Category: visual

“Well over half the exhibition halls in Iraq’s National Museum are closed, darkened and in disrepair. And yet the museum, whose looting in 2003 became a symbol of the chaos that followed the American invasion, officially reopened on Monday. Thousands of works from its collection of antiquities and art — some of civilization’s earliest objects — remain lost.”

“The market for high art defied the global economic slump last night when bidders in Paris spent more than €210 million (£184 million) at the start of the sale of the sumptuous collection of the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, his partner. In the first night of a three-day auction half a dozen records were broken in the sale of Impressionist and Modern works that was a test of the health of art when most other investments have collapsed.”

“In response to the global economic crisis, James R. Houghton, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, posted a letter on the institution’s Web site on Friday announcing that the Met had decided to close 15 of its satellite shops around the country.” The museum has also instituted a hiring freeze.

“The Yves Saint Laurent estate can go ahead with the sale of two Qing Dynasty bronze sculptures on Feb. 25, a Paris court ruled today. China’s government had urged the estate of the late French fashion designer to return the bronzes being auctioned by Christie’s International in Paris. … The two animal heads — a rabbit and a rat — were severed from a water fountain at Beijing’s Imperial Summer Palace when British and French troops plundered and burned the palace in October 1860.”

“Archaeologists believe hundreds of wrecks beneath the eastern Mediterranean may contain treasures, but a new law opening Greece’s coastline to scuba diving has experts worried that priceless artifacts could disappear into the hands of treasure hunters.”

The four contiguous five-storey brownstones, located along Madison Avenue just south of the museum, had been for sale since last summer through commercial realtor CB Richard Ellis Group, but sources in the field told The Art Newspaper that the buildings did not sell and have been withdrawn from the market.

The museum will close Feb. 28. Staff and board members say the museum will remain an entity and keep its name so that it can possibly reemerge when the economy improves. Members and docents were notified this afternoon.

“As our experience of landscape changes, so do our ideas about what constitutes heritage. While curators and managers once focused on the protection of specific sites and buildings, they now also seek a broader, more holistic understanding of the historic environment. This shift in emphasis is partly due to our increasingly mobile society, which has created a heightened sense of ‘localness’, and a growing appreciation of personal views of what matters and why.”

“A before-and-after poll of the audience found that tales of chandelier bidding, bidding rings, the lack of regulation and so on resulted in 55% agreeing that the art market is less ethical than the stock market (only 33% opposed, 12% undecided). Amid the worst economic meltdown in half a century, caused by the unregulated greed of bankers and securities traders, the art market lost the debate.”

Horace “Woody” Brock “believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”