Category: visual

“Eighteen banks, including UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co., are competing for money-management business from an elderly, refined first-time client — the Louvre. The Paris museum, which opened to the public in 1793, says it is starting a U.S.-style endowment next month with the 175 million euros ($230 million) it received to set up an Abu Dhabi offshoot.”

“When Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938, the Nazis seized his father’s collection of 12,500 rare posters on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. … Today, some 4,000 of the posters, worth at least euro4.5 million ($5.9 million), are in the possession of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, largely in storage. Peter Sachs goes to court Tuesday to try to get them back.”

“Vladimir Putin’s first painting fetched 37 million rubles ($1.14 million) at a charity auction in his native St. Petersburg last night. The Russian prime minister’s picture of a frosty window made the highest price of 30 works on offer.”

“India’s art world is reeling from one of its most embarrassing forgery cases today after S.H. Raza, one of the country’s foremost artists, inaugurated an exhibition of his paintings in Delhi – only to discover that most were fakes.”

On the one hand, vendors are holding back from selling, for fear of “burning” their pictures by seeing them unsold; the auction houses are struggling to bring in good material for next month’s sales. On the other hand, forced sales by cash-strapped collectors may bring desirable works onto the market.

“The past, high-growth decade proved a golden time for the sale and promotion of indigenous culture. Today, though, in the face of the looming international downturn, an ominous calm has descended.”

“In Lebanon the propaganda posters of Hizbullah and its allies are a heady mix of bright colour, simple logos and distinctively Arab calligraphy and portraits… [they] harnessed contemporary graphic design and made it their own: Jerusalem in glowing colours features alongside clenched fists and AK-47s; the four-sided Syrian symbol rises like a sun; car bombs go bang like Roy Lichtenstein paintings.”

“But when I drove up to Stoke to visit the Wedgwood museum last summer, the place was as dead as a cobwebbed dodo… Two weeks earlier I’d attended the Ceramics in the City show in London, featuring the best new talent in a market that’s been expanding… I’d seen revolutionary shapes, colours and ideas. The punters were handing over their credit cards. So why wasn’t Wedgwood buying in?”

“David Cerny vowed yesterday to hand back all the public money he received for his EU sculpture although he was vague about the bulk £350,000 purse he was attempting to raise from private donors. Mr Cerny, 41, apologised for hoodwinking his government and said that he would not take the 50,000 Euros which the Czech Government agreed to pay to rent the sculpture for six months.”

“We’ve been loving our janitor to death. A do-not-molest sign near the popular lifelike sculpture at the Milwaukee Art Museum has helped a lot, but we can’t seem to keep our hands off the guy.” All that pawing — which is down an estimated 90 percent since the sign went up — has done some damage to Duane Hanson’s “Janitor,” slouched against the wall for the past 36 years.