Category: visual

“Opened this week, this monster of a modern fortress designed by Berger Devine Yaeger , has been described by at least one US commentator as the ‘imperial mother ship dropping into Baghdad.’ It could, I suppose, be seen as a latter-day, Wild East-version of a 7th Cavalry fort, with the Iraqis playing the role of Native Americans.

“With most of the happy-clappy amateurs driven away from the auction arena by the financial panic, the game is back in the hands of those who buy art in full knowledge. Prices have dropped by 20 or 30 percent in categories where speculation was manifest, and will go further down, but outstanding objects are holding up at every level.”

“Can culture really perform miracles as the credit economy disintegrates? There is surely a real risk that a faith in the arts as agents of change, which has become universal among urban planners since Barcelona’s Olympics-inspired success, is founded on air, or on the same postmodern delusion that everything is possible which has fuelled the current economic madness. In Britain, with our huge investment in our cultural image, this is especially worrying.”

One of Europe’s great museums has lost well over €2m in support in just the past few weeks…

“The World Monuments Fund is launching a project with Iraq to preserve the ancient city of Babylon… [The site] has sustained damage in recent years from Saddam Hussein’s efforts to make it a tourist attraction, from looting after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and from being used as a military base during the Iraq War.”

Financier J. Ezra Merkin’s investment funds reportedly lost more than $3 billion in Bernard Madoff’s gigantic Ponzi scheme. Now that Merkin might need some cash, there’s a great deal of interest in the dozen Mark Rothko canvases he’s collected. They’re not currently for sale, says Merkin’s art adviser, but “everything has a price.”

Thanks to the success of such buildings as Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences, “2008 just may be the year in which doing the right thing, or at least thinking about how one might go about doing the right thing, became cool.”

“Many sponsors have withdrawn quickly from the art field, and many people have lost jobs in the Moscow art scene… Collectors have scaled back purchases, as seen by the results of the Russian art auctions in London at the end of November. But many non-profit art projects are going forward.”

“The bronze figure, one of only a handful of casts remaining in private hands, is expected to fetch £9-12 million when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s on February 3.”