Category: visual

“The St. Louis Art Museum has decided to delay the groundbreaking of its $125 million expansion. The museum’s Board of Commissioners cited the current financial markets for the move.”

“Buyers were reluctant to make expensive purchases at this week’s Asian Art in London promotion, dealers said, after a 2.5 million-pound ($3.95 million) Buddha was withdrawn on the morning of Sotheby’s Nov. 5 auction of Chinese works of art.”

“French billionaire Francois Pinault attended his company Christie’s International’s New York auction of impressionist and modern art last night, and watched from a sky box as almost half the lots failed to sell. Buyers passed on 44 percent of the 82 pieces offered. Sales tallied $146.7 million, against the low estimate of $240.7 million. It’s the week’s third evening auction that missed estimates and a sign the global financial crisis continues to undermine demand for the most-expensive art.”

“English Heritage yesterday announced a grant to save arguably the most horrible building it has ever attempted to rescue, the sprawling Victorian hulk of Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, which housed the equally ramshackle geniuses who broke Germany’s second world war codes.”

“The Veneto is one great construction site that has produced monstrosity after monstrosity over the past 50 years… On the one hand, you have a region of outstanding natural beauty and extraordinary architecture; on the other, an ugly urban sprawl that has obliterated the countryside.”

“The items, taken from archeological sites in the eastern Italian region of Apulia and in northern Italy, were found in the possession of a married couple who are Basel-based art dealers.”

“On Day 2 of the fall auction season, a Russian masterpiece expected to sell for up to $3 million did not find a buyer yesterday, further underscoring the impact of the global financial crisis on the art market… Many other works sold at or below their presale estimates; others did not sell at all.”

“Mark Rothko, the late American painter whose work commands multimillion-pound prices, offered Tate Gallery a gift of 30 paintings which was not accepted because trustees feared he would expect to see them on permanent display. […] If the Tate had accepted the work, it would most likely be worth $1bn in the current art market.”

“Chinese officials are fuming at plans to sell national treasures from an imperial palace sacked and burned by British and French forces during the second Opium War… The designer Yves Saint Laurent acquired the bronze sculptures of rat and hare heads for his immense art collection. But following his death in June they are to be auctioned alongside his other relics and artworks, in what some have called the sale of the century.”

“‘I imagine to attack every day more and more thoroughly,’ he wrote to a friend in 1928, using the violent language he had learned from Surrealist associates like André Breton,… “[to] make my victims die cleanly, without agonizing nerve spasm.”