Category: visual

“The transformation of London, a sleepy backwater for two decades, into an art capital that rivals New York has never been more apparent than in this past fortnight of auctions, with record prices fetched for works by artists ranging from Monet to Francis Bacon.”

British Museum staff are striking for four hours over what they say is a “totally inadequate” pay rise.

“The museum, home to the world’s most extensive collection of Tiffany works, plans to build the 10,000-foot addition to showcase some of his most spectacular pieces.For decades, the Morse kept in storage most of the Daffodil Terrace and many other pieces from Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall, destroyed by fire in 1957.”

“The number of art thefts in Canada has been growing, the most notable being the robbery in 2004 of five ivory statuettes from the Art Gallery of Ontario snatched in broad daylight.These events have attracted speculation that the insurance company might have paid over the reward as a ransom, as this is one way in which thieves make their money.”

“Known as Mogaoku — ‘peerless caves’ — and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-molded clay sculptures of savior-gods and saints, they are, in size and historical breadth, like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world. And Mogaoku is in trouble. Thrown open to visitors in recent decades, the site has been swamped by tourists in the past few years. The caves now suffer from high levels of carbon dioxide and humidity, which are severely undermining conservation efforts.”

“The Prado’s announcement last week about the Colossus, a large oil painting depicting the torso of a giant bursting through the clouds as he marches above a terrified village, is causing a furor among experts, some of whom still believe the painting is genuine.”

“Archaeology pushes its history ever deeper into the past; a racing market economy makes Chinese-ness a mutable identity, under continuous revision. The country and its art institutions seem caught in the tension between self-images: the sovereign civilization apart on one hand, the ambitious scrambler in the global game on the other.”

“Delighting contemporary art fans and dismaying some of France’s most august historians, Jeff Koons is flying in this September to exhibit some of his most famous works in the chateau and gardens of the country’s most illustrious national treasure.”

“By bringing class-action lawsuits against Louis Vuitton North America and L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a Los Angeles art collector and his attorneys say they are sounding an alarm on behalf of people who shop for art prints that can cost thousands of dollars: Let the buyer be savvy, and let the seller beware. The suits in Los Angeles Superior Court rely on an obscure chapter of the California Civil Code called the Fine Prints Act. Together Louis Vuitton and MOCA potentially are liable for millions of dollars.”