Category: visual

A British law enforcement raid on thousands of safe deposit boxes has yielded several important works of Renaissance art, part of a much larger trove of cash and valuables said to be tied to organized crime.

“A man has been charged over the theft of a collection of Lowry paintings worth up to £1m from an art collector’s home in Greater Manchester. Ivan Aird was tied up and his wife and two-year-old daughter threatened during the robbery in Cheadle Hulme last May.”

“Police believe they may be trying to sell the art work through a network of criminal associates in the Vancouver area, according to a news release issued Tuesday morning.”

“The Association of Art Museum Directors, whose 190 members also include leaders of Canadian and Mexican museums, says the new policy will probably make it even more difficult for museums to build antiquities collections through purchases or, as is more often the case, through gifts and bequests from wealthy private collectors. But they assert that the change will help stanch the flow of objects illegally dug up from archaeological sites or other places.”

“The armed presence of private rent-a-cops mostly transforms a public art museum into a mid-Wilshire branch of Van Cleef & Arpels. It’s hard to imagine almost any scenario in which an art museum guard might shoot someone, but that bizarre thought keeps bumping around in your brain at BCAM. Needless to say, it has a less than salutary effect on the art experience.”

“On a recent day, at least three security officers with holstered guns and batons guarded the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art addition. One carries a 9-millimeter pistol. Another, armed with a .38-caliber pistol, is assigned to stand a few feet in front of an artwork with a dead lamb, embalmed in a tank filled with formaldehyde and water, created by British artist Damien Hirst.”

“If London’s National Gallery, under its new director Nicholas Penny, has hinted at the demise of the blockbuster, perhaps that death has been somewhat exaggerated. Its big autumn exhibition, announced yesterday, will be devoted to Renaissance portraits – a subject more or less guaranteed to attract visitors in droves.”

“During her tenure, SAM’s endowment grew from $24.5 million to $113 million, and membership increased from 23,000 to 40,000. SAM now attracts more than a million visitors a year, which is more than a tenfold increase since she joined the museum. She also opened the museum’s first conservation studio. Besides last year’s debut of the sculpture park on reclaimed industrial land, SAM reopened downtown with 70 percent more exhibition space and the potential to continue growing eight floors into the future.”

“Gates’ stint at SAM has brought the most dramatic changes in the institution’s history and its largest capital campaign. To open the expansion and the sculpture park last year, the museum raised some $200 million. It also recently announced 1,000 promised gifts of art valued at $1 billion, a landmark in museum philanthropy. Under Gates’ watch, SAM also established a new art-conservation department and broadened the museum’s audience and attendance.”

“The problem with the Royal Institute of British Architects Awards is that they’re decided at a regional level. Which means that if you’re building in London, where a lot of big and interesting stuff is built (just look at T5), you’re significantly less likely to get an award than in Northern Ireland, where less stuff is built. And obviously, it looks bad if there’s a region with no awards at all. Then again, how many big buildings do you think get built in the UK each year?”