Category: visual

The museum, which is struggling to rebuild its collection after it was looted in April, 2003, in the U.S.-led invasion, is still in a terrible state.

The Tate is making “a last-ditch appeal for the public’s help to acquire the country’s most significant work by the 17th-century Flemish master, painted at the height of his powers. If it fails, The Apotheosis of King James I will be sold overseas.”

“The counterfeiting included the reproduction of actual works by the artists as well as the sale of fakes executed in each one’s particular style.”

“A newly discovered wooden sculpture of a Buddha that had religious objects sealed in its torso for 800 years sold for $14.3 million, setting a world record for any Japanese work of art.” The winning bidder was a Japanese department store, and the sale price was more than seven times the highest pre-sale estimate.

Summer is traditionally a time when museums mount those inescapable blockbuster exhibits designed to draw in the maximum possible number of ticketbuyers. But in Toronto this summer, things will be relatively quiet. “One inconvenient truth about Toronto as a city with an appetite for big art shows is that apart from the AGO and the ROM, we have nowhere to put them.”

“The Art Gallery of Ontario, slouching toward its reopening next fall, has hired a new director of exhibitions and publications. Catherine de Zegher, former executive director of the Drawing Center in New York, has already taken up her new post.”

There is a place in rural Pennsylvania where you can visit no fewer than three of Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature houses in a single day. “Fallingwater is spartan and spectacular; the hilltop Kentuck Knob is cozy within and expansive without; and Duncan House, the newest addition to the collection, is a transplanted curiosity where visitors can spend the night.”

“Leonard A. Lauder, the cosmetics executive and chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said on Tuesday that his art foundation would give the museum $131 million, the biggest donation in the Whitney’s 77-year history.”

“A fish that escaped being battered, despite spending almost a decade inches from the deep fat fryer in a Leeds chippie, is to be sold – for up to £150,000.” A bit overpriced, you say? Well, the beast has been carefully preserved in formaldehyde… by Damien Hirst.