Category: visual

“Since the Second World War a rather different strain of collectors has grown up. Their pastime has acquired a much more public dimension. They pursue their own passions — but with a growing awareness of wider responsibility. Their hoards are a matter of public record. Their finest pieces become globetrotting loans.”

“Five museums and galleries yesterday won the art world’s equivalent of the lottery: a jackpot of £1m each to spend on acquiring international contemporary art.” The money is courtesy the UK’s Art Fund.

“New York art dealer Jerome Eisenberg returned eight pieces of ancient art valued at about $510,000 to Italy, one of the first private gallery owners to turn over antiquities which the government says were illegally removed from the country.”

“Henri Matisse’s 1937 ‘L’Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue,” starring a curvy young woman in green pantaloons, sold tonight for a record $33.6 million at Christie’s International in New York. Matisse’s previous auction record of $21.7 million was set in June at Sotheby’s in London.”

It’s not just the circus atmosphere or the crushing crowds. Critics say that accidents with great workds of art “inevitable with so much art now on the move.”

New museums and museum expansion projects are everywhere. “In America, two dozen art museums have opened major expansions in the last decade, and a dozen more are currently engaged in building projects.”

“An Andy Warhol painting of Dame Elizabeth Taylor is expected to sell for more than $25m at an auction in New York. The 1963 portrait, called Liz, is one of 12 paintings of the actress which Warhol created while Dame Elizabeth was recovering from an illness. According to reports, the portrait belongs to British actor Hugh Grant.”

It’s largely a lost art these days, but woodcutting was one of the most respected artistic trades in earlier times. “The baroque woodcut industry didn’t just produce pictures for the walls. It also made frontispieces for books, pages for Bibles, sacred images for home altars and technical illustrations for academic texts.” Most important, it made the wide distribution of great works of art possible centuries before modern duplication technology had been conceived.

New Orleans “has always been known for its eclectic housing styles — Greek Revival, Italianate, Creole. Now emerging is what could be called a posthurricane vernacular, wide-ranging architectural responses to what everyone here refers to simply as the Storm… The result is precisely the hasty, haphazard aesthetic that some planners warned would emerge unless officials seized on Katrina as an opportunity to rethink the Crescent City in a more systematic fashion.”

“Move over, Prince Charles. Former Boston University president John Silber covets your title as the world’s leading Architecture Crank.”