Category: visual

“Manhattan dealer Edward Merrin has been sentenced in a case that charged him and his son Samuel Merrin with defrauding their clients William Ziff and his wife out of millions of dollars. The case against Samuel Merrin continues.”

“In the era of chaos in Iraq, it has been all too easy for the world to airbrush out of mind the longstanding record of American custodial service to other people’s cultures. A salutary reminder of that tradition is being unveiled in a more modest way this week with a pack of playing cards featuring the monuments and antiquities of Iraq and Afghanistan, with exhortations to military personnel to safeguard them. The packs will be distributed to U.S. troops in the region throughout the autumn.”

“”What surprised me is this notion that museums as commissioning agents, as patrons of the arts, should simply be willing and ready and able to deal with the art diva, even if his demands arise from nowhere, because they are an expression of passion. It was all ‘the artist has rights’ and we at the museum have ‘responsibilities,’ and we heard very little about the artist’s responsibilities and our rights.”

This was the second year for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, an all-night art crawl encompassing the city’s many museums, galleries, and public art spaces. But despite the success of last year’s debut, many were underwhelmed by the sequel. “The crowds had tripled, the art had dwindled. Everybody was stuck in traffic human or vehicular, the whole night. The city was in total immobile gridlock. And where was the art?”

What are a museum’s responsibilities when showing the work of a commercially popular artist considered less than great by critics and the art cognoscenti? Sarah Milroy says that whatever those responsibilities may be, they’ve clearly been abdicated by Ontario’s McMichael Collection in a new exhibition of the work of Robert Bateman. “Bateman has chosen to do many constructive things with his fame, and that is to be admired. But let’s get serious. Our arts institutions are empowered and funded to educate members of the public, not pander to their ignorance in pursuit of a quick profit.”

Everyone loves to beat up on Los Angeles as a soulless metropolis with little in the way of cultural legacy. But America’s second-largest city has a rich history, and the architectural pedigree to go with it. You just have to look for it. A new book examines L.A. through the prism of its classic houses, even those which have been gone for years and left nearly no trace. “We don’t just tear down our treasures. We toss out all written records about them as well.”

“For years the Turner has held its own as the most talked-about fixture in the art-world calendar.” But a show of past Turner winners comes up empty. “The Turner loses its spirit when the winners are dissected out. The comparisons are the body of the prize, and it is the debate that lends it its soul. These are all missing.”

The gallery was “bought by Christie’s in February as part of a move to increase private sales of art outside the auction rooms, which can be more profitable than public sales. The loss of the gallery’s stand at Frieze, the U.K.’s largest art fair, may be a setback for that plan.”

“The leader of an artists’ cooperative has been sentenced to probation for setting up a secret apartment inside a shopping mall’s parking garage as part of a project on mall life. Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the 750-square-foot apartment beginning in 2003 and lived there for up to three weeks at a time. The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.”

The Canadian government is floating a plan to convert an Ottawa building into a private center for functions hosted by the prime minister. One problem – it’s the same building scheduled to become the home of the National Portrait Gallery. “It is thought the chief strike against locating the portrait gallery at 100 Wellington is that originally the project was a Liberal initiative,” and the government currently in power is Conservative. Still, many are asking why the gallery couldn’t also be used for official functions.