Category: visual

Thousands of artworks from the Dutch national collection are being sold on eBay. “These are works that have not been on display in 100 years or works that do not fit in with the kind of exhibitions in museums. Most of the works were made through a government program in the 1980s, which paid artists for a certain number of works to be produced.”

“Some of the measures include the creation of a special department within the ministry to be responsible for tracing stolen items and repatriating them, and allowing phone taps on suspects and prison terms for those who make fake antiquities.”

“Perhaps it’s their cool abstraction, or their labyrinthine floor plans, or their harsh materials, like the serrated concrete that can practically cut your skin. Whatever the reason, the American public has yet to cotton to these buildings. A survey of America’s 150 favorite works of architecture, released last February, didn’t contain a single structure by Chicago’s master of steel and glass, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But popularity is one thing; quality is another.”

LA’s Armand Hammer Museum has a small budget and big ambitions. “It’s an interesting experiment. The museum has a talented group of curators. (One collector called them “incredibly dynamic and magnetic.”) It is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s top art departments. It has considerable good will among arts experts, locally and abroad. Now the Hammer is discovering how much that good will is worth in a marketplace where so many collectors are competing for the same artworks and so many museums are competing for the same collectors.”

Montgomery County, PA, says it will file a motion to block the Barnes Collection from moving to Philadelphia. “A wedding to Montgomery County is something the Barnes Foundation clearly wants no part of. It only has eyes for Philadelphia. The Barnes Foundation last month spurned Montco’s marriage offer, even though the county offered to provide at least $50 million for the Barnes if its collection would stay.”

“Berlin has become a production center for works sold from Portugal to Dubai. Rents are going up. The dilettantes have departed. The foreign purveyors have nestled in. What remains is less the innocent verve of the past than an atmosphere that — although aesthetically adventurous and more open to experimentation than in most cities — has matured with a shrewd eye toward marketing.”

New York art dealer Ira Spanierman bought a painting in 1968 for $325. Last night the Raphael sold for “18.5 million pounds ($37.3 million) with commission, more than 100,000 times the price he paid for it. The portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici set a record for the Italian painter at the Christie’s International sale in London.”

Daniel Libeskind has had his way with an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum. “Taken on its own terms, the addition is extraordinarily skilled and tremendously exciting. That scrum of jostling shapes, exploding out of a U-shaped courtyard formed by the museum’s stern, much- altered 1914 building, electroshocks dull Bloor Street.” But “in too many ways Libeskind has been allowed to run amok.”

Johnson’s 47-acre estate is “a collection of 14 structures that includes the legendary Glass House, completed in 1949; a guesthouse; an art gallery; and a sculpture pavilion, the complex survives as an enticing voyage through the ups and downs of late-20th-century architecture set in a dreamy landscape of rolling lawns and maple trees. But as imposing as it is as a historical landmark, it is as telling about his weaknesses as a designer as about his influence as an advocate for architecture.”

“A poll of 18- to 25-year-olds recently named him an ‘arts hero’ in third place behind Walt Disney and Peter Kay, and ahead of Leonardo da Vinci. The cult of Banksy is a broad church, ranging from millionaire bankers splashing out on ‘street sculpture’ to young book buyers radicalised by Iraq.”