Category: visual

“A portrait by Lucian Freud has broken the record for a living European artist after selling for £7.8m at auction… Art experts estimate that this week’s London sales could generate almost £500m.”

“Recently Monet has become fashionable again – having fallen out of favour in between the world wars, when people preferred hard-edged, abstract painting. Today, his paintings are obvious targets for rich collectors. But, when they were first exhibited, they felt avant-garde.”

The UK’s newest national museum has opened in London, and the collection is anything but predictable. “It combines galleries with the world-famous Wellcome Library and a public events forum, with the aim of exploring the relationship between people and biomedicine… Charles Darwin’s walking stick, Nelson’s razor and Napoleon Bonaparte’s toothbrush are among the thousands of objects that went on display.”

“The news that Charles Saatchi has just snapped up a Royal Academy student’s entire graduation show doesn’t come as much of a surprise in the art world. Saatchi is famous for this kind of thing.” But what probably feels like nothing but good fortune for the student could quickly turn sour. “More than a few artists have suffered at the hands of Saatchi’s generosity in the past.”

Toronto is unveiling a slew of new cultural buildings this summer, and anticipation is high. “But do these projects mark a beginning or an end? Does the renaissance stop here? Or will it lead to a second wave of cultural works that will bring new depth to the arts in Toronto?”

No one ever accused modernist architecture of being nice to look at, but should ugliness be enough of a reason to avoid preserving a generation of buildings in the way that we preserve other schools of architecture? “But the actual threat to Modern architecture stems mostly from real-world concerns,” such as the fact that most of them are inefficient and costly to maintain.

The collector who donated the Franz van Mieris painting which was stolen from a Sydney gallery last week is remaining calm about the situation. “It is in my collection and clearly one feels sadness that it has happened. [But] Van Mieris is not an obvious artist for someone to go for and that leaves some hope that it’s still in the country.”

“Most contemporary artists dream of having a work bought by Charles Saatchi. James Howard, a student at the Royal Academy Schools, was shocked to discover yesterday that Britain’s most influential collector of contemporary art wanted 46 of his – an entire graduation show.”

The art boom has been going on for so long now that nearly everyone assumes that a crash similar to the one the art world experienced in the early 1990s is just around the corner. But what if it isn’t? “As the number of sages predicting a crash mounts, prices continue to spiral like an ever spinning top… Just as our cyclical weather patterns are changing, so are the economic and social forces that effect the art market.”

British art critics have not been enjoying their time at this year’s Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany. “Documenta 12 is a disaster. I thought at first it must be me. After all, it is always good to stir things up a bit, to disturb hierarchies, rattle the tyrannical white box, juxtapose the new with the old, the dead with the living, east against west, the brilliant with the talentless, but hang on a second!”