Category: visual

Damien Hirst is selling a diamond-encrusted skull he created for $100 million. “The life-sized platinum skull, studded with 8,601 stones weighing 1,106.18 carats, cost Hirst $20 million to make — about the same amount of money as Jay Jopling spent to build his new White Cube Mason’s Yard gallery.”

The World Trade Center Museum is under construction. But “the museum’s identity problem was built in from the start when officials quietly commanded that an exhibition space be created under the memorial plaza designed by Michael Arad. A memorial is not enough, the reasoning went; the event must be interpreted. Though two wars and thousands of deaths have been unleashed in 9/11’s name, the 115,000-square-foot museum focuses on ourselves and our losses.”

Timothy Potts, who resigned as director of the Kimbell Art Museum last Friday, has taken the post of director at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Potts will succeed Duncan Robinson, who has been the director of the Fitzwilliam since 1995.”

If it’s June, it’s auction month in London. This year American art is front and center. “It used to be the other way around. But this summer half what we are selling in our postwar and contemporary art auction is from the United States, and a third of the consignments for our Impressionist and modern art sale are from America too.”

“Art theft has turned into a global industry that experts believe now fuels everything from terrorism to drug-running. At least one art sleuth puts art crime, including stolen antiquities and traffic in forgeries, behind only drug and arms trafficking as the third-most lucrative criminal activity in the world, at $2 to $6 billion a year.”

Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum has raised CAN$262 million towards its Renaissance ROM campaign, following the addition of several last-minute donations totaling CAN$12 million. The campaign’s goal is CAN$270 million.

Jerry Speyer, President & CEO of Tishman Speyer Properties, has been as a member of the MoMA Board of Trustees since 1982. He becomes Chairman after serving as Vice Chairman since 1996. He was integral to the new building project and instrumental in the Museum’s sale of the West End properties.

“The pressure of the growing number of art fairs is tough on primary-market dealers. Normally, a dealer will ask an artist to produce a particularly special work to take to a fair. ‘But it’s hard to say that five or six times a year’.”

The statues of the Acropolis have been on their hill for 2,500 years. But soon they’ll be removed as the greeks move them down from the hill to a new museum. “Three cranes, standing up to 165 feet tall, will relay the sculptures from the old museum on the Acropolis to the new $174 million building — a distance of about a quarter-mile.”

The fourth Moscow World Fine Art Fair opens this week. “Only 20 galleries attended the first fair in June 2004, when it was not so common for a Russian to pay more than $1 million for art.” This year 80 art galleries will show works valued about 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) of work.”That’s close to the $1.5 billion estimate of art shown at the world’s biggest art fair in Maastricht in March.”