Category: visual

Provenance has become a major issue for museums. “We’re still figuring out what can be acquired and sold without problems, as opposed to 40 or 50 years ago, when people were much more careless about ownership history. The question to me now is, where do we draw the line? What if a piece was already in circulation before these new standards? The archaeologists don’t have an answer to that. They don’t say throw it out, and they don’t encourage you to buy it. What are we supposed to do?”

“Digital technology, computers, software and the Internet multiply the number of people with access to taking and viewing pictures. Once you buy the camera, there are almost no other costs. That is increasing the variety and creativity in how people take pictures, and what they do with them.”

Zagreb, Croatia is the type of city that you wouldn’t expect to have a chance to make much of itself, located as it is “in a location that always seems too near the edge of some bigger place that wants to gobble it up. [But] Zagreb has been an example of many styles of architecture and many theories of city planning.” The result is a city that provides a fascinating architectural look at the conflicts and resolutions of 19th- and 20th-century political struggle.

An art storage company in the UK has been court ordered to pay £350,000 in damages for accidentally throwing out an artwork by Turner Prize winner Anish Kapoor. The ruling was a compromise between two widely differing value assessments of the destroyed work.

As London’s skyline continues to grow upward and outward, can the city prevent the kind of runaway development that leaves some cities looking cluttered and without focus? Those in charge believe that progress doesn’t have to mean letting the inmates run the asylum.

The paintings of abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, long hidden away from public view in a warehouse awaiting a permanent home that would meet the strict terms of the artist’s will, will soon have a home at a new museum in Denver. The Still archive, which few scholars have even had the chance to peruse, is, in a word, massive, and at least 10% of the works have significant conservation problems.

A judge has ordered a company that mistakenly destroyed an Anish Kapoor sculpture by putting it in the trash to pay the owner £350,000. “The judge ruled that the 1984 sculpture, Hole and Vessel II, was put in a skip during building works in 2004 and later destroyed at a waste plant.”

“Here is the scorecard for the recent contemporary art auctions around the world: New York, $240 million; London, $229 million; Hong Kong, $67 million; Tokyo, $1.1 million. How can this be? Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy, enjoying its longest expansion in six decades, has been left out of the current art market boom.”

Art is fetching record prices. “The problem with these highly publicized transactions, objectors fear, is that museums are looking past the importance of their collections and are now seeing million-dollar checks hanging on the wall.”

“Overnight, an unknown person or group covered up the breasts, genitals and buttocks of the statues decorating the city’s Vigeland Sculpture Park. Black bars were found Thursday morning censoring the nude scultptures in Oslo’s Vigeland Sculpture Park. A note left behind, purportedly to explain the action, criticized newspapers for showing too much nudity and said that this did not have to extend to the park as well.”