Category: visual

“Ten years ago, a few Chinese artists, like Chen Zen or Huang Yong Ping, appeared on the West’s radar screen, satisfying a certain outdated “Orientalist” craving among some collectors. But now Western collectors and dealers are descending on China like a swarm of annoying and aimless flies.”

Baltimore’s unique and quirky American Dime Museum, which closed in December, is auctioning off its bizarre collection of American sideshow memorabilia. “Wandering through the place is an exercise in suspended disbelief.”

“Christie’s auction house said yesterday it had bought a London contemporary art gallery, moving the world’s largest auctioneer onto terrain usually occupied by art dealers. Christie’s said it had acquired the Haunch of Venison gallery, based in London’s Mayfair district. The auction house did not say how much it paid for the gallery, which also has branches in Zurich and Berlin.”

is Orange County’s smallish Bowers Museum. It will now charge $19, putting its price right behind New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “The Bowers argues that, because it charged $19 for the ongoing ‘Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt … Treasures From the British Museum,’ a special exhibition that opened in April 2005, this does not represent a price increase, since only a handful of patrons were opting to pay $5 to visit just the permanent collections.”

So the Louvre is going to Abu Dhabi? The Louvre is “acting like a company with a clearly defined strategy called profit maximization, It is to be feared that fast financial gain will transform museums into free-floating goods dependent on the laws of the market, with no relation to cultural context.”

Since a storm 15 months ago, a sculptue that sat outside Miami Beach’s City Hall has been gone. It’s not likely to be back. “Artist Barbara Neijna, who created the sculpture in collaboration with City Hall architects Bouterse, Perez & Fabrigas, said that’s no way to treat a sculpture appraised at $500,000 before the storm. The city commissioned Red Sea Road for $78,000 in 1976.”

“The Detroit Institute of Arts is entering the final phase of its six-year, $158 million renovation and expansion that is increasing its gallery space by about 30 percent. The museum recently announced that is has raised more than $80 million of its $180 million goal for the ‘Great Art, New Start’ capital campaign, which is supporting the renovation as well as the museum’s endowment.”

“A year ago the settlement was hailed as one of the largest restitutions of art seized by the Nazis. Now about 170 old master paintings returned to the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch dealer who fled Amsterdam in 1940, are to be offered at Christie’s in three sales, beginning in April in New York. The auction house says the paintings, many on view in Dutch museums and government buildings since the 1950s, could fetch from $22 million to $35 million.”

Scotland’s National War Museum in Edinburgh is losing visitors. “The free museum, based inside the Castle, has seen visitors drop by a quarter in the past year. While the number of people paying to visit the Castle has increased slightly, museum staff say poor signage and competition from rival war museums has driven away their visitors.”

The museum’s attendance numbers have been falling. “The estimated number of visitors to the museum plunged to about five million in 2006 from a six-year high of 9.4 million in 2003, according to the latest attendance report from the museum complex. And the decline has been far sharper than that of the overall Smithsonian, which includes 18 museums and the National Zoo.”