Category: visual

The booming art market has brought big attention to Chinese art. Big money too. “With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese auction houses that once specialized in traditional ink paintings are now putting contemporary experimental artworks on the block.”

The breakup of Altria is likely to diminish the company’s support for the arts. “The museum likely to be most severely affected is the Whitney, which receives more than $500,000 per year to support exhibitions at Altria’s corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Altria has also sponsored each of the past five Whitney Biennials, providing $500,000 for the 2006 edition.”

London is looking for some. “Art Beat Special Constables are being recruited from museums such as the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum, universities, insurance companies and other cultural organisations. After four weeks training in police procedure as well as specialist art squad techniques, volunteers will be sponsored by their employers to work as Special Constables for 200 hours a year or one day a fortnight. They will be uniformed and will have full police powers.”

A 7-1/2 -foot statue of the goddess Aphrodite owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has long been the subject of a contentious debate over whether it was illegally obtained. Now, journalists covering the Getty’s recent troubles have “found new information that undermines the statue’s official history, bolsters claims that it was illicitly excavated in Sicily and shows that the museum bought the Aphrodite despite repeated warnings that it had been looted.”

“Capitalizing on Manhattan’s robust real estate prices, the Museum of Modern Art is selling its last vacant parcel of land in Midtown for $125 million to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston… As part of the deal Hines is to construct a mixed-use building on West 54th Street that will connect to the museum’s second- , fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. [The] project would afford about 50,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the Modern’s painting and sculpture collections.”

Traditional buildings of justice are meant to awe. But “like most of its modernist forebears, the new Bronx Hall of Justice, designed by Raphael Viñoly, seeks to humanize our interaction with the forces of law.”

The Seattle Art Museum is about to open a major new sculpture park. The museum has been on a fundraising tear that has fueled the organization’s dramatic expansion in the past two decades.

“The treasure trove, discovered during excavations to build the New Acropolis Museum in the capital, includes relics ranging from a near perfectly preserved marble bust of Aristotle to cooking utensils, children’s games and figurines of little known deities.”

Sotheby’s says it sold $1.8 billion of art in the US in 2006, a “52 percent increase from the previous year, according to Sotheby’s data gathered for analysts and investors. U.K. auctions of $1.2 billion rose 28 percent from 2005, while Asian sales of $282.3 million were 29 percent higher than the previous year. Auctions in continental Europe advanced 6 percent to $320.1 million.”

“Questions are being raised about plans to create a satellite of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and to establish an outpost of the Georges Pompidou Center in Shanghai. Critics have accused President Jacques Chirac of using the country’s museums to promote France’s political and commercial interests abroad.”