Category: visual

“In a stunning vote of confidence, the Royal Ontario Museum’s board has extended the contract of its director and chief executive officer, William Thorsell, until 2010, even though the Renaissance ROM expansion is about six months behind schedule and short by about $37-million.”

A busy auction night in Toronto highlighted what has become apparent in recent weeks: that the art boom occurring on both sides of the Atlantic is even stimulating interest in (and higher prices for) works that might previously have been considered of only regional interest. “The fall auction season for Canadian art [hasn’t] approached anything like the heat of international art auctions. [But this week’s] sales looked like yet more signs that collectors’ appetite for Canadian art, far from softening, is actually broadening.”

The Italian government has agreed to loan two valuable antiquities to New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, in exchange for the museums having returned contested antiquities to Italy. The amicable settlements in New York and Boston stand in stark contrast to Italy’s ongoing battle with Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Seeking to build on its success in bargaining with a few American museums, Italy has asked the New York collector Shelby White to consider returning more than 20 ancient artifacts that it argues were illegally mined from its soil… Rather than implicitly threaten legal action, however, as it occasionally has in pursuing objects in major museum collections, the government hopes to rely on moral suasion.”

In this season of unfathomable auction records and price spikes in the art market, Asian art has been some of the hottest, and most surprising, work to be sold at auction. And it isn’t just Western buyers who are looking to the East. “Wealthy buyers from China and other parts of Asia are now jockeying with European and American collectors to buy Chinese works that only five years ago were largely ignored by the international art market.”

The newly expanded home of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (all of it) is finally open to the public, and Nicolai Ouroussoff says that the last of the newly built spaces is “unlikely to appease those who feel the museum has become a soulless corporate machine. But at least it underscores what is most alluring about the museum’s recent expansion… Seen from the street or the garden, the museum presents a continuous pattern of activity, reaffirming its public mission.”

A UK Art Fair recently polled 500 artists, asking them who their ten favorite artists of all time might be. The result was an eclectic list that left at least one critic distinctly unimpressed. “The artists’ artist Top Ten consists entirely of painters, and errs towards the splodgy and the splashy type much beloved by those who revel in the craft of oil painting… This is the Top Ten of an artist who thinks conceptual art is a con and that the ability to balance illusion with a love for gooey paint is paramount… It is the taste of an art student stuck in 1962.”

It sometimes seems as if all the great British artists come from (or at least have some connection to) the northern part of the country, which is somewhat surprising, since London, the great UK art capital, is in the south. “What is it about the North that gets everyone painting, sewing or puddling about in clay before carving chunks out of marble or timber? Time was when you could blame unemployment or even the rainy weather keeping people indoors, but neither of those seem convincing reasons any more.”

Much is being made of the disparity in acquisition budgets between UK museums and those in continental Europe and the U.S. But some in the UK arts world say that what’s of greater concern than the raw budget numbers is the value system used to judge which art is worth acquiring. “Is an Italian painting that was obtained by a British milord in the 19th century an integral part of ‘British heritage’? It is part of the history of British collecting, but that is not the same thing.”

Museum attendance is booming across the U.S., and while not everyone agrees on just why the public is suddenly so taken with art, museums are doing their best to make sure the ride doesn’t end anytime soon. From new or renovated buildings to the scrapping of admission fees, museums “have emerged as the pre-eminent cultural institution, a means of shaping the identity of a city.”