Category: visual

“When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist in London, responded in characteristic fashion. ‘From that moment on, he began to try to understand it by painting himself,’ said his wife, Patricia Utermohlen, a professor of art history. … The paintings starkly reveal the artist’s descent into dementia, as his world began to tilt, perspectives flattened and details melted away. His wife and his doctors said he seemed aware at times that technical flaws had crept into his work, but he could not figure out how to correct them.”

“A group of men burst into a Moscow art gallery, destroying work by an ethnic Georgian artist and beating up the owner, it was claimed yesterday. The attack follows the seizure by officials of political art the same gallery had displayed.”

“Perhaps conceptualism, minimalism, whatever we’re going to call it (even the philistine term ‘modern art’ is still, unbelievably, current) has lasted so long because the public is still baffled by what is going on. The achievement of the high renaissance was obvious, and it was over in a moment; Mannerism lasted a bare 50 years. Eighty years on, we are still gazing uncomprehending at replicas of Duchamp’s readymades.”

Thieves trying to rob ancient Egyptian tombs were captured by police. “That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake.”

The UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund is establishing a £3m fund to help museums whose acquisitions budgets have been slashed. “Museums have felt that in the flood of lottery money spent on new or remodelled buildings, the importance of the collections they hold has been forgotten. The situation has been predicted to become more acute, with the Heritage Lottery Fund squeezed by declining lottery ticket sales, and by the new lottery good cause, the 2012 Olympics.”

Paris’s newly restored Musée des Arts is a far cry from the dark, dingy place it used to be. “Radical decisions were made, bold steps were taken. While architects worked out how to open up the space, bringing in light and air, a team of curators settled down to choose the best 6,000 objects to put on permanent display… The result is a collection that positively shines with its own good fortune.”

When Canadian über-collector Kenneth Thomson died last spring, it marked the end of an era for Canada. Now, many are wondering who will step in to fill Thomson’s considerable void. “Buyers and dealers speculate about what will happen to the structure of the market with the removal of one of its pillars… No dealer is going to risk offending clients by naming them or telling them more is demanded of them. But while big fish prefer to move under the water, they cannot help but leave ripples in their wake.”

Public art is suddenly the hottest thing on Toronto’s cultural scene. “Long forgotten are the political battles of the ’60s that confronted the installation of Henry Moore’s The Archer in Nathan Phillips Square. In such a media-intense city as we are now, a public display of significant contemporary art is seen as an innovative and necessary way to ornament existing urban space. And unlike the oversized bronze statues of a century ago, you don’t necessarily need space on the ground, either.”

“As the economies rise in Asia, the Middle East—and soon South America and perhaps one day Africa—leaders will want to found new museums. With the dwindling supply of quality art necessary to fill them, an attractive shortcut is to partner with a museum that already has the art, as well as the personnel and expertise.”

“In what experts say is a first in recent memory, art confiscated during the Nazi regime has found its way back to its rightful owners in Canada.”