Category: visual

“The economic free-for-all after the collapse of the Soviet Union created a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs who have been buying Russian art and are already widening their collecting interests. All this should favour the Moscow fair, founded two years ago, but nothing in Russia is ever as simple as it seems.”

Robert Campbell likes the way Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art looks while it’s still in construction. “I’m not saying the ICA looks better now than it will when it opens Sept. 17. But it looks and feels great, even — maybe especially — when enveloped by wind-driven rain and choppy seas.”

“Adding to the excitement yesterday were record-setting prices for works by Alex Colville, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Henrietta Mabel May, Jack Shadbolt and Robert Pilot. The total take well surpassed the pre-sale estimate of $3.3- to $4.5-million, another affirmation of current robustness of the Canadian resale art market.”

The Art Newspaper polled UK art students on who their favorite artist is. The winner: Marcel Duchamp. “The French conceptualist who famously placed a urinal in a New York gallery in 1917 and declared “this is art”, has come top of our survey of students from 11 of the leading art schools in the UK.”

An Ottawa gallery was stripped of all its art by thieves this weekend. “Thirty paintings, 10 sculptures and about 30 pieces of jewelry by emerging and established artists from the area were taken in the heist at the Blink Gallery on Sunday night or Monday morning. The robbers even took the labels for each piece.”

Officials have discovered that two artifacts from the treasure of 6th Century BC Lydian ruler, King Croesus, have been stolen from a museum in Turkey and replaced with fakes.

“Major developers across the country have long since realized, of course, that celebrity architecture sells. But its sudden rise here seems linked to a new level of design consciousness, an outgrowth of the now-entrenched fashion industry in South Beach and the booming success of Art Basel Miami Beach, an art fair held annually since 2000.”

Charles Saatchi has opened an online gallery. “In creating a site that offers to exhibit exactly the kind of outsider who will have spent the last two decades years reviling Saatchi, the millionaire collector appears to have done something innovative, even generous. But it’s only after, ooh, about ten minutes at Your Gallery that you see the emptiness of the exercise.”

“The Opening of Waterloo Bridge was supposed to be reunited with its full-scale preliminary sketch as part of ‘Constable: the Great Landscapes’, opening at Tate Britain on Thursday. But shortly before the exhibition was due to open, technical experts discovered the sketch was more likely to be the beginnings of a separate work that was never finished.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver is only 10 years old. But it is looking to break into the big leagues with a new $15 million building. “Perhaps most important, the museum hopes to gain the participation of top-level international artists it simply could not approach before because of the deficiencies of its facility and the institution’s lack of stature.”