Category: visual

“Britain’s once sleepy contemporary art market has exploded. The problem is that its expansion coincides with a financial squeeze on the publicly funded institutions that have long dominated new art in Britain, and this could imperil the delicate balance of power between the public and private sectors.”

“The condo market that helped propel the change has begun to cool in many American downtowns. But the shift in skyscraper architecture from commercial to residential has been so sharp and widespread that it’s difficult not to think of Norman Foster and David Childs as an anachronistic pair: as, say, a couple of contemporary composers who have produced dueling string quartets or two television network executives deciding to launch competing half-hour, laugh-track sitcoms that also happen to be very well-made.”

A Vancouver gallery has found a way to tap into a global market for art. This Thursday the gallery hosts “an estimated $6-million, biannual, on-line live auction of traditional and contemporary Canadian art, ranging in estimated price from $1,000 to $350,000. The auction that includes works by Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Maurice Cullen, Jean-Paul Riopelle and E.J. Hughes will be held with gala glitz in a downtown Vancouver hotel ballroom. But it will also be broadcast simultaneously over the Internet, capturing a global audience with an increasing taste for Canadian art.”

“In a sobering development, forgers have been purchasing the works of minor European artists, altering them in a process known as “Russification,” painting on the signature of major Russian artists, and selling them for many times their worth. Perhaps even more alarming is that they’re fooling the most reputable auction houses in the world.”

“A profound change has taken place in the antiques market. In the past only one or two openly acknowledged sales of dealers’ stock would be held each year, often with dire results. Dealers were reluctant to pay premiums at auction when they could buy from their colleagues in the trade.” Now big auction sales are big successes.

A new 35-foot high statue by Damien Hirst was erected in London Tuesday. “The Virgin Mother has layers removed on one side to reveal the foetus and the woman’s skull, muscles and tissue. The bronze statue, recalling Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer, dominates the courtyard in front of the gallery, and is visible from Piccadilly where passers by stopped to look as a crane hoisted it into place on Monday.”

“The first major rehang of Tate Modern’s collection formally opens today. The four suites of galleries housing the collection were until recently divided into unwieldy, catch-all themes – Landscape/Matter/Environment, Nude/Action/Body, Still Life/Real Life/Object, and History/Memory/Society. These have been replaced by Poetry and Dream, Material Gestures, Idea and Object, and States of Flux. All this is a tad snappier, but more than the labels needed to change. The new displays are a major improvement. At times, they are spectacular… But from today, who will notice these fine-tuned alignments, the worried-over niceties and accidental pleasures?”

The Tate’s grand rehang amounts to an admission that it was a mistake, when the museum first opened in 2000, to abandon all reliance on chronology in organizing the collection. And interestingly, now that some semblance of linear time has been restored, Rachel Campbell-Johnston says that we can finally see how non-linear the art of the last 100 years has actually been. “The narrative of art history, [the re-hung collection] reminds you, is seldom a single linear progression. Modernism is not a single movement but a struggling protean force.”

A UK game show has obtained permission to film episodes in the British Museum, and producers say they hope to “conquer the Louvre, the Cairo museum, [and] the Smithsonian” next. “Each episode of the show is built around a period of history, starting with ancient Mesopotamia, and the series uses some of the museum’s most famous artefacts, including the 2,700-year-old Flood Tablet, a cuneiform-inscribed clay tablet with an Assyrian version of the Old Testament story of Noah’s ark.”

Museum gift shops aren’t what they once were, and the biggest change is one that you’ll never see on the surface as you browse amid the trinkets and exhibit books: “the trend for institutions to hire outsiders, chain retailers, to run their gift shops… For museum stores, outsourcing is more than a tempest in a replica teapot. It’s a threat to a gold mine.”