Category: visual

The Story Behind The Oils

Most art collectors are content merely to own a painting, and perhaps to look at it on a regular basis. But when Mark Archer purchased a portrait of a woman in a red scarf for £2,800 at the London Art Fair two years ago, he found that the painting would not leave him alone. His investigation into the relatively obscure artist and her subject led to an intriguing storyline involving obsessive love, public nudity, and a tragic suicide.

Drunken Guests Attack Art At Milwaukee Museum

The Milwaukee Museum’s beautiful Calatrava home is a popular place for parties. But “a recent martini fete held there turned into an overcrowded, drunken affair. Some unruly guests accosted artworks, which have been taken off display for a checkup. People threw up, passed out, were injured, got into altercations and climbed onto sculptures at Martinifest, a semi- formal event organized by Clear Channel Radio and held at the museum Feb. 11, according to several people who attended or worked at the event.”

Boy Sticks Gum On Museum Painting

At the Detroit Institute of Arts on Friday, “a mischievous 12-year-old boy visiting the museum with a school group took a piece of barely chewed Wrigley’s Extra Polar Ice out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler’s 1963 abstract painting “The Bay,” damaging one of the most important modern paintings in the museum’s collection and a landmark picture in the artist’s output.”

In Toronto – Body-Watching

An exhibition of plastinated bodies has been a huge hit in Toronto. “Officials announced that a total of 458,726 visitors paid anywhere from $15 to $25 each to attend Body Worlds 2, the controversial exhibition of 200 plastinated body parts and cadavers (including 20 whole bodies), that had its first-ever Canadian premiere at the centre last September.”

Scientists Find Lost Civilization Under Volcano

Scientists say they have found traces of a lost civilization in Indonesia buried by a volcano almost 200 years ago. “Mount Tambora’s cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, buried the inhabitants of Sumbawa Island under searing ash, gas and rock and is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths. The eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mount Krakatoa’s in 1883.”

Needed: A Better Return Policy For America’s Museums

The Metropolitan Museum is returning a 2,500-year-old krater to Italy. The Getty is negotiating on artifacts in its possesion. And Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts may be next. So are America’s museums, one by one, going to have to make deals to cleanse their collections of items of dubious provenance? What is really needed is a plan to deal with the whole mess in an orderly way…

Duchamp – Fountain Of Grace

The fuss over a bad performance artist who damaged Marcel Duchamp’s iconic “Fountain” last month may have for some obscured Duchamp’s importance. “Duchamp is invariably referred to as an “anti-artist” and an “iconoclast.” This is entirely false. Duchamp was a great art adviser to collectors. He wasn’t against art at all; he was against the hypocritical aura surrounding it.”

Munch Theft Linked To Another Armed Robbery

“Police [in Norway] believe they have discovered a new link between the brutal raid on the Norwegian Cash Service (NOKAS) office in Stavanger, which resulted in the shooting death of a police officer, and the armed theft of two paintings by Edvard Munch… One of the weapons used during the commando-style NOKAS robbery on April 5, 2004 and the pistol used in the Munch robbery, likely stem from the same break-in… in January 2004.”

What’s Really Driving The Battle Over Antiquities?

With criticism coming from all sides over the issue of antiquities acquisition, some of the more prominent people at the helm of America’s great museums are making a concerted effort to explain to the public their role in the art collection process, and to allay concerns that the works on display may be ill-gotten gains. “In large part, [the drive to ‘repatriate’ works of art] has grown out of a growing antiquities debate: is knowledge better served by collecting and exhibiting objects in museums or preserving them in their original archaeological context?”