Category: visual

A large bronze sculpture has been stolen from a London campus. This follows the theft of a large Henry Moore three weeks ago. “Police said 20 art thefts had happened in London in the past six months. Officers fear thieves are targeting valuable artworks worth millions of pounds so they can melt them down and sell them on as scrap metal at a fraction of the price.”

“Soaring scrap prices have opened up an opportunity for gangs to pocket a quick profit. The Henry Moore sculpture, taken in mid-December, was believed to be worth around £5,000 if melted down; the Chadwick may fetch as little as £1,000. Reduced to its metal content, the figures are worth only a fraction of their art market value but neither police nor art dealers believe such large objects would be stolen to order for a private collector. In many cases, the sculptures have been severely damaged.”

A 3000-year-old tomb has been found underneath Rome’s Forum. “Archaeologists were excavating under the level of the ancient forum, a popular tourist site, when they dug up the tomb, which they suspect is part of an entire necropolis.”

The director of Iowa’s State Historical has been fired after performance of the museum failed to live up to expectations. “His work gained little public attention, and attendance by school groups in 2005 fell to its lowest mark in seven years, according to a department report.”

So who was it that stole the Cellini saltcellar from a Vienna museum? The suspect “was a funny guy. He had collected sculptures in his youth and had a feeling for them. He also ran an alarm firm and was an expert in alarm systems. He knew exactly how to steal it. He told us afterwards it [the theft] was all rather spontaneous.”

Tyeb Mehta is India’s most successful artist. “Mehta’s career has mirrored the changing fortunes of contemporary Indian art over the last six decades, from the intellectual fervor of its birth at Indian independence in 1947, to a lifetime of aesthetic and financial struggle, to the improbable rise of the Indian art market in the last few years.”

The Royal Ontario Museum has finally opened its long-awaited gallery focusing on the history of native peoples in Canada. The gallery seems primed for success, but it brings up an uncomfortable irony for North America’s aboriginals: having been forced from their land, mistreated for centuries, and generally denied the opportunity to reestablish their native culture, native peoples are now forced to view their history through the prism of the white man’s museums. “How can the museum transcend the guilty legacy of cultural vandalism that haunts it?”

“Austrian police have recovered a $60m 16th Century figurine stolen in 2003 called Saliera, or salt cellar, after a suspect turned himself in. Experts established it was an authentic work by Florentine master Benvenuto Cellini… It was found on Saturday, buried in a wooden case near Zwettl, a town about 55 miles north of Vienna.”

The announcement that New York’s eye-catching Seventh Regiment Armory will soon be transformed into a 55,000-square-foot “visual and performing arts institutions” was greeted happily across much of the city’s arts world. But not everyone is happy: “for dozens of dealers and show organizers across the country and abroad, the cavernous Park Avenue space [has been] a crucial sales point for their wares.”

Vienna’s celebrated Belvedere Museum has taken down five paintings by Gustav Klimt after receiving an anonymous threat from an individual who threatened to destroy them. “Sources in the gallery said the mail had threatened the paintings would be destroyed to stop them being restored to heiress Maria Altmann, niece of their orginal Jewish owner who was driven out of Vienna and stripped of his possessions by the Nazis in 1938.” The Belvedere had agreed to return the paintings earlier in the week.