Category: visual

“That rarefied practice of collecting high art — from canonized old masters to contemporary works by both international art stars and marketable young upstarts — is experiencing a surge it hasn’t seen since the explosive moment in the late 1980s when the market ballooned to a thinly stretched bubble, before bursting, finally, along with the stock market, in the 1990s. According to Artprice, a Paris-based information service that lists auction prices from more than 300,000 artists, prices for contemporary art alone had risen 40 per cent this year, pushing past even the heyday of the ’80s explosion… Contemporary art, traditionally a tough sell, has also caught the fever… Put simply, the art world is in a full-blown boom.”

The Royal Ontario Museum, in the messy midst of a $200 million expansion project, is unveiling ten new finished galleries for public viewing, beginning December 26. Kate Taylor is impressed with ROM’s direction, up to a point: “[The museum’s planners] are exercising a particular museum philosophy here. They wanted to restore rather than hide the heritage building, and the galleries are now being asked not to impinge on the architecture.”

“Tempers became heated [Friday] as the Italian state presented new evidence in its case against Marion True, a former antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, who is on trial [in Rome] on charges of dealing in looted antiquities. Ms. True’s defense lawyers shouted out objections when Maurizio Pellegrini, a document and photography analyst with the Italian Culture Ministry who testified as an expert witness for the state, began commenting on correspondence between Ms. True and the antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, a co-defendant in the case who was sentenced to 10 years in prison last December.”

It can’t be easy to make off with a bronze sculpture that measures 3.5 meters long, and better than one meter high. But that’s exactly what someone (or, more accurately, three someones and a crane) have done with a Henry Moore sculpture north of London. The theft took place Thursday night, and officials at the Henry Moore Foundation are afraid that the thieves could be planning to melt the work down to sell as scrap metal, since it would be difficult if not impossible to sell as is. The sculpture, entitled “A Reclining Figure,” is valued at $5.3 million.

Police have recovered the truck believed to have been used in the Henry Moore sculpture theft. The truck itself was also stolen, and was abandoned by the thieves some distance from the scene of the crime.

In today’s world of instant information and do-it-yourself media, the world of the critic, based as it is on an assumption of expertise and some vague notion of “the eye,” seems increasingly old-fashioned. But Jerry Saltz writes that the trend towards art criticism that is all ideas and no expertise is a dangerous one. “Having an eye in criticism is as important as having an ear in music. It means discerning the original from the derivative, the inspired from the smart, the remarkable from the common, and not looking at art in narrow, academic, or “objective” ways. It means engaging uncertainty and contingency, suspending disbelief, and trying to create a place for doubt, unpredictability, curiosity, and openness.”

A Czech court has awarded a Canadian family a European art collection assembled by their Jewish grandfather before the Second World War and later confiscated by the Nazis and then the Communists. “The family has been fighting for more than 14 years to gain title to and possession of some of the estimated 140 art works — including paintings by Gustav Klimt, James Ensor and Oskar Kokoschka — owned by their grandfather, businessman Oskar Federer. Many of the works are housed in small public galleries in the cities of Ostrava and Pardubice.”

Peter Noever, the “globe-trotting head of Vienna’s MAK Center” has a plan for a new art center in an old WWII antiaircraft tower in Vienna. “The idea is to build a collection of the 21st century. And to do it on site, and step by step. It will be very slow — 15 to 20 years. You invite one artist, and then see what he has done, and then see what you do next. It is the very opposite of the kind of collection that’s offered on the market, which changes as parts are bought and sold.”

Glass artist Dale Chihuly is suing two glassblowers, claiming they are copying his designs. “How does an artist go about proving — or disproving — copyright infringement? How do you differentiate between Chihuly’s influence on other glass artists and artistic plagiarism? Can he claim exclusive rights to designs that are modeled on things such as Navajo blankets and sea life? And what does it mean for the world of art glass?”

Eero Saarinen’s 1962 masterpiece TWA Terminal at JFK airport is a classic. It’s now being used by JetBlue, which in only a few years has become the airport’s biggest carrier. So now the airline is expanding. “JetBlue’s new terminal, unfortunately, shows just how low air travel can go. At $875 million, it’s $125 million cheaper than the bare-bones JFK barracks that American Airlines opened last summer — and looks it.”