Category: visual

“You know, we have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown. We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it. ‘I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb. That may be the right thing to do’.”

Italian officials are said to have pictures of antiquities being pulled from the ground that they say is documentary proof that Boston’s Museum of Fine Art has stolen art. “It is the smoking gun. It means they came out of the ground; they were looted and cleaned up and sold. That’s about as strong a case as you’re going to find.” MFA officials said yesterday they have yet to hear from Italian authorities. The museum has long disputed that works in its collection were stolen, an assertion underscored yesterday.”

“Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican representative in the United States Congress and a long-standing critic of China’s human rights record, has announced he will lead an investigation into what he suspects was the systematic looting of Tibetan art and objects by Chinese authorities since the 1949 Communist revolution. The inquiry has coincided with a high profile auction in Beijing of artefacts that previously belonged to Tibetan monasteries, and which seeped out into international markets sometime last century before being bought by the leading Taiwan-based collector Wang Du.”

“A painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has been sold for $22.4m in New York, breaking the world sales record for the artist’s work. His 1886 work La Blanchisseuse shows a female laundry worker gazing out of a window. It beat the 1997 record of $14.5m for one of his works. Christie’s annual autumn art auction also sold Picasso’s Sylvette on a Green Armchair for $8m. But Henri Matisse’s Marguerites failed to reach its $10m asking price. A pair of Monet paintings also remained unsold, drawing no bids beyond $3.2m after pre-sale estimates of up to $6m. Christie’s two-week Impressionist and modern art sale took a total of $160.9m in its first week.”

Britons are being offered a deal on art. Own Art is “a new government-funded initiative that offers interest-free loans of up to £2,000 ($3,545) to anyone wanting to buy contemporary artwork. ‘We want to open people’s eyes to owning something unique rather than just going to a superstore and buying something mass produced’.”

His name is, in fact, Mozart. “He is 82, lives in Linz and trades in stolen archaeological items from Italy. The carabinieri have found 3000 items to have passed through his hands and around 600 have already been returned to Italy.”

For the first time, archaeologists have excavated homes of prehistoric Neolithic henge builders, in a set of dwellings, some older than Stonehenge, excavated from a Northumberland quarry. “The Neolithic Britons left some of the most spectacular prehistoric monuments in the world, but there have been only scraps of evidence showing where and how they lived. House sites are so rare that some archaeologists believe most people lived a semi-nomadic existence.”

“Art Cologne closes tomorrow after a six-day run on the tail of London’s Frieze, which sold 26,000 tickets. The German fair’s sales may reach 70 million euros ($84 million) this year, up from 60 million euros in 2004, preserving its status as Europe’s No.2 modern and contemporary fair after Art Basel.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is selling off $10 million worth of art. “Exactly why the museum has decided to sell them now is not known, although income from the auction will be restricted to future acquisitions. (Rumors have circulated that a war chest is being assembled for a major purchase, but they remain unsubstantiated.) LACMA’s plan to construct a new building — the Broad Contemporary Art Museum — is no doubt one force driving the idea, as construction of the Anderson Building for Modern and Contemporary Art was at the time of the museum’s last big de-accession, in 1982. Bizarrely, one LACMA official said the museum was merely pruning redundancies, as if unique works of art were not — well, unique.”

Richard Dorment is shocked that the Tate is being attacked for its recent purchase of Chris Ofili’s “The Open Door.” “With MoMA breathing down their necks, the Tate trustees either had to act at once or lose one of the most important works of British art painted in the last 25 years. Had the gallery let the work go, I’d now be writing an article castigating the director and trustees for their obtuseness. And what if Ofili had stepped down from the board? It would still have been possible to point to his recent association with the gallery and accuse Tate of cronyism. By asking the artist to step aside during the negotiations, the trustees secured a masterpiece while adhering to the highest ethical standards.”