Category: visual

Two years ago, London’s National Gallery bought “The Madonna of the Pinks” for £22 million, including £11.5 million in public money. “James Beck, a professor at Columbia University, New York, a tireless critic of the attribution, has just completed a book in which he claims that the Northumberland Madonna cannot be by Raphael.”

Critics are attacking Oslo’s Munch Museum for selling a board game based on the theft of the museum’s most famous painting – The Scream. “In principle I find it a bit in bad taste to make a game out of the theft of The Scream. My initial reaction is to disapprove of an initiative that helps trivialise a national and international drama while the painting is still missing.”

The Tate Gallery spent £700,000 on buying Chris Ofili’s “The Upper Room” after the artist’s agent told the museum that Ofili was getting married and needed the money. Ofili is one of the Tate’s trustees.

The Munch Museum in Oslo, which lost its “The Scream” painting last year in a dramatic theft, is selling a board game in its gift shop based on the incident. “Players of The Mystery of the Scream, a game aimed at the family market, must hunt down the robber before he reaches a criminal paradise.”

The Greek government is demanding that the Getty return four artifacts it says were illegally exported. “The Greeks have presented archeological evidence that they say proves the Greek origin of three objects the Getty purchased in 1993: a gold funerary wreath, an inscribed tombstone and a marble torso of a young woman. The three artifacts, which date from about 400 BC, are ranked among the masterpieces of the Getty’s antiquities collection. The fourth object that Greek officials are seeking to recover is an archaic votive relief bought in 1955 by J. Paul Getty himself.”

“Over the past hundred years or so a very particular revolutionary sensibility has influenced the value system used in making and appreciating visual art. It feels to me that the art world today has its own visual dialect, a kind of educated mischievous slang that is learnt from making, looking at and talking about art for a long time and a love of being challenged or surprised. From outside, the art world must seem like a self-regarding mafia, but it relishes an assault on its values.”

London’s Frieze Art Fair is only three years old, but it’s leaving traditional museum shows behind. “The Frieze Art Fair feels as if the flying circus of dealers from Basel, curators from Barcelona, museum owners from Istanbul, collectors from Los Angeles, and even the occasional artist from Hoxton or Berlin who constitute the perpetual shifting landscape of art, have given up perpetually circumnavigating the globe, and decided to turn themselves collectively into an airport.”

“The speed with which Frieze has become an essential date in the international arts calendar is testament to the buzz which surrounds British art. It was launched only three years ago, but the number of galleries represented has risen from 150 last year to 160, due to the increased quality of the 400 applications. Frieze is determinedly international, but this year there are 35 British galleries represented – second only to the Americans, who have 38.”

“The plans, presented in public workshops over the past month, offer the first glimpse of an institution that is likely to become one of the country’s most visited museums. The ideas are also likely to prompt sensitive questions of how to tell the story of Sept. 11.”

“The forces of growth that have filled Shanghai’s sky with construction cranes — China’s national bird, in current parlance — have sparked a profusion of nonprofit exhibition spaces and commercial galleries devoted to avant-garde art. Against the odds, these showcases have popped up in a central park, a historic pedestrian street, a suburban shopping mall, abandoned banks and a derelict industrial complex. Beijing remains the undisputed cultural capital of China, but Shanghai is fashioning a role for itself as a distinctive place to see new art made in China and elsewhere.”