Category: visual

“A 650-year-old Chinese vase that survived for generations on a low shelf, at constant risk of being dashed to the floor by the tails of boisterous dogs, sold for nearly £3m at auction yesterday. The unique 50cm double-gourd vase, bought for £10 in 1900, was snapped up by an overseas buyer, for a new record price for an antique sold at a British provincial auction house.”

It has now become the norm for museums to sell their art, rent their space for blockbuster exhibitions, and otherwise exercise judgment more indicative of a for-profit corporation than a non-profit keeper of culture and art, says Michael Kimmelman. “A steady corrosion of faith in the integrity of institutions will be the long-term price for short-term wheeling and dealing. With faith goes the delicate ecosystem of charitable contributions and tax-free privileges. Why, the public will ask, do institutions like these reap the benefits of nonprofit status if they service private interests who shape the content of what’s on view and/or reap cash rewards?”

Spencer Tunick has taken his passion for photographing mobs of naked people across the pond, and mounted his first large-scale UK event in the Tyneside district. “Volunteers from around the world – including Australia, Belgium and Peru – signed up, among them a vicar. They had to dodge chips and kebab remnants dropped by the previous night’s revellers as they made their way around a cordoned-off section of the Newcastle and Gateshead quaysides.”

“The French countryside could not be farther away, in distance or sentiment, from the long stretch of neon lights that line the Las Vegas Strip. But as the impressionists launched a revolution in the art world more than a century ago, a small art gallery inside the Bellagio resort has been quietly doing the same, albeit to a lesser degree, over the past six years… This month, the gallery launched its ninth exhibition, titled The Impressionist Landscape from Corot to Van Gogh. On the heels of a wildly successful Claude Monet show, gallery officials are confident they are accomplishing their mission of bringing art to the masses — even if it is in a casino.”

A mining company’s plans to destroy a Tuscan mountain crest to get at its prized marble has caused a furor. “The plan has pitted environmentalists against trade unions and local authorities, who argue the stone from Monte Altissimo in the Apuan Alps is needed to protect jobs. But the controversy also sets contemporary artists and designers against art historians who treasure the mountain, which served as one of Michelangelo’s most celebrated, if frustrating, quarries.”

Jérôme Sans, co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, has criticized billionaire François Pinault for his aborted plans to build a major museum oustide Paris. “For a start, nobody really knows what was going into Mr Pinault’s museum. The contents of his collection are unknown to most people. The entire episode was a little like someone saying yes, ‘I’ll marry you’ and then at the last minute leaving the bride at the altar”. He stressed that “this illusion [that Mr Pinault was to open a museum in Paris] has harmed rather then helped the French art world”.

In 1981 a group of Cuban artists got together for a controversial exhibition that “placed the 11 young artists on the map, set the course for contemporary Cuban art, and created an identity for a new generation of artists. When they gathered for Volume One, the young artists still dreamed of carving a niche in Cuba’s art scene. And though they are scattered, they achieved that. Many would become internationally known while living in Cuba in the 1980s.” Now they are scattered across several countries, but there is a plan to bring them together…

Frank Gehry has been chosen to design a 40- or 50-story skyscraper next to his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles as well as other elements of the $1.8-billion complex planned along Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The street is the focus of an ambitious plan to cluster cultural buildings in the city.

“China’s low wages and hunger for exports have already changed many industries, from furniture to underwear. The art world, at least art for the masses, seems to be next, and is emerging as a miniature case study of China’s successful expansion in a long list of small and obscure industries that when taken together represent a sizable chunk of economic activity. China is rapidly expanding art colleges, turning out tens of thousands of skilled artists each year willing to work cheaply. The Internet is allowing these assembly-line paintings to be sold all over the world; the same technology allows families across America to arrange for their portraits to be painted in coastal China.”

A coalition of British museums has banded together to preserve one of the country’s finest collections of silver and gold plate which would otherwise have been broken up and sold at auction. “The nine museums, including the V&A, the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford, pooled their resources and secured hefty grants, including over £850,000 given by the National Heritage Memorial Fund to celebrate its silver anniversary, and over £400,000 from the Art Fund charity. The collection was built up by the financier Ernest Cassel, who was born into a poor Jewish family in Germany in 1852, arrived in Liverpool in 1869 with a violin and a small bundle of clothes, and by the time of his death in 1921 was one of the richest men in Europe.”