Category: visual

Forty galleries, collectors and artists have sued the art storage company Momart over a warehouse fire in London last year that destroyed millions of dollars worth of art. “The list of litigants includes some of the most powerful figures in the industry: the artists Damien Hirst and Gillian Ayres; the sculptor Barry Flanagan; five Royal Academy of Arts trustees, including the celebrated architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw; and a host of galleries.”

There’s a surge in interest in Mexican art – both the classics and new hotshots. “While rich collectors such as film producer Joel Silver, former HBO boss Michael Fuchs, and Daniel Filipacchi, the chairman of Hachette, favour 20th-century Mexican masters, a younger generation of collectors – mostly Latin Americans, Americans and a sprinkling of Europeans – buy work by a new generation of Mexican artists breaking new ground.”

Andrea Rich has been leading the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for ten years. “The museum has stable finances, longer hours, grand plans and, yes, fully operative telephone and computer systems. With star architect Renzo Piano poised to lead an expansion and reorganization of the crowded, confusing campus, the $130-million projected cost of phase one is already in the bank. These facts alone, many museum professionals say, should qualify Rich as a triumphant turnaround artist. But the closer you look, the more complicated that picture becomes…”

“The Autry National Center and the California Historical Society have entered into a 100-year partnership designed to enhance exhibitions at the Autry museum in Los Angeles and create a Southern California presence for the San Francisco-based historical society. The plan calls for joint projects that will bring the society’s holdings out of storage and into the public eye.”

“The problem with the Biennale is that it takes place in Venice, the city in whose Frari church you can see Titian’s altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, one of the world’s supreme works of art. It is the consummation of Venetian art, mysterious, modest and, as you find if you visit near the feast of the Ascension, still serving a community of worshippers. It seems a futile thing, championing the new in a city that is such a great advert for the old, but in recent years the Biennale has been so atrociously curated and so pathetically managed that it would disgrace a far lesser city.”

The poor Acropolis is in great disrepair, and preserving it has been problematic. “Thirty years after Greek conservationists launched the biggest restoration project in modern history, the works have become dogged by controversy, and the government in Athens has now revealed that at least 20 more years – and up to €70m (£47m) – will be needed to finish the project. The restoration is causing political ructions in Greece, not least because nobody knows where the money will come from.”

Nelson Mandela is suing his former lawyer over sales of Mandela’s artwork. “Mr Mandela’s side now claims that unauthorised prints are being marketed which bear false signatures. It is argued that these sales are worth millions of dollars. Mr Mandela’s prints typically sold for over $10,000 each until last month.”

With the increasing popularity of digital cameras, more and more retailers are offering top-quality printing services for those who want a hard copy of their photos. But your snapshots better not look too professional, or many retailers might refuse to print them. “There are a growing number of stories of amateur photographers being turned away by photofinishers for having photos that looked, at least in the eyes of a store clerk, too good to have been taken by anyone other than a professional. Their photos have become collateral damage in the war on digital copyright infringement.”

A site in Cyrene in Libya that has been under excavation for 150 years has recently yielded 76 intact Roman statues. “One morning, a collapsed wall in the Roman temple, which was discovered in the 1930s, revealed a marble serpent wrapped around a stone. We could not have known that this was only the first in a series of statues of every kind and size that we would pull from the ground. We just kept discovering them every day, for a month and a half, and found 76 in total.”

The Warhol Foundation has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a website that offers “museum-quality copies of famous masterpieces painted by our Thai artists totally by hand.” The site offered “oil-on-canvas copies of famous works created by a studio of artists in Thailand. Many artistic tastes were represented – from pop artists like Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to impressionists Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet – for prices ranging from $250 to $500 US.”