Category: visual

“There are more than 160,000 missing works of art, according to the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that tracks stolen and recovered art. The global trade in stolen art is estimated to amount to at least $5 billion a year, according to the Progressive Policy Institute, which reports by comparison that the legitimate art market is said to be about $25 billion annually.”

The owner of a venerable Boston art and prints gallery abruptly left the country about two weeks ago, setting off a criminal investigation into whether he absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sales of artwork left on consignment at his shop…

“This month, a New York-based Web site that celebrates graffiti and other street art began testing a system” that would allow “art lovers to download images created by emerging artists onto the video screens of their cellphones. Calling it a “curated online art gallery for your mobile phone,” the founders of the Web site, woostercollective.com, are hoping it will provide a new way for struggling young artists to make money, in much the same way that a songwriter can earn money from radio play or an actor from reruns.”

“A Moscow court has found the organisers of an art exhibition guilty of inciting religious hatred and fined them 100,000 roubles (£2,000; $3,600) each. The January 2003 exhibition called “Caution! Religion” was staged by the Sakharov Museum, named after the Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov.”

The Brooklyn Museum’s Luce Center for American Art is “among a growing number of visible storage centers in the world. Art experts say visible storage is a good option for museums to show the public the breadth of a specific collection, but they caution that it must be used to complement, not to replace, traditional exhibits. At the Brooklyn Museum, about 800 objects are housed in the Luce Center, including all American paintings not formerly on display. There are thousands more decorative objects, such as spoons, teapots and toasters, still in storage.”

A fire Saturday swept through a sprawling Moscow art market noted for a wide array of Russian handicrafts and Soviet-era trinkets and replicas, leaving at least one woman dead and another injured.

Rita Duffy, Northern Ireland’s foremost artist, plans to tow a giant iceberg from the Arctic and moor it off Belfast. She says “allowing it to melt is about ‘thawing’ a place locked in a political and emotional deep freeze where divisions are firmer than ever. ‘A huge big mountain of ice seems to be the most eloquent way of describing where we are. There is a certain type of madness in Northern Ireland society, a denial of what has happened to us. Maybe it’s time to come out of denial and confront what has sunk us’.”

A controversial former Whitney Museum director, a well-liked London director known for his fundraising skill, an Asian art specialist from Australia by way of Richmond, and a recent director of L.A.’s Getty Museum are among the candidates said to be on the shortlist to head the Cleveland Museum of Art…

“Culture wars over blasphemous art, such as Andres Serrano’s urine-dipped crucifix or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-decorated Madonna, have flared up periodically in the United States in recent years. A similar conflict is now raging in post-Soviet Russia. But there, the debate is not about whether taxpayer money should be used for museum displays that offend some people’s religious beliefs. It’s about whether a provocative exhibition at a privately owned museum should be a crime with harsh penalties for the accused blasphemers.”

What accounts for the astounding rise in fortunes of Marlene Dumas? Her work currently holds the record for highest-selling work by a living woman artist. “In 2002, the record for Ms. Dumas’s paintings, only a few of which had come to auction, stood at about $50,000. Yet last month at Christie’s in London, after a bidding war between two dealers, her 1987 painting “The Teacher,” a rendering of a posed class photograph, went for a startling $3.34 million.”