Category: visual

“Over the last two weeks, a shadowy British graffiti artist who calls himself Banksy has carried his own humorous artworks into four New York institutions – the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History – and attached them with some sort of adhesive to the walls, alongside other paintings and exhibits. Similar stunts at the Louvre and the Tate museum have earned the artist – who will not reveal his real name – a following in Europe, where he has had successful gallery shows and sold thousands of books of his artwork. But his graffiti has also landed him in legal trouble.”

The DC museum’s East Wing opening of “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” draws more than 9000 visitors its first day. “Museum guards with clickers stationed at the entrance to the 10-room exhibition — a kind of tour of Paris night life in the late 1800s — counted 9,230 visitors. That easily surpasses the 6,190 who attended the opening of “Treasure Houses of Britain” in 1985 and the 3,340 who came for the first day of “Johannes Vermeer” in 1995. The West Building’s attendance record was set in 1963 when an average of 19,205 visitors a day saw Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

Fakes of famed Canadian First Nations painter Norval Morrisseau abound. So a new official committee has been set up to authenticate work. “The committee, composed of five Morrisseau experts, will function much like the famous four-member Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which has been the sole arbiter of genuine Warhols since the pop-art master’s death in 1988: If you think you have a real Morrisseau but want to know for sure, you’ll have to submit it to the committee for determination. And once you do, you’ll have to sign a contract by which you absolve Morrisseau, his family and Milrad of any liability if the committee comes back and says, ‘It’s not a Morrisseau.”

An expert says a painting recently declared a fake is in fact a real Cezanne. “He based his assessment on the unsigned work, purported to have been painted by Paul Cezanne, being riddled with secret “signatures” left behind by the renowned French impressionist. The piece, Son in a High Chair, was among notable works said to have been taken from the home of eccentric NSW art restorer John Opit in February last year.”

The Seattle Art Museum this month “begins in earnest the $86 million expansion to the 1991 building that kicked off a regional arts building frenzy. The expansion is only one part of a three-pronged, $180 million overhaul – the museum has raised $124 million to date – including a sculpture park downtown and a new roof for the Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park.” Come January, SAM closes its main building for a year to accomodate construction.

A new history of art since 1900 is “the final ludicrous monument to an intellectual corruption that has filled contemporary museums and the culture they sustain with a hollow and boring, impersonal chatter. Art has been lost in a labyrinth of theory. If this sounds anti-intellectual, let me clarify. There is no good work of art that cannot be described in intelligible English, however long it might take, however much patience is required. And yet this book begins with four theoretical essays explaining the post-structuralist concepts the authors believe we need before we can meaningfully discuss a single work of art.”

A billionaire art collector has offered to pay for the restoration of a Henry Moore marble arch. “The six-metre tall work, given by Moore in 1980 to the people of London, was removed from Kensington Gardens and dismantled in 1996 on safety grounds. The sculpture is unevenly weighted, and soon after it was installed it began to twist. In addition, travertine, the stone of which it is made, is susceptible to damaging cycles of freeze-thaw in cold weather. The Royal Parks, which manage Kensington Gardens, have estimated that to repair it – by inserting a steel “spine” – would cost around £300,000, which they say they cannot afford.”

Looting at Angkor Wat has increased in the past six months. “One of the astonishing aspects of the Angkor sites is their diminished nature at the hand of modern man. Amid the grandeur, empty pedestals, headless carvings and missing lintels cast an aura of indelible loss. The sudden cascade of tourists – one million foreign visitors came to Cambodia last year, a vast majority to Angkor – brings many risks: overcrowding, dwindling of the scant local water supply, a cheapening atmosphere.”

Historians in Florence believe they have found a sculpted marble relief of Michelangelo that might have been carved by the artist himself. “The work speaks for itself: it is a very high-quality sculpture which depicts Michelangelo. The skilled chiselling on the back makes us think it might be a self portrait.”

Artists on this year’s Beck’s Futures prize shortlist have a show. “If there is anything that connects the six artists here it can be seen, as much as anything else, as a refusal of the market-affirming object-based practice of the YBAs.”