Category: visual

With the art market cranking at full speed, the competition to buy desirable work is fierce. And getting into art fairs early to see what’s on offer has become a game. “From big machers on museum boards with millions to spend to relative nobodies with a few grand saved up, anyone who wants a leg up on the competition tries to see the merch first. Competition is so fierce because of a long-overheated art market in which nearly every gallery exhibition sells out and waiting lists are the norm. Since the Armory Show is arguably the most important contemporary art fair in North America, there’s a lot of work that collectors might not get a crack at otherwise.”

Questions are being raised about a 22-karat gold, jewel-encrusted crown believed to have been made in Thailand in the 15th century, and owned for the past 23 years by the Philadelphia Museum. “The crown, which resembles a cylindrical helmet, is featured on the museum’s Web site and in its collections handbook. Now, with the opening of an exhibition of Siamese art in San Francisco that includes the crown, questions have been raised in Thailand as to whether this regal object was removed from that country illegally nearly half a century ago.”

For years, the giant beverage company Foster’s has collected art. But the company has decided to sell off its collection. “Yesterday, the firm announced that Sotheby’s would auction the about 70 pictures in Melbourne on May 23. The sale is being promoted as the biggest corporate art sell-off in Australian history, with estimates of the likely proceeds ranging from $9 million to more than $13 million.”

Washington’s new Museum of the American Museum tries for so much. But does it deliver? “Although architect Douglas Cardinal’s building has powerful moments, and several of the exhibits are intriguing, the $220 million museum is mostly a disappointment, a casualty of political infighting, scholarly temporizing and curatorial confusion. But the exhibits are the bigger letdown, mainly because with 800,000 artifacts in its possession, including the fabulous Heye Collection, the museum is in a position to do something spectacular. Yet the exhibits are technology-rich and object-poor and so badly organized that it is difficult to know where you are or how one section or theme relates to another.”

James B. Twitchell argues that church, college, and museum have lately become “just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one more story you tell and are told.” No longer serving as “gatekeepers” to the worlds of spirituality, art, and higher learning, these institutions, Twitchell says, have collectively become mere “ticket- takers” peddling an experience of uplift and status-conferring affiliation, while individually laboring to project a distinctive brand “fiction.”

A Pennsylvania court will hear an appeal of a judge’s decision to allow the Barnes Collection to move to Philadelphia. “The court ruled yesterday that an appeal of December’s Montgomery County Orphans’ Court ruling, which allowed the Barnes Foundation to move its gallery and change several other key governing rules, can proceed. In yesterday’s decision, the Superior Court ruled against a request by the Barnes Foundation to quash the appeal by a Barnes Foundation student.”

“A wealthy sheik from Qatar who has emerged over the past three years as the world’s single biggest buyer of art has been dismissed as his country’s art acquisitions chief after a disagreement with the emir of Qatar over his spending habits, art world figures familiar with the case said.”

“Audacious and appalling when it’s aimed at a museum masterpiece, the vandalizing of freely accessible, open-air artworks carries its own set of meanings and effects. Community murals, public sculpture and other forms of outdoor art are clearly more vulnerable than a museum’s protected holdings. But public pieces also tap notions of shared ownership and mutual interest (or mutual distaste) to raise an ongoing, open-ended mingling of reactions, feelings and reconsiderations. The public space belongs to everyone and no one. Art that is placed there engages and enacts that idea.”

“King Tutankhamun was not murdered, but may have suffered a bad broken leg shortly before his death at the age of about 19, a CT scan on the 3,300-year-old mummified body of the pharaoh has revealed.

Baltimore city officials have a plan to raise money for schools. Art. Giant fibreglass crabs. “The goal is to put 200 of the sculptures around town — and to raise $1 million from businesses, foundations and individuals for a city-sponsored campaign to make physical improvements in school facilities, including money raised from an auction of the sculptures after they have been on display through the spring and summer.”