Category: visual

As acquisition budgets get leaner, museums are teaming up to buy art. “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has just announced an agreement with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington to purchase jointly a major work by Seattle video artist Gary Hill.”

The Worcester Art Museum in Massachsetts has agreed to pay $60,000 to settle an anti-discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of a Muslim man who was fired after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,

Police are no closer in the investigation to recover two paintings by Edvard Munch from the Munch Museum in Oslo. And the museum remains closed “indefinitely” while new security systems are being installed. “There haven’t been any arrests in the case, nor have any charges been filed.”

A number of well-known artists is promising artwork to the Tate to help fill in the museum’s gaps in contemporary work. “In all, 23 artists are committed to giving – and the gallery naturally hopes this will become a fashionable bandwagon which others will wish to scramble aboard. At the most conservative estimate the promised gifts are worth £2.5m. But if an auction house could assemble such a collection, it would certainly go for many times more.”

Contractors exploding ordinance at an ammo dump in Iraq are causing damage to an important ancient site that is on Unesco’s World Heritage list. “Since May, controlled explosions of recovered munitions and mines are conducted at a nearby US military base. These are believed to take place twice daily. This constant seismic activity is damaging the stone arches of the main temple and the outer wall of the ancient city, which could lead to collapses.”

The Tate Museum is huge. But it’s struggling with a collections budget that is undersized. So, some 20 artists have agreed to give pieces of their work to the Tate Britain gallery. “There are huge gaps in the Tate’s collections, which in many ways inform all of us, working artists and the growing public. Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said: ‘We have to take this initiative to sustain our public collections in the face of declining public resources’.”

The value of artwork in Russia appreciates at 15-20 percent per year, making it a good investment. BUT. By some estimates, 80 percent of the artwork for sale in Russia is forged, and until now it has not been possible to get insurance. But that may be changing…

X-rays show that Degas worked and reworked a painting over the course of 40 years as his ideas changed. “The x-ray shows flurries of reworking, as figures become more and less distinct, the teenagers turn towards one another and then look away, the detailed background landscape is softened into a blur. At one point, Degas scrubbed out their classically handsome faces, and replaced them with Parisian urchins.”

A life-size statue which has stood for 500 years in a small town in Southern Italy has been identified as the work of Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna. It had been believed that none of Mantegna’s sculptures were still in existence, but a staggering two decades of research by art experts uncovered the provenance of the statue, which was first noticed by a museum director in 1978.

As China has gradually transformed itself from a closed economy to a capitalist-Marxist hybrid, the nation’s urban culture has changed as well, as the architectural rebirth currently going on in Beijing and Shanghai demonstrates. “It is turning the country into the world’s most boisterous architectural funhouse. Not since its birth in the Bauhaus almost a century ago has the modern revolution raged as hot as it does in China today.”