Category: visual

“Finnish police said yesterday they were investigating a large-scale art fraud in which dozens of high-quality photocopies of works by artists such as Salvador Dalí were passed off as originals and sold for up to €10,000 (£6,700) each.”

“Art experts said that given the fame of both “The Scream” and “Madonna,” it would be nearly impossible to sell them to a collector. They speculated instead that the thieves would demand some form of ransom. That is what happened in 1994, when another version of “The Scream” was stolen and later recovered.”

It’s no wonder that Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” has such a strong hold on the public imagination, critic Adrian Searle writes. “The several versions of Munch’s Scream have become a kind of shorthand of modern alienation and despair, icons of anxiety and hopelessness.”

For cultural boosters in Athens, having the world descend on their city is a chance to show off the work of their artists — and not just the dead ones. Alongside classical art, tourists drawn there for the Olympics are also encountering contemporary Greek art, which is very deliberately on public view.

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s (New Brunswick, Canada) biggest patron is “suing the institution for fraud, claiming it lied or misrepresented the ownership of $200-million worth of disputed paintings. The Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation and a grandson of Lord Beaverbrook filed suit this week. The suit seeks $15-million in returned donations and punitive damages from the gallery.”

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opens in Cincinnati this week. Blair Kamin reports that the building is a mixed success. “The architecture of the Freedom Center rises and falls to the extent it exploits and expresses this tension. The museum is, in some respects, powerful and poetic, its undulating travertine walls symbolizing the indirect, often-torturous routes — through mountains and forests, and over rivers — that slaves took to freedom. The trouble is, this sort of poetry doesn’t occur with enough consistency, especially inside, to make the museum the powerhouse combination of intellect and emotion, the visual and the visceral, it might have been.”

There is big demand for dinosaur fossils, and poachers have been taking advantage of their remote location to “chip the prints out of rock illegally and sell them to unscrupulous — or unaware — collectors. Worried that online sales are making it easier for poachers to sell their goods, lawmakers, geologists, and police are searching for ways to find these looters and stop them.”

Today’s Big Time Art World travels in a pack – jetting around the world to where the perceived action is. “At the center of this pack are wealthy patrons who enjoy traveling together, often in their own planes, to far-flung art destinations. Some take chances on untried artists; others embrace challenging work by well-established names. But all keep abreast of one another’s choices. A purchase by one can inspire further interest from others, directly affecting the artist’s market and stirring up greater critical discussion. Wherever they go, they are always shopping, even at ostensibly noncommercial venues like Site Santa Fe.”

Gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo and ripped Munch’s “The Scream” from the wall, stealing it. “Two masked thieves pulled the work and another painting, Madonna, off the wall as stunned visitors watched. One robber threatened staff with a gun before the pair escaped in a waiting car, a museum officer told the BBC.”

Leads are coming in about the two Munch paintings stolen in Oslo this weekend. “On Sunday afternoon police found a painting frame near Carl Berners plass in central Oslo. Police believed the find could be linked to the Munch heist. One of the employees at the Munch Museum café told Aftenposten’s Internet edition that she saw two men walking with the two paintings held between them.”