Category: visual

Cambodia’s heritage is being plundered and sold off on the black market. “Sales of such ordinary antiquities are booming at markets across the kingdom, robbing it of a rich history archaeologists are only just beginning to study after decades of conflict ended here in 1998, experts warn.”

Two men have been jailed for stealing two Van Gogh paintings. “The thieves were arrested separately in 2003, in Spain and in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh Museum has put in a claim for 1.8 million euros for the two uninsured paintings, which were stolen in 2002 and have never been recovered.” (a judge has rejected that claim…)

“England’s wealthy Beaverbrook family and a Fredericton, Canada-based art gallery have agreed to let a Canadian arbitrator decide who owns tens of millions of dollars worth of paintings that the two sides have been feuding over for months.”

The Edinburgh Festival is one of Europe’s great cultural institutions. But it didn’t include visual art. After years of griping, a visual art festival will now be included. “The new Edinburgh Art Festival has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of despair. It was absurd that a festival founded in 1947 on the principle of showing, as the Lord Provost put it at the time, ‘all the best in music, drama and the visual arts’, should ignore an entire medium’.”

So Philadelphia schools have found a trove of artworks in their possession. Where else might there be public-owned art? Perhaps at the Pentagon? A Department of Defense employee “is/was resposible for maintaining accountability for this art collection, and in the mid 90s she was apparently fired/quit in part because a military Inspector General’s team discovered that the works were generally unaccounted for and in many cases improperly stored (leaky buildings, rain, moisture, etc.).”

Phillip Dodd is leaving as director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art to focus on Asia. “In my usual pompous way, I have a kind of wager that the 21st century belongs to a constellation of China and India and my deepest feeling is that Britain shows no sign of understanding this. There is a lack of engagement with that part of the world which is just crazy. My real worry is that we spent the past 10 years being so in love with ourselves – that’s what Cool Britannia was, like Narcissus – we thought we were the centre of the world. But the world has moved on and we are bewildered.”

Two pieces of Aboriginal art on loan from the British Museum have been seized in Australia. “Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens. The two bark etchings and a Aboriginal ceremonial headdress were on loan to Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Gary Murray, of the Dja Dja, accused the museums of ‘colonial arrogance’.”

Biennales are generally big agglomerations of a lot of “stuff” that rarely works together to deliver a coherent statement. But “last weekend, in a minor miracle of contemporary curating, New Yorker Robert Storr opened the fifth Santa Fe biennial, titled Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque. Storr’s show, held at a contemporary art center called Site Santa Fe, channels the unnatural elegance of Raphael’s Vatican decor, almost 500 years after the Italian master’s death. At Site’s invitation, Storr has brought together 53 contemporary artists whose works speak to one another, and to how the ancient notion of the grotesque pans out today.”

London’s memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, opened only last month by the Queen, has turned into a disaster. “The £3.6 million fountain, supposed to express Diana’s spirit and love of children, is closed indefinitely over the school summer holidays after three people were hospitalised in accidents while paddling, among them a child who had to be treated for a head injury. It is the third and most serious stoppage, following break downs due to a malfunctioning pump and ‘a rogue leaf’. An urgent investigation is now under way.”

“To just about everyone except the tax authorities, the Jersey City waterfront is a part of New York,” writes Paul Goldberger. “Cesar Pelli’s tower is the anchor of a new city, a kind of Shanghai on the Hudson, that has sprung u over the past decade on what was once industrial land. It is an enormous complex—by far the largest cluster of skyscrapers in the region outside Manhattan.”