Category: visual

Restorations of the gardens around Versailles have been completed. But a feud between restoration firms competing for restoration work inside the palace has delayed work on the Hall of Mirrors. “The job, which includes repairs to the paintings, 450 windows, and gold-leaf and stucco work, is scheduled to begin next month and to finish in 2007.”

As always there was a vast array of vastly different stock, such a plethora of objects one eventually begins to doubt the supposed ‘rarity’ of any art. The most expensive work on offer at the fair was a De Kooning at Richard Gray for $12.5 million, followed by a Bacon triptych at Marlborough ($10 million) and a Munch at Mitchell Innes & Nash for $7 million, none of these had sold by the weekend. The cheapest was a Richard Serra “Stop Bush” poster on show at Galerie m Bochum which can be downloaded for free

A hundred years ago, descendents of Massachusetts settlers commemorated their battles with local native Americans with stone markers. Now the local history museum is covering up those markers. “The aim is to drape the rhetoric of the 1870s and 1880s, when the museum was established, with a more modern version of events in the late 1600s and early 1700s that no longer denigrates one-time foes. ‘It was hard for me and other members of the staff to rationalize the words. Phrases like ‘bloodthirsty savages’ are hurtful to people’.”

“Three tattooed Maori warrior heads that have been hidden away in a Glasgow museum vault for up to a century are to be returned to their native New Zealand. The somewhat grisly relics have never been on display and have lain in storage in Kelvingrove art gallery and museum.”

The US military has set up a military base right in the middle of the ancient site of Babylon – an extensive archaeological site. Originally sent to protect the site, the base has done “permanent” damage to a valuable piece of cultural heritage.

A group is suing Germany for $18 billion, claiming that the country is “making money by keeping artworks stolen from Holocaust victims. The legal action, by the Association of Holocaust Victims for Restitution of Artworks and Masterpieces (AHVRAM), is a first step against several countries.”

Hicham Aboutaam, the co-owner of Phoenix Ancient Art, has pleaded guilty to falsifying documents concerning the origins of a silver drinking vessel that he later resold for nearly a million dollars. Phoenix Ancient Art is the same company which just sold an ancient bronze sculpture thought to be the work of Praxiteles to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“The Bactrian gold — 20,600 pieces of gold jewelry, funeral ornaments and personal belongings from 2,000-year-old burial mounds — has emerged from hiding intact, a shimmering example of the heights scaled by ancient Afghan culture. For years the gold was feared stolen, lost or melted down by the different forces that seized power over more than 20 years of war.”

A UK charity is attempting to catalog every work of publically owned art in the Great Britain. “The nation’s collection is one of the richest and broadest in the world. But many works hang unregarded in public buildings from hospitals to council offices to fire stations. More still, in some counties up to 90% of public pictures, are in storage in regional museums, often in terrible conditions. Not only are they unavailable to the public which owns them, but they can also be inaccessible to academics, with individual museums lacking the means to put out catalogues.”

Architecturally speaking, Toronto has always been an exceedingly ‘beige’ city. But with countless cultural organizations planning and executing new cutting-edge buildings, the city is poised to emerge fom the shadow of Montreal and become one of North America’s most architecturally diverse and fascinating metropolises.