Category: visual

“The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the 88-year-old niece and heir of an Austrian Jewish art collector can pursue her lawsuit against the Austrian government and its national art gallery for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt that belonged to her family before the Nazi takeover.”

Coventional wisdom has it that Angkor Watt was destroyed by a seige in 1431. But researchers now believe that the city was done in by something much more mundane. “They created ecological problems for themselves and they either didn’t see it until it was too late or they couldn’t solve it even when they could see it.”

“Sotheby’s is facing a $1.8 billion lawsuit from Holocaust survivors who claim it has recklessly trafficked in works of art stolen from Jews during the Second World War. They allege Sotheby’s helped buy and sell looted masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian, El Greco, Monet, Van Gogh and others since the 1970s.”

There’s been much hype about Larry Gagosian’s new gallery space in London. “The Gagosian Gallery proves to be a modest creation, housed in a former garage in Britannia Street, a rats’ alley smelling of diesel and urine, scuttling across the Metropolitan and Circle underground lines as they rattle between Farringdon and King’s Cross-St Pancras. Behind the gaunt facade, Larry Gagosian’s architects, Caruso St John, best known for their New Art Gallery, in Walsall, which opened in 2000, have opened up bright, cavernous, concrete-floored, top-lit white spaces. These are particularly refined white spaces; they have something of a religious air about them…”

Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar is building five new museums and is serious about collecting for them. “A team of London agents working for the Sheikh bought 350 of the top lots in last months’ Islamic sales, spending well in excess of £15 million. The objects are all destined for the Museum of Islamic Art under construction in Doha to the designs of I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect coaxed out of retirement by Sheikh Saud. With its completion scheduled for 2006, the Islamic museum will be the first of the five to open, and the Sheikh‘s determination to buy the very best for its collection is having an extraordinary effect on the Islamic art market.”

In 2002, the FBI planted a bug in the construction shed at the site of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York. The bug resulted in a 61-count indictment against 24 people including “fifteen family associates; and a number of fellows from locals 14 and 15 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, an AFL-CIO affiliate, have been indicted on charges that include racketeering, extortion, loan-sharking, and all the trimmings. “

“A scientist says he may have found remains of the lost city of Atlantis. Satellite photos of southern Spain reveal features on the ground appearing to match descriptions made by Greek scholar Plato of the fabled utopia.”

An exhibition in a museum in Wisconsin reveals the secret behind one of Harry Houdini’s great magic tricks. Contemporary magicians are not amused…

The London warehouse stuffed with BritArt that went up in flames last week wwas next to another storage building that had been burgled just before the fire, say police. “One of the smaller units where the fire actually began appears to have suffered a burglary, but it is yet to be established if the fire was deliberately started.”

“The rise of the Chinese art buyer has been swift and spirited. Five years ago private art collectors on the mainland were virtually unheard of. Now, driven by plenty of money and a patriotic rush to return treasures smuggled away over the centuries, Chinese collectors are bidding here as well as in New York and London.”