Category: visual

“A warehouse fire in Leyton, east London, is estimated to have sent £50m of modern art up in smoke. More than 100 pieces owned by art mogul Charles Saatchi were among those inside. It said the fire appeared to have started in a separate building in the warehouse complex, some distance from the art storage unit.”

“Artists and collectors are preparing to sue Momart, the art storage company, for negligence after the warehouse fire in which hundreds of works were destroyed.”

“In the past two decades, cutting-edge galleries and museums have focused on everything but painting. The halls were chockablock with installations, photo-based work, conceptual art, new media, and digital and video art. But a fundamental shift has taken place. Suddenly painting is allowed to exist again.”

Donald Trump is building a new skyscraper in Chicago, in case you haven’t heard. (Yes, this is the building that will be managed by the winner of a reality TV show.) But given The Donald’s famous preference for outdoing all other buildings in the area, the plans for the tower are raising some eyebrows. Specifically, where the original plan called for building the second-tallest building in the U.S., the latest version would be only the fourth-tallest skyscraper in Chicago. That’s still plenty tall, of course (90 stories, in fact), but it all seems very un-Trump-like.

“Future generations are unlikely to mourn the lost masterpieces of the Saatchi Collection as we mourn the ancient manuscripts that perished when the library at Alexandria burned. But the point is, this generation never produced a great novelist, but it did create some striking works of art.”

“One shudders to imagine what has been lost, and it is likely that major works by leading international as well as British artists will be included in the final tally. But one needs a bit of perspective here: this fire may not be comparable to a world heritage disaster like the flooding of Florence or the sacking of Rome or the grinding of Iraqi archeological sites into gravel by coalition tank-tracks. Unlike Lady Churchill’s burning of Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston, or the demolition of Buddhist statues by the Taliban, this, so far as we know, was an accident. Yet there is something horribly ironic in the likelihood that an out-of-control blaze at a nearby paint factory may have caused the damage.”

Charles Saatchi was still assessing the damage from a warehouse fire that destroyed millions of pounds worth of his art. “A spokeswoman for Saatchi said he was ‘absolutely devastated’ after the works – worth millions of pounds – were lost. She said many were Mr Saatchi’s ‘great personal favourites’ and he considered them ‘irreplaceable in the history of British art’.”

The latest threat to the art world appears to be art enthusiasts armed with sketch pads. This week, a Canadian man was told to stop sketching an ancient Egyptian artifact on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, because the piece in question was on loan from the British Museum, which does not allow sketching. The rogue sketcher helpfully pointed out that the ROM is not, technically, in Great Britain, and therefore allowed to make its own rules, but to no avail.

Vegas casino owner and collector Steve Wynn has regained his appetite for high-end art. “Last week in New York Mr Wynn bought John Singer Sargent’s 1885 portrait Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife. for $8.8m (£4.8m). He plans to hang it in his new casino, Wynn Las Vegas, due to open next year. With a Cézanne and a Renoir, purchased last year for $40.9m and also destined for Las Vegas, it looks like Mr Wynn has recovered his appetite for blue-chip art, and that the market is recovering after disappointing sales in recent years.”

When Michael Klein became the curator of Microsoft’s corporate art collection five years ago, the first thing he did was give the committee that had been picking art for the company the boot. “He’s not above rubbing it in. ‘I took their toy away’.” With a substantial budget and an eye for contemporary art, Klein has emerged as a player in the coporate art collecting world.