Category: visual

A Jackson Pollock painting from 1949 fetched $11.65 million at auction this week, a record for a post-World War II American artist. The total take from the auction, which also inlcuded works by Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol, was more than $102 million, also a record.

The Brooklyn Museum is trying to better connect itself with its Brooklyn community. Hilton Kramer takes offence: “All of this is a ghastly reminder, if we need one, that when arts institutions invoke “the community” rather than the public at large as their primary constituency, you can be certain that something crucial—like, say, artistic standards—is being sacrificed on the altar of identity politics, in this case the politics of race and class. What follows from this descent into political accommodation is a surrender of the institution to a mind-set guaranteed to render it innocuous, if not something worse.”

Charles Jencks’ “wriggly earth bank set around three sinuous ponds, which transformed a flat patch of scrubby grass in front of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, has won the £100,000 Gulbenkian museums prize, the richest single prize in the arts. The £380,000 design, Landform is based on chaos theory. Loved by visitors almost to destruction in less than two years, parts have had to be returfed already. Jencks’s inspiration was La Grande Jatte, Seurat’s painting of a Paris park.”

Georgian police in Tblisi have “discovered a painting by the famous German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder stolen from the Georgian State Museum of Fine Arts 10 years ago.”

The art market is hot for investors. And experts are saying that art as an investment is proving to be sound strategy. Partly this is “due to the highly variable returns of other asset classes over the last few years, Wall Street’s fascination with alternative investments, and the excitement that accompanies record-setting auction prices.” And, “academics and economists, armed with newly mined historical data, have demonstrated that including art in an investment portfolio can yield important diversification benefits thanks to the low correlation between art returns and those of stocks, bonds, and other traditional asset classes.”

Why have the pictures from Abu Ghraib provoked such a big reaction? “The illusory immediacy of the medium no doubt accounts for some of its power. The event depicted may have taken place minutes or years ago; and yet each time we look at a photographic image it’s as though we are actually there at the moment the shutter was clicked. By capturing the light of the past and embedding it into the chemical fabric of its own production, photographs offer convincing, “scientific proof” that something happened or once existed. Unless we actually see a picture of a female reservist holding a naked Iraqi man on a leash, most of us would have difficulty believing that it had taken place, and those in charge would have a far easier time denying it.”

“A Russian-made waxwork of Adolf Hitler exhibited by a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad has caused a storm of protest in Berlin, where city politicians said the figure could attract the wrong kind of visitor.”

A $1.9 million lawsuit against New Orleans’new museum of Southern art accuses its founder of using Louisiana taxpayer money to build a private museum on public land, sidestepping the state’s conflict-of-interest laws and illegally naming it after himself. The museum opened last August and has about 2,700 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and pieces of pottery. Museum officials say Ogden donated more than 1,200 of the works came his personal collection. However, the suit also says Ogden uses his relationship with the museum for his own financial gain.”

James Russell is having difficulty getting his head around paying $104 million for a painting. “Here’s how the Picasso auction sale fits in terms I understand: 2.6 “Boy With a Pipe” paintings will buy you one Disney Concert Hall. 1.2 will get you the Santiago Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. About 8 “Boys” will buy you the Museum of Modern Art’s addition/renovation by the renowned architect Yoshio Taniguchi that will open later this year. MoMA would probably only have to deaccession the Picasso once to complete their fundraising.”

What makes one painting worth $104 million and another only a few thousand dollars? It’s certainly not for how looks hanging on the wall. Here’s a primer on the valuation of art and who plays the art acquisition game.