Category: visual

Foundations want to sell a Lucien Freud and a Turner painting in a New Brunswick gallery – together the paintings could sell for $30 million. The foundations say they’re helping the gallery. “When asked then, why virtually the entire board of the Fredericton gallery resigned, he replied: “Clearly they don’t agree on the strategy.” The strategy, he explained, would be for the foundations to sell art that has been on long-term loan to the gallery — art they believe they own and that needs to be removed from a city of 48,000 and, in the words of one Canadian foundation member, made “more visible to the world.” From these proceeds “[we] would give [the Beaverbrook gallery] a substantial donation” to help offset what Lord Beaverbrook calls its “substantial deficit.” “We’re trying to be helpful to them,” observed Lord Beaverbrook, “but it’s not always easy to do that, it seems.”

“After several years of seeing stocks and shares take a battering, more than one million Londoners have invested in art instead, researchers have found. Last year the capital spent more than £523 million on art. A quarter of Londoners questioned in a survey said they had bought into “alternative investments”, such as art and antiques.”

Should the Barnes Foundation sell off a valuable country estate in order to raise money? “I don’t think anyone relishes the thought of selling assets. But, do you abandon a gallery and art education program… or a farm house that [Barnes] used on weekends for a few years and the sale of which would save his trust?”

A Danish artist has painted an iceberg bright red. “Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti mixed 3,000 litres of the red dye with sea water and used three firehoses, two icebreakers and a 20-person crew to spray a floating, 900-metre-square chunk of ice, located off the coast of western Greenland.”

Iraq’s culture minister says the country’s National Museum could open within a year, so that Iraqis have a chance to see the museum’s artwork before it is sent on worldwide tour. “The reopening of the museum will take place within a year to show Iraqis the treasures of Nimrod, which the people have never seen because Saddam Hussein hid them.” Progress on reopening the looted damaged museum has been slow because of security concerns.

So the art market has rebounded, and sales are strong. Only one problem – there isn’t enough quality art to satisfy the demand.

“Two foundations set up by the late Lord Beaverbrook are claiming ownership of two paintings at a New Brunswick art gallery named in his honour, saying they’re too valuable to remain there. The Montreal-based Canadian Beaverbrook Foundation and its British counterpart have an appraisal report from Sotheby’s auction house that suggests two unnamed works among the 200 in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton should be displayed elsewhere.” But representatives of the gallery don’t want to give up the paintings, which they say were a gift to the province, and accuse the Beaverbrook estate of trying to reclaim the paintings because the family is in financial trouble.

Ever since Frank Gehry unveiled his design for the reinvented Art Gallery of Ontario, the plans have been under attack from community groups and preservationists concerned about cost overruns and the detruction of the existing AGO. Gehry is not known as a fiery figure, but the piling on appears to have gotten his hackles up. He hotly disputes the notion, advanced by a prominent columnist, that his projects frequently come in massively over budget, inviting the writer to produce numbers to back up his claim. And as to the charge that his plans would wipe out a popular sculpture atrium added to the AGO in 1993, Gehry claims that his design will leave a large part of the atrium intact, and that the overall expansion will enhance the space.

“The cult of obscurity that surrounded architect Zaha Hadid hardly distinguished her from her colleagues in the architectural avant-garde—or, for that matter, in the artistic or literary ones. For decades, architects like Hadid and their champions in the academy have discussed architecture in writing where jargon operates as a kind of code, keeping amateurs confused and thus, for the most part, comfortably out of the way. But Hadid took that disdain a step further: She walled off her work visually, too.”

This year’s Beck’s Futures Prize show is up. “The 10 shortlisted artists will split £40,000, while the overall winner with get an additional £20,000. There is a rumour going round the gallery that if he wins, Andrew Cross will spend the prize money on six and a half miles of model rail track. “No,” he says. “I’m going to buy a Saab.”