Art dealers are just interested in making money, right? Earning their livings off the sweat of artists. Yet art dealers have made enormoug contributions to the history of art. “Over and over you find that interest in a new or unexplored area of art history in Britain was dealer- led. Like any profession, art dealing indeed has its rogues and scoundrels. But far more dealers are cultivated men and women who adhere to the highest professional standards. It is high time the contribution dealers make to art history was acknowledged and celebrated.”
Category: visual
Australia’s Blockbuster Sale
“One of Australia’s most prominent art collectors, John Schaeffer, has been forced to put his $30 million mansion and his entire collection of paintings and sculpture up for sale. Christie’s claims next month’s Sydney auction of hundreds of art works will be the biggest sale in Australia in decades.”
Help For UK Museums?
The British Parliament debates the country’s level of support for museums. Museusm are under budget pressure, and a change in the tax code will only make it worse. “It does seem rather odd to me that there is this shift away from museums in favour of other sorts of public expenditure … at a time when so much more is being demanded of museums and galleries.”
The Art Of Art Damage
Flies, mold, pets – artwork gets damaged in many mysterious (or mundane) ways. “Fine-art insurers say that most damage to art occurs during transport. But art is also damaged in other, more unusual ways—by destructive pets, careless storage, and improper cleaning methods.”
Doubts Increase About Missing “Cezanne”
Cezanne experts are voicing more skepticism that a painting stolen last weekend in New South Wales was an authentic Cezanne. “Claiming the work appeared to have been painted in England in the 1920s,” one expert says owner John Opit was “suffering from a case of ‘mythomania’. ‘I think it’s just a case of the myth getting bigger than the man’.”
Debating The Visual Culture
“A disturbing though little publicized movement is afoot in American education to transform the study of art into what is termed Visual Culture Studies. It seeks to broaden the proper sphere of art education–the visual arts–to include every kind of visible artifact. In their rush to embrace Visual Culture Studies, art teachers who have been immersed in postmodern culture, and in the postmodernist work that now passes for art, have lost sight of the salient qualities of works of visual art. As a result, their interpretations are prone to error, blurring major differences not only between painting, sculpture, and other types of imagery but also between works of visual art and artifacts that are not images at all.”
Wrong Building, Wrong Place, Wrong Time
How is it that a new £34 million community sports center was so badly planned that it had to be closed down? “if you seek political hubris, overarching architectural ambition, millennial folly and evidence of the decline of local authority expertise in one building, this is where you should come. This is the sad yet instructive story of the municipal swimming pool that sank.”
Frozen Art At The North Pole
An unusual village of ice and snow scultures has risen in northern Finland. Teams of architects and artists have created it, and the project’s curator “believes the show has spawned technical and artistic breakthroughs in what can be done with snow and ice. But more daringly, he hopes to demonstrate that artists and architects can work together in an environment, on a scale and with a material alien to most of them.”
Iraqi Art To Go On Tour
Plans are being made for a world tour of Iraqi art treasures. “The travelling show, provisionally entitled ‘The gold of Nimrud’ is being planned as a blockbuster exhibition that will include hundreds of Assyrian objects from Iraqi museums. It will embark on a three- to five-year international tour beginning in early 2005. If all goes according to plan, the show will visit eight to 12 cities in Europe, the US, and Asia.”
The Barnes In Limbo
The judge considering whether or not the Barnes Collection should be allowed to move to Philadelphia has put the brakes on the proceedings. On January 29, “The judge said he was ‘hamstrung by the total lack of hard numbers in evaluating these proposals,’ calling the construction price only a ‘guesstimate.’ There had, he said, been no architectural plans, feasibility studies or proformas projecting the Philadelphia project’s success or the costs of maintaining three separate locations.”