Category: visual

There are still two years to go before Sir Timothy Clifford leaves his post as director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland. But already a search is on for his successor…

Costco has begun selling fine art in its stores and on its website. And the paintings are selling. “Previously, the company tried offering lower-priced art reproductions generated by computer, but it took them off the Web site because they did not sell. The art being sold is priced from $450 to $15,000, and averages $1,500.”

Curious about who’s been chosen for this year’s Whitney Biennial? New York Magazine’s got a gallery of work online by artists chosen for the biennale…

A group of Iraqi museum prefessionals will be coming to the US to study conservation and restoration techniques. “Scholars at the Smithsonian have been discussing for months how to assist their colleagues, especially those at the Iraq National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, which was ransacked after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship last April. ‘The best way is through a practicum, where we can help establish practical methods of conservation, registration and preservation’.”

An ancient Egyptian stone stele unearthed a decade ago should have, under Egyptian law, “been turned over to the government, a recovered shard of the national patrimony. Instead, something considerably more commonplace happened. It became an outlaw. Quietly, it passed into the global antiquities market. Five years later, cleansed of its illicit origins, it emerged in New York as a rich man’s prize, in the foyer of a Fifth Avenue apartment.”

Cleveland has $1.5 billion to spend on building schools. “If ever there were an opportunity for excellence in architecture and planning – and a chance for Cleveland to distinguish itself nationally – this is it. But with the district ready to break ground soon for the first four new schools in the city in more than 20 years, the forecast for design is discouraging.”

“For most of the past half-century, Houston was the proud avatar of freebooting suburban sprawl. You could do anything you wanted in Houston, as long as you did it as God intended, behind the wheel of your car. Downtown sprouted a forest of new office towers in the 1970s, but the old business district along and near Main Street fell into disuse.” In the past seven years, however, Houston has transformed itself…

Recent sales of contemporary art at London’s Sotheby’s set new records…

“Once upon a time, young artists started their careers with a single gallery in their home country. Scoring international representation was a consecration that occurred only once the artist had an established reputation and a proven market. But that old model has been pulverised. Today, both in Europe and America, artists only a few years out of school commonly have some combination of several European galleries, dealers on both US coasts, and perhaps something more exotic, like representation in Japan or Latin America. Yet in the same way that a college degree has devolved from being a symbol of high achievement to a minimum requirement for decent employment, having multiple international galleries is now just an early step toward art world success.”

“On Friday the National Gallery in London learnt that Raphael’s gooey Madonna of the Pinks was probably a forgery; meanwhile the National Gallery of Ireland spent the week rebutting accusations that its precious Caravaggio, a moody nocturne representing Christ’s arrest, was a second-hand Flemish copy, inferior to an original unearthed by a dealer in Rome. The reattribution wounded Irish national pride and the religious conviction that underpins it.”