Category: visual

“The hottest rumor in the art world — that one of Jackson Pollock’s greatest drip paintings was sold for a staggering $105 million — just won’t go away.”

The decision to close a small but important gallery attached to the Regina (Saskatchewan) Public Library, has “sent waves of shock and dismay through the national visual-arts community. This nationally recognized institution has been a critical thread in the Canadian cultural fabric since 1949.”

Caravaggio experts from around world are gathering in Sydney this weekend to examine works by the master. “The exhibition includes nine works experts agree are genuine Caravaggios and about 50 works by his contemporaries or those influenced by him. Some of those works may turn out to be genuine Caravaggios. ‘There is no definitive view on what is and isn’t Caravaggio’.”

An Australian expert of Caravaggio is miffed that he hasn’t been included in the Caravaggio Confab. Author Peter Robb, who wrote the award-winning fictional biography of Caravaggio, M, will not be taking part. “He has been ‘excluded’ from the line-up, claimed his publisher. He has also been ‘excluded’ as a contributor to the catalogue of essays that accompanies the exhibition. ‘We have here someone … acclaimed around the world as a Caravaggio expert. But here they fly in people from elsewhere when they have someone on hand who is just as much an expert’.”

Australian aboriginal art is getting more and more popular – “the industry is worth $143 (£83m) annually, growing 10% a year.” But along with that popularity there’s a growing problem of fraud, including some recent high profile cases. So the Australian government is setting up a database to help ensure what’s real…and what’s not.

Collector Charles Saatchi – long one of Damien Hirst’s biggest collectors, has sold a dozen of the artist’s works back to Hirst’s gallery. “A spokeswoman for Mr Saatchi refused to comment on a report in The Times that he and Hirst had been in ‘a feud’. She said visitors to the Mr Saatchi’s London gallery could still see famous Hirst pieces such as the pickled shark.”

Evidently Saatchi’s sale to Hirst signals a truce between the two. “There was speculation last night that Hirst had reclaimed arguably his most powerful work, A Thousand Years, a rotting cow’s head on which flies hatch only to perish moments later on an electric trap, which had some delicate souls retching when it was first shown at the Royal Academy. The installation has been missing from the Saatchi gallery since September, as has One Little Piggy Went to Market, another example of Hirst’s taste for the grotesque.”

Archaeologists in Rome are dismayed that an important mosaic from the 4th Centuery is to be covered up and buried underneath a parking lot. Along with the mosaic, Italian archaeologists found “traces of warehouses, workshops and offices, along with numerous coins, lamps and amphoras, the tall, two-handled jars that were used to transport oil, wine and garum, a salty, fish-based sauce popular in the ancient world.”

The finalists for the World Trade Center memorial can all trace influences from Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial. “As successful as Ms. Lin’s Vietnam memorial was, the eight finalists prove that it has become a crutch, rather than an inspiration, for American memorial architecture. Indeed, Ms. Lin’s aesthetic presence in the plans speaks volumes about the state of memorial design in America. On one hand, the continued presence of Lin-esque minimalism in American monuments points to the long-awaited emergence of an American memorial style; on the other, the finalists’ failure to move beyond the threshold she set more than two decades ago points to a severe lack of vision in the way Americans build memorials to tragedy.”

The Statue of Liberty has been closed to the public since the 9/11 attacks, although most Americans are probably unaware of that fact. The statue won’t be able to open again until $5 million of security upgrades are in place, but the money has yet to be found. Several large corporations have pledged the majority of what’s needed, but the city of New York is still struggling to attract donors to round out the required funds. Even with all the new security measures in place, the days of tourists being allowed to climb up the inside of Lady Liberty are likely at an end.