Category: visual

A film purported to be footage of artist Vincent Van Gogh is a fake, says experts. After investigations, the festival organisation in the Netherlands that planned to show the movie – Autour de Vincent, “confirmed the footage was a hoax designed to gain publicity for the weekend event. The Brabant provincial government was aware of the stunt and had partially funded it.”

A British artist plans to use plastic surgery to graft a human ear grown in a biotech lab onto his forearm. “Even in an art world used to the antics of Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, the Extra Ear project will cause upset. Many critics of unusual modern art say a fringe of the movement is caught in an ‘arms race’ of stunts that have little artistic merit but plenty of shock value. Last month a French artist cut off his own finger with an axe and donated it to a museum.”

The British Museum has categorically rejected sending the Parthenon Marbles to Greece for the Olympic Games. “Having for years resisted discussing the issue, the museum’s new director, Neil McGregor, told the Greek minister of culture that, as one of a handful of ‘universal, world institutions’, the British Museum was the best place for them.”

Is Daniel Libeskind getting edged out of the WTC project. No, writes Justin Davidson. Hiring Santiago Calatrava to design part of Libeskind’s vision is inspired. “If Libeskind is the great enshriner of memory, Calatrava is a poet of forward motion. His best buildings seem to be poised in the instant before taking flight. Straining yet serene, as fast and frozen as a comic book swoosh, they look like icons of weightlessness. Almost a century ago, a group of Italian artists-ideologues who called themselves the Futurists published a polemic in which they declared ‘that the splendor of the world has been enriched with new forms of beauty, the beauty of speed.’ The Futurists approved of little, but they might have loved Calatrava.”

“The U.S. Senate recently authorized the start-up of a national museum of African-American history and culture that would be part of the Smithsonian Institution and located on the Mall. This seems a very good thing for our nation, although no one has mentioned that a separate museum might seem to replicate the very segregation that the museum is meant to decry. Wouldn’t matters be better served in providing a ‘true’ picture of American history and in understanding African-American ‘contributions’ to American culture, as the official cant goes, if the story was fused with the main national narrative?”

What artwork is actually missing from the Iraq National Museum? “American and Iraqi investigators last week released a ‘most wanted’ list showing 30 priceless antiquities still missing from the museum’s main collection, along with some 13,000 other pieces. (No, they’re not printed up as playing cards.) Over the past couple of months, Iraqi museum staff, experts at the British Museum in London and U.S. investigators, have discussed the thefts in detail with Newsweek reporters. While some of the picture is still vague and the true culprits still can’t quite be identified, the fog is slowly lifting.”

Teenage art gangs seem to be hip right now. “These days the very youngest and hippest American collectives all seem to come from Rhode Island, namely groups such as Forcefield and Dearraindrop. These are apparently two distinctly different organisations who happen to share the same provincial bohemia and a not dissimilar anarchic aesthetic of extreme visual and sonic overload; what’s more their combined ages probably add up to just one mid-career abstract painter.”

How’s the Milwaukee Art Museum doing since opening its new Calatrava building last year? “Our annual expenses since the Calatrava addition opened have gone up by about $3 million – and so has income, by a like amount. Membership is up from 13,000 members before the expansion to 30,000 now; admissions are running at 360,000 visitors a year, or double levels before the expansion; annual donations and a successful museum store account for the rest.”

“A gold bar at the National Museum of American History, long thought to be a sample from the 19th century California Gold Rush, is a fake, according to a well-known geologist. Bob Evans, the scientist who examined the five-ounce bar, said the ingot is indeed gold but was not made in 1857, the date stamped on it. He said it was probably made in the 1950s and was purchased unknowingly by Josiah K. Lilly, the pharmaceutical industry executive who willed his enormous collection of gold coins to the Smithsonian in 1968… the museum will move the two bars into a section of the coin exhibit that deals with counterfeiting.”

Museums are not generally in the habit of acquiring stolen goods intentionally. But in the long, shady history of public and private art acquisition, countless works of art may come to a museum with little in the way of a paper trail. Most museums accept such works without question, and proceed to claim them as having been legitimately acquired. But with the drive to ‘repatriate’ artworks looted by Nazis gathering steam, and governments fighting over ownership of cultural artifacts, museums are increasingly under pressure to take an active role in stemming the unchecked flow of stolen antiquities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently on the horns of just such a dilemma.