Category: visual

Egypt is seeking the loan of artworks that were stolen from Egypt and are now in other museums, for an exhibition next year marking the 100th anniversary of Cairo’s Egypt Museum. “Top of the museum’s list is the ancient Rosetta Stone, which is housed in the British Museum, and a bust of Nefertiti from Germany.”

“Each of the five branches – Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy – has a collection, consisting mostly of paintings and sketches. The Navy’s is the largest, with about 17,000 works, followed by the Army’s 15,000, the Air Force’s 8,800, the Marines with about 8,000 and the Coast Guard with 5,000. They arrange exhibitions at bases and museums.”

More than 1000 artists around the world are participating in the Found Art Project. “They make small artworks — sculpted figures, booklets of drawings, decorated mailing labels, collaged postcards and CDs, sidewalk chalk drawings, even ‘fairy houses’ made by kids and tied to trees — and ‘release them into the wild.’ They leave them at public places such as park benches, library shelves, hospital waiting rooms, grocery bulletin boards and malls. Those who find the artworks can keep them, throw them away or leave them someplace else.”

Australian aboriginal art has recorded record sales at auctions in Sydney this week. Most of the sales – an estimated 70 per cent of the works – were sold to international bidders.

“One of the National Gallery’s most extraordinary paintings, Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife, is at the centre of an increasingly ugly debate between scientists over whether the Flemish artist employed optical projections to help him paint it.”

Goya’s 14 “Black paintings” have delighted viewers for years and are a much prized part of the museum’s collection. But new evidence arises that the paintings may not have been created by the master…

“Most art is unadmittedly competitive; graffiti is nakedly so. Writers vie for prominence of their works, their size, complexity, technique and above all their ubiquity. Elaborate etiquette regulates this rivalry, and competition is joined by overwriting a rival’s work. When I accompanied a TV team to watch the well-known writer, Prime, produce a work on a quasi-official site, the most interesting and shocking act was his first – taking a large roller to the painting already there, entirely blotting it out. If convention governs the terms of rivalry and respect between writers, it also quite rigidly governs the look of graffiti.”

For a long time museums turned a blind eye as to whether the art it was acquiring was attained legally. Now there are myriad laws passed to deter theft of cultural property from one country to another. “What prompted this shift in global attention, when the world often turned a blind eye in the past?” And are these laws doing what they were supposed to do?

London’s National Gallery has introduced a digitizing/printing system that allows visitors to print out copies of artworks in its collection. “The ‘print on demand’ technology will allow visitors to browse through and print in reproduction quality A3, A4 and A5 size prints. By 2005 the gallery hopes to have the whole collection available.”

A former New York City parks commissioner who denied permission for Christo to stage his “Gates” project in Central Park 22 years ago explains why he thinks the project is now a good idea. “Now there is both a time and a place for Christo and his ‘Gates.’ Now they cannot hurt the park or distract us, as they surely would have in 1981, from our duty to preserve and maintain it forever. ‘The Gates’ will visit the park briefly, like the New York City Marathon, which wends through and terminates there, or Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park at the open-air Delacorte Theater. And its colorful, whimsical embrace of the restored landscape will make us stare, laugh, gasp, prance, gawk, and say, to no one in particular, ‘Isn’t the park wonderful. . . . Isn’t New York amazing’.”