Category: visual

“The Iraq Museum plans to hold a one-day exhibition Thursday — its first since the outbreak of war more than three months ago. The show is designed to ease the minds of those who worried that the museum’s collections had been devastated by a frenzied, two-day looting spree in mid-April while American troops were fighting to secure the city.”

A new exhibition features chess sets made by artists in the 19th and 20th Centuries. “There are 19 sets on display, each one set out to illustrate a move in an apocryphal game played between Napoleon, playing as white, and General Bertrand on St Helena in 1820. Five new sets by contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama and Maurizio Cattelan mark out the climax of the game.”

What should hosting an Olympic Games mean to a city? “Many Olympic cities have promised regeneration and few have delivered. From the Foro Italico in Rome to Homebush in Sydney, the world is littered with desultory, underpopulated Olympic zones that were once the subject of some planner’s proud boast. If the Olympics automatically gave its sites a boost, then Wembley, where the games were held in 1948, would be the hottest place in north London. This time, London has to mean it, and it has to deliver.”

In one of the great libel trials of the 19th Century, James Whistler sued the great art critic John Ruskin, author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, over a review that dismissed him as a fraud. “There had been rows about modern art before. But none that are so uncannily familiar, none that speak our critical language in all its odd mixture of the extreme and the banal. It is easy for us to laugh, with the condescension of posterity, at the sexual hysteria of French journalists distressed by Manet’s Olympia (1863). But Ruskin’s denunciation of Whistler is the template for a thousand denunciations to come: it is the definitive rejection of modern art as fraud, and every subsequent diatribe against beds, bricks or the lights going on and off reproduces it.”

“With pets holding court as favored members of the family, pup art has become big business. Dozens of artists advertise their talents on the Internet. Pet parodies in the style of famous artists depict everything from a cut-up geometric Picasso beagle to a tabby frozen in Edvard Munch’s “Scream”. Getting your pooch’s picture with Santa has been popular for years at vets’ offices and animal shelters, and photography studios report a brisk business in non-human shoots. Given this flurry of furry activity, museum-quality custom paintings were inevitable…”

Art forgery is usually a dangerous business, but Christophe Petyt has turned it into a wildly profitable business. “At 32, he is the world’s leading dealer in fake masterpieces, a man whose activities provoke both admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the painting and for as little as £1,000 he will deliver you a copy so perfect that even the original artist would struggle to tell the difference.”

Back in the 1970s, an Australian farm-implement and hardware company needed something to put on the walls of its headquarters, and began to make a project of acquiring museum-quality art. The company now owns better than 600 works, and last year, it mounted an exhibition to allow the public a glimpse of what the company’s execs see every day. “National interest was so great when the exhibition was originally limited to the Art Gallery of Western Australia last year that it was decided to tour it nationally. The paintings will be on the road for the next 2 years, visiting all states.”

“It sounds like a marriage made in heaven – one of the world’s greatest paintings housed in one of the world’s great art galleries. By the end of the year, the marriage will be consummated. The celebrations will be held in Melbourne at the opening of the $160 million renovation of the National Gallery of Victoria’s St Kilda Road headquarters. The painting, Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra, will have pride of place. The freshly restored work will hang at the end of one of the new, high-ceilinged galleries that have been installed in the former open courtyards.”

“A mathematical formula is allowing Italian researchers to recompose one of the most complicated jigsaw puzzles in history: the fragmented 15th century frescoes which once decorated the Ovetari Chapel of the Church of the Eremitani at Padua.” The fragments were photographed, digitized, and are now being painstakingly reconstructed on computers, with the aid of “‘circular harmonics’ — mathematical formulas that are able to identify and ‘retain the memory’ of the piece’s orientation.”