Category: visual

Los Angeles is about to get a major new Gehry – the Disney Hall. “For 50 years it’s been the world’s archetypical sprawling, privatised, centreless city of gated suburbs, fast food, fast, flashy architecture, malls and freeways; a city in which you need never sully your toes by touching a sidewalk. But now that Beijing, Shenzhen and the North Circular are out-LA-ing LA, LA has decided to become Paris. It’s been quietly turning its downtown into a proper city centre, like it used to be 80 years ago, before the car screwed it up. It’s introduced old-fashioned public space without security guards, lofts, pedestrian (gasp) boulevards, and posh, properly public buildings such as Rafael Moneo’s masterly Roman Catholic cathedral, and, the linchpin, the Disney Concert Hall.”

A thief has been entering important libraries in Europe and cutting out pages of rare volumes. “Such is the concern that Scotland Yard has just included him on its ‘most wanted’ list alongside men wanted for questioning about murders, sex attacks and gangland crime. He is in effect Britain’s most wanted art thief.”

A museum director in Denmark has been aquitted in a case that charged cruelty to animals. “The exhibit at the Trapholt modern art museum in 2000 featured live goldfish swimming in a blender. Visitors were given the possibility of pressing the button to transform the fish into a runny liquid. Artist Marco Evaristti, the Chilean-born bad boy of the Danish art scene, said at the time that he wanted to force people to ‘do battle with their conscience’. Two goldfish died after two visitors pressed the button, and the Danish association Friends of Animals filed a complaint against the artist as well as the director of the museum, Peter Meyer, for cruelty to animals.”

The owner of the cafe that Van Gogh frequented wants to buy one of the master’s paintings and hang it there. He “recently negotiated to buy ‘Field and poppies’, painted just two weeks before Van Gogh?s death. For most of the past 50 or so years it has been hidden away in a Swiss private collection. The audacious plan is to raise the $27 million in just 30 months, by selling shares for $75 each. Under this scheme, donors will own a tiny share in the painting, which is to belong to the non-profitmaking Institut Van Gogh. A discreet camera will be mounted in the attic room, enabling shareholders to view the painting in ‘real time’ on the internet. It will require over 300,000 people to take up the offer.”

Art pillaging in Afghanistan hasn’t slowed any since the Americans came. “For decades, war and gnawing poverty made Afghanistan fertile ground for thieves and smugglers. Looters have cleared the shelves in Afghanistan’s museums and left deep hollows in the earth of its ancient sites, where Buddhist, Greek, Zoroastrian and early Islamic civilizations once flourished. Yet even with the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai in place and an international community eager to support cultural preservation, large-scale looting of Afghanistan’s archeological sites goes on.”

An emerging trend in the art market? “It was evident that the market for Contemporary art – made from about 1945 to the present – continues to rise. It seems to be only a matter of time until Contemporary art auctions routinely outshine those of the longtime market leader, Impressionist and Modern art.”

“Thousands of antiquities missing from the Iraq National Museum have been found but not returned because citizens won’t hand them over to either their American occupiers or remnants of the hated former government, U.S. investigators say.”

Is the art market getting ready to tumble? Recent sales were good – but some say the good prices were luck. “So far the art market has defied the doomsayers who predicted a collapse at the top end. Perhaps it is true that art, because of the emotional attachment, is the last thing the financially embarrassed rich will sell. But some believe that it is a only matter of timing.”

The Art Loss Register’s Sarah Jackson on recovering art stolen by the Nazis: “In the past, provenance was important to establish value. Today, provenance is taking center stage because of liability. The law is changing slowly, but remorselessly, in favor of the victim. Once there is a known Holocaust survivor of a known work of art, it becomes virtually unsalable. For commercial art dealers, the choice is stark, because the buyers will choose an alternative that is not a tainted work of art.”

Has modern photography changed the face of architecture? Increasingly, it seems as if every new building that goes up in a big city is designed to make a great poster when photographed from that perfect angle. With the rise of photography as an art, the scale and substance of architecture changed forever, but the jury is still out on which form was more influential on the other.