Category: visual

Iraq’s official portraitists are out of work. “In a good year, 20 portraits of Saddam Hussein could earn an artist £1,200 – a small fortune in a country crippled by two decades of war and economic sanctions. But now that the best-paying customer in town is fresh out of commissions, his absence is leading to a plummeting market in presidential iconography; what is a Saddam portraitist to do?”

“In the past two years – as flying the flag on homes, public buildings, opera houses and (momentarily) central Baghdad has become an American enthusiasm – Johns has emerged as the last hope, or maybe the fig leaf, of the ambivalent flag-waver. When a video of the concert for New York after the World Trade Centre attacks was released in this country, Johns’s Flag was on the cover. When New York museums wanted to match the patriotic mood, they displayed not just any flag, but Johns’s flag: Three Flags (1958), a version owned by the Whitney. Ambivalence is his thing. There are few works of art quite so uncertain, so confounding – not just in its values and meaning, but even in its status as an object or a sign – as Jasper Johns’s Flag, made in its most famous version in 1954-55.”

The new Lexmark European art prize has had more than 2000 entries in its first year. “The contest – equal in prize money to the Turner – has been set up to overthrow the influence of conceptual and installation art and ‘bring back painting’.”

The art restorer hired to clean Michelangelo’s “David” for its 500th birthday, has walked off the job, protesting the “modern” cleaning technique chosen by the director of the statue’s gallery. “The gallery director who led an 11-year health check of the statue before it was decided to go ahead with the restoration, wants it to be cleaned using a modern ‘wet’ technique involving small amounts of water. Agnese Parronchi, the restorer, believes that any method other than careful dry brushing to remove the engrained dirt could further erode the protective coating.”

A”rt collectors and dealers say they are already getting queries about artifacts looted from Iraq’s museums, and the FBI said today at least one suspected piece had been seized at an American airport.”

During the Second World War, Allied governments made protecting Europe’s art treasures a priority. It was a policy that paid many benefits. So why did the Americans not have a similar policy to help protect Iraq’s culture?

Why shouldn’t Jake and Dinos Chapman’s much publicised modifications – or defacements, depending on your point of view – to a £25,000 set of prints of Goya’s ‘The Disasters’ be considered vandalism? “There’s no reason why they should work on the real thing apart from vanity on their part. I find it objectionable that they should, as they have consistently done, compare themselves to Goya, because he was a deeply serious artist and The Disasters of War is one of the most powerful commentaries on war ever created.”

The Barnes Collection, outside Philadelphia, is one of the America’s great collections. “The Barnes collection, all 8,000 pieces of it, is like a multilayer cake. The masterpiece paintings that traveled around the world between 1993 and 1995 are the creamy, highly visible icing. Underneath, less readily noticed, other specialized groups of objects produce a fascinating and incomparable texture. These subcollections are themselves of splendid quality and variety. Not only are they aesthetically stimulating, but they also help to create the distinctive displays, called ‘ensembles,’ that make the Barnes unique.”

US forces in Iraq include two “combat artists,” “part of a tradition dating back to the American Revolution, charged with going into war to capture its ‘essence’. Unlike war photographers today, combat artists are in no way restricted by the military. Their orders: Go forth and do good. That’s it. Absolutely nothing is dictated, from the medium to the subject to the tone.”

Art about war is difficult. Passions of artist and viewer have to be negotiated, and the symbolism can be complicated. “With so few works considered truly enduring, is it possible that the power, ugliness and odd beauty of war is simply inexpressible, even in art? If it can be expressed, then who is qualified? Do artists have to see first-hand what they translate into art?”