Category: visual

British artist Antony Gormley travelled to China and enlisted the help of 300 villagers to create thousands of small figures with only eyes for features. “He and the villagers got stuck in to 100 tonnes of clay. He hoped for 120,000 figures but in five days 192,000 were produced.” Now they’re all arranged to fill up a room – 384,000 eyes all staring at whoever comes to see them.

India’s National Museum in New Delhi has got the go-ahead for a major expansion. “Pending for more than a decade now, this ambitious project will not only provide the museum with much needed space but also result in the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India being shifted to a new location.”

“In a year when many business investments have suffered, the value of art has kept rising. Over recent decades, everyone from Madonna to the Queen Mother discovered that if you invested in a Monet, you could end up making a lot of money. Collecting art today is perhaps more widespread than it has ever been. Once the prerogative of those with inherited wealth, auction houses are enjoying a new and varied clientele, including millionaire rock musicians and actors. Professional collectors will tell you it is addictive: there is always another – better – acquisition on the next horizon. Part of the thrill is the chase.”

Recent tax scandals with art sales, and the auction houses’ price fixing trials damage all of the art world, writes ex-dealer Andre Emmerich. “Art dealing is a business based on trust. People who buy and sell art – whether or not they consider themselves collectors – must have confidence in the person they are doing business with. When one dealer is seen to be dishonest, the public is likely to conclude that most dealers are shady, just as the recent scandals surrounding Enron, Tyco and a few other corporations have affected investor confidence across the board.”

“Why are some scholars aghast at the idea of breaking up Andre Breton’s art collection? “The surrealist wizard was an outstanding art critic as well as a classic prose writer, a major poet, and a perceptive commentator on more general intellectual history. Because of his commitment to the work of leading painters and sculptors, Breton’s art collection ranged from André Derain to Man Ray and Joan Miró, from Giacometti to James Rosenquist, a Pop artist he admired. But he was also a connoisseur of the indigenous arts of the Pacific, especially New Guinea and its neighboring islands, as well as of the Hopi and other Pueblo Indians and the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico. What’s more, his personal friendships extended from the outstanding Parisian poets and artists of his time to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Leon Trotsky–all of whom presented him with signed books and manuscripts.”

Archaeologists fear that George Bush’s war on Iraq and its aftermath could “obliterate much of humanity’s earliest heritage. Heavily looted in the last 10 years, Iraq’s archaeological treasure remains as precarious as the rest of the country’s post-war future. ‘What’s really at stake here is our past. What happened here was the establishment of civilization as we know it – codified religion, bureaucracy, cities, writing. What developed there was modern life – urban existence.”

London’s Royal College of Art needs to expand in the worst way. The college held a design competition, and everything seemed set to go, until preservationists got wind of the plan to demolish some of the RCA’s current 60s-vintage building. “Hold on a sec, says the Twentieth Century Society. Isn’t the RCA listed? You can’t just knock it about willy-nilly…”

Asian art is everywhere in the US these days. “This week 10 or more sizable exhibitions devoted to Asian art are under way or about to open in American museums. The Puritans, who saw the devil’s hand in almost anything foreign, would have run for their torches. But if they saw the U.S. museum calendar these days, they would not have known where to run next. Immigration has produced larger Asian-American communities all over the U.S., which have not only heightened the demand for their cultural patrimony but also produced the prosperous donors and collectors who slap the money down for the shows.”

Art magazines are full of stories about how communication between artists, the art establishment and the public have broken down. That leads to lots of bristling opinions, often without much thought. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel invited a group of “artists, curators, critics, a museum director and his visiting farmer friend, art students and art teachers – one Saturday morning to tackle some tough but fundamental questions about contemporary art. Why does art even matter? What’s ‘good’ or ‘relevant’ anyway? Who gets to say so? Should art be beautiful, expressive, dense with ideas, easily understood, a perfect match for the sofa?”

Louise Blouin MacBain, former CEO of auction house Phillips has bought struggling “Art & Auction” magazine from LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton, with plans to “redesign the 25-year-old magazine and develop a sister newsletter on art market data and investment trends. She plans to nearly double the magazine’s circulation of 22,000 over the next three months by expanding into Germany, France and England.”