Category: visual

An investigation into the theft of tens of thousands of objects from the Australian Museum suggests that many of the artifacts may have been stolen from the museum’s mail room. “The Independent Commission Against Corruption, which has recovered a ‘substantial amount’ of items pilfered from the mammals collection, is looking at the possibility that a steal-to-order racket, with foreign links, has been operating at the museum and some zoos for years.”

Vienna’s Albertina Museum has just reopened after a $100 million facelift to rave reviews. “Although this tradition-bound Viennese institution houses one of the world’s premier collections of graphic art, spanning artists from Michelangelo to Egon Schiele, it has never generated much public interest.”

In a series of raids, Australian police have recovered thousands of items stolen from the Australian Museum. “The items include precious skulls, bones, rare species in jars of formaldehyde and even a stuffed gorilla.” A former museum worker is being questioned, and thousands of items have been returned to the museum. They were stolen from the museum between 1996 and 1998.

New York Larry Gagosian is jousting with the Internal Revenue Service on two front. He’s is under investigation for his dealings with tax cheat Sam Waksal. And he’s suing the IRS over tax claims the government is making over three painting.

“In a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, prosecutors accused Gagosian, the Gagosian Gallery and three other men of failing to pay taxes on the 1990 sale of 58 works of art that earned $17 million in taxable gains.”

Yet another important painting in Britain is apparently “in danger” of being sold abroad. And another campaign is mounted to raise money to “save” it. “This rhetorical flourish is becoming commonplace in Britain. Our public galleries are so strapped for cash that barely a week goes by without an appeal being launched to ‘save’ some work for the nation, or some top aesthete bending the knee before Lottery paymasters for lolly to keep something beautiful from leaving this country. This rhetoric may be to an extent justified by the parlous state of public funding for the arts, but it does raise suspicions that the principles underlying these claims are sometimes questionable.”

The estates of Francis Bacon and Andre Breton are currently in danger of being broken up and sold. “Our instinct cries out to protect the ‘integrity’ of such inheritances by keeping them together. But is that justified? Should the state, as it does in France, have a say? Or should great art have a life of its own when its creator dies, beyond the control of its maker and his loved ones?”

Ada Louise Huxtable is a fan of the winning design for the World Trade Center site. “The design by Daniel Libeskind is not about death and destruction, as some have feared; it is an original and eventful reconstruction of the World Trade Center site that brings the architecture of the 21st century to New York, where it has been sadly and shamefully lacking. Even as we preserve that tragic pit and its sustaining wall, they will become the source of new life. But this will happen only if the spotlight stays relentlessly on the rebuilding process, and if we do not lose the urgent sense of necessity and inevitability that has brought us this far.”

Four English museums have been shortlisted for the first £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize for museum innovation. Finalists include London’s Natural History Museum and The Discovery Point in Dundee, the galleries of Justice in Nottingham and Rotherham’s Clifton Park Museum.

Appreciating art at blockbuster art shows has gotten near impossible. “As with any blockbuster you can’t linger too long and you have to expect big crowds. But does there come a point when the crowds are too big, the jostling too irritating and the noise too distracting for any real enjoyment, let alone serious appreciation? To judge from the letters column of this paper this week, that point has been reached.”