Category: visual

A heavily promoted ‘blockbuster’ exhibit of the work of Degas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is drawing huge numbers of visitors, and that may be a problem. “On those most popular days for museum attendance, Degas devotees holding timed tickets have reported waits of up to an hour to see the critically lauded show, devoted to the great impressionist painter’s lyric images of ballet dancers. And once inside, it was tough for the packed-in art lovers to see the art.” Part of the crowd-control problem can be attributed to a series of crippling snowstorms in the area which prevented many ticketholders from making it to the museum during the exhibit’s first two weekends.

US prosecutors are going after art buyers who have made deals with galleries to avoid sales taxes. So far, “34 Manhattan families had coughed up $6 million in back taxes on art purchases since June, when former Tyco International CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski was indicted on charges he evaded sales taxes on $13 million in art in a widely publicized case. Art dealers say they believe the government is looking for quick ways to collect revenue in a weak economy.”

Did security guards at Riker’s Island jail stage a fake fire drill las weekend to cover the theft of a Dali painting? “The rare middle-of-the-night drill was held Friday, hours before two officers noticed that the painting, last appraised at $175,000, had been replaced with a fake.”

What will happen to a number of important paintings by Francis Bacon now that the painter’s primary heir has died? “John Edwards, who died in Thailand on Wednesday aged 53, was Bacon’s friend and muse for many years. He inherited the artist’s £11m estate when Bacon died in 1992.”

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. museums have struggled to obtain works for major exhibitions from overseas due to skyrocketing insurance rates and jittery art lenders who fear losing their pieces in a terrorist strike.” Now legislation has been introduced in the US Congress that “would raise the amount of indemnity coverage that can be provided at any particular time from $5 billion to $8 billion. It also increases how much coverage the program – run through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – can provide to one exhibition, from $500 million to $750 million.”

The amazing Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum’s most famous building, finally opened this week, some 2000 years after it was enveloped in mud in the eruption that buried Pompeii. The “largest Roman villa ever found, it was the magnificent seafront retreat for Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Piso, a literate man who patronized poets and philosophers, built there one of the finest libraries of its time. Many believe that the mud filled lower terraces could hide the fabled second library, which probably contains lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, lost dialogues of Aristotle, and Livy’s History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing.”

Iraqi-born art collector Charles Saatchi, whose devotion to promoting the work of young and emerging artists is well-established, is making a second major donation to the Arts Council Collection, based in London. Saatchi is giving over control of 34 modern sculptures to the ACC, which plans to display them in touring exhibitions around the U.K. and possibly abroad as well. Saatchi had previously made a gift of more than 100 artworks to the council in 1999.

Gereon Krebber, who graduated last year from the Royal College of Art, won this year’s Jerwood Prize with a proposal for “Tin, a 1.5-metre can with the top slightly open – or almost closed, creating uncertainty and ambivalence, the artist says. Krebber beat seven other sculptors, shortlisted from 90 proposals, for the prize, which is open to sculptors who have graduated from art school in the past 15 years.”

A competition is an odd aesthetic for an art show. So how did the Matisse–Picasso opposition come about? It “was invented almost a hundred years ago by a handful of avant-garde poets and painters who had an appetite for grand pronouncements. The rivalry was also fostered by Gertrude and Leo Stein, who, in their salon, liked to put other people’s neuroses in a pot and let them simmer till they boiled over. Early on, Leo Stein made a point of telling Matisse and Picasso, then freshly aware of one another, that an important Parisian art dealer had spent the large sum of 2,000 francs on new paintings by Picasso and the very slightly larger sum of 2,200 francs on new paintings by Matisse. Then came a press release by the poet Apollinaire, and the duel was officially on…”

Australians spent $100 million on fine art last year, “with a record $80 million passing through the hands of the nation’s art auctioneers. Despite the uncertain economic and world political climate, that record could be broken this year as well-to-do newcomers who boosted sales last year by taking their money out of the sharemarket continue their splurge on paintings, prints and drawings. Salesroom turnover last year was up by $10 million on the previous year and four times greater than a decade earlier.”