Category: visual

“Emerging from London art schools, the BritArtists brought glamour, hype and excitement to the capital and revitalised its arts scene in the 1990s. But now London has become a victim of its own success. In cities that have witnessed less global attention for their artists, such as Los Angeles or Berlin, there are thriving scenes, and new movements emerge every couple of years. London, however, has remained stagnant, while commercial galleries trawl through the dregs of Goldsmiths’ Class of 1990 for the one-that-got-away and focus is diverted from what’s really new.”

A waiter who stole paintings worth tens of millions of dollars over a six-year period, faces a ten-year prison term. “Stéphane Breitwieser targeted mostly small museums in France and Switzerland, but he has admitted to dipping into collections in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Austria.Among the vandalised canvasses were works by Antoine Watteau and Peter Bruegel. About 110 objects, valued at more than £6m, have been recovered including glassware, china, and musical instruments. But up to 60 paintings have not been found, and investigators fear they were destroyed” by the man’s mother.

Phillips’ forray into the high-end art auction business has come to an end. French billionaire Phillipe Arnault has sold his stake in the company, and it is laying off workers and downsizing. Arnault bought Phillips in 1999 and “spent tens of millions of pounds on guaranteeing money to vendors, regardless of how their works of art performed in the saleroom, in an attempt to raise the company’s profile and win market share from rivals.”

Phillips was founded in 1796, and did fine until four years ago when the push to compete with Sotheby’s and Christie’s turned serious. “Phillips, which was supposed to become a major force in the art market, is left with just half a dozen departments and some 85 employees. This journey to disaster started out sensibly enough. Arnault’s LVMH group has made a fortune from marketing scent, champagne and suitcases and Arnault believed that selling art would be no different…”

Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled “Painter of Light” was a phenomenon, selling millions of dollars worth of sentimental paintings out of mall-front stores. But lately business has been bad, and Kinkade dealers are furious. “The dealers have their own ideas about why sales have slowed: Media Arts has been flooding the market with cheap reproductions of the same art for which they’re forced to charge top dollar. Although dealers are prohibited by contract from discounting the paintings by even a dime, Kinkades have been showing up at national discount chains, puncturing the carefully wrought myth that they are collectibles with a generous scarcity premium.”

This week, the competition for designs for the World Trade Center site is expected to be narrowed to two finalists. Regardless of which plans make the cut, the models of the proposed plans has been the hit art event of the season in New York. “Some days, the place gets so jammed—with people chattering in every language from Japanese to Italian—you have to rubberneck to get a decent glimpse. The models are like magical toys, some with moving parts and lights, others with stunning video displays providing a virtual-reality trip into the future.”

“How does feminist art of the 1970s hold up? Does it seem historically significant or merely transiently faddish?” Feminist artists’ “demands for parity, for an end to being patronized, and for acknowledgment that art should accommodate a distinctly female consciousness made headlines at the time.”

“Like S.U.V.’s and television screens, photographs throughout the 90’s swelled to almost irrational dimensions. As technology allowed huge color prints to be processed with ease and buyers paid top prices for them, big became the norm. Younger photographers and students, when asking themselves how large an image should be, often opted for the McDonald’s answer: supersize it.”

“Who was Roosevelt’s architect? Nobody we can remember. Stalin’s? No one cares. Churchill’s? Silly question. But there is no doubt who Hitler’s architect was: Albert Speer. Almost nothing of his buildings survives, either because they were not built or because they were demolished after 1945. Modern art has never had much political power, but modern architecture is a different matter. Architecture is the only art that moulds the world directly. Of all the arts, it is the supreme expression of politics and ideology. It marshals resources and organises substance in a way that music, painting and literature cannot. It is an art that lives from power.”

As the Victoria & Albert Museum prepares to redo its Medieval and Renaissance galleries, one critic hopes planners don’t botch the job like they did the new British galleries a few years ago. “If the faults of the British galleries were caused through inadvertence (by mistake, a remarkable bust is shown looking into a corner) that would be bad enough. But most of these faults are faults of policy: the downgrading of the individual object – whether in the fine or the decorative arts – is a matter of policy. It must have been, to be so systematic. So let’s hope the policy has already had its day.”