Category: visual

What is outsider art? “It is eccentric, engaging, and often apocalyptic. It stands outside the standard schools and movements, and is produced by artists who are usually self-taught and often judged insane. It includes some of the most compelling, disturbing, and/or simply strange painting, sculpture, and even literature and music being produced today. Whatever outsider art might be, Joe Coleman is one of its biggest stars, with vivid paintings of riots, demons, serial killers, and sideshow geeks, all rendered in an instantly recognizable style. Yet New York’s annual Outsider Art Fair, has decided not to include him when it reopens its doors next month.” The problem? Coleman has been to art school, “thus removing him from the ranks of the self-taught.”

The Guggenheim budget is roughly half what it was at the end of the 1990s. So the museum has been cutting back programs and staff. And, as long rumored, the Goog is closing its Rem Koolhaas-designed Las Vegas branch while it looks for more money…

The artist you like doesn’t produce much work. And people are clamoring for it. So how do you get a piece of the action? “A gallery’s waiting list is no first-come, first-served, restaurant-type arrangement. Getting on the list requires collectors to demonstrate a ‘commitment’ to the dealer’s gallery in the form of consistent, long-term buying.” That takes a certain amount of work…

Last week the Tate was mounting a campaign to raise money to prevent the sale and eexport of Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Omai”. Then the museum came into a £14.6 million profit in a deal that recovered two Turners stolen from the museum in 1994. So will Tate use the money to rescue the Reynolds? Er…

Do auction houses have an obligation to help owners of stolen art recover their property? The family of a Holocaust victim wants Christie’s to reveal the owner of a painting the auction house had planned to sell. “To Christie’s, the issue is not so clear-cut. Its lawyers say the auction house has done all it can to help, including contacting the collector and informing him that the painting’s ownership may be at issue.” But they won’t reveal the name.

Russian TV has shown what it describes as the most secret museum in the country – a museum documenting the KGB and its predessor security organization. “According to the TV, there is only one poignant item to represent the tumultuous events of the 1930’s, in which thousands died at the hands of Stalin’s secret police. It is a list of chiefs of the Leningrad directorate and other security personnel executed between 1933-39: a total figure of 22,618.”

Did the Tate pay a £3.5 million ransom to get back two of its greatest Turner paintings? It was a cloak-and-dagger operation. “A sizeable chunk of the cash they handed to the German authorities went to pay a chain of informers and middlemen for ‘information’ on the paintings, now worth around £50 million. But the Tate insists no ransom was paid nor were criminals rewarded, at least not directly by them or by the two former Metropolitan policemen they employed.”

An Irish couple has been been arrested for holding five stolen paintings. “The five masterpieces – including two by Rubens – were found by police on Friday night, nearly three months after they disappeared from Russborough House, the stately home of the late South African diamond millionaire, Sir Alfred Beit.”

For 15 years, a Toronto businessman has enjoyed a painting he has hung in his livingroom. He “never had the canvas appraised. He just enjoyed admiring it as it hung in his Forest Hill living room. But last summer, after reading that billionaire Ken Thomson paid $117 million for Rubens’ Massacre Of The Innocents, the owner became interested in what an expert would say.” They say it might be another Rubens…