Category: visual

Thieves broke into Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum overnight and stole two of the artist’s drawings. “Police were studying video tapes recorded by security cameras, while curators rearranged the paintings to cover the blank spaces on the walls before opening the museum to the public.”

“It was a year ago that a high-ranking Cambodian official said the time had come to rev up the old ruin with things like sound-and-light shows, zigzag escalators and hot-air balloons. ‘Angkor is asleep. We will wake it up’. Since a rough-edged peace came to this battered country in 1997, tourist visits to the Angkor temples have risen from almost zero toward a projected one million in 2005. The temples are already swarming.”

The Belgian newspaper De Morgen printed a blockbuster scoop last week – the Parthenon Marbles weren’t really made by a Greek but by a “wandering stonemason from Devon called Phil Davies who changed his name to Pheidias to ingratiate himself with his ancient Athenian patrons.” That means that the English would have a stronger claim to retaining the Marbles in the British Museum. The story included denials from the Greeks and quotes from the gloating Brits. Of course the story was a hoax, and the newspaper later printed a sheepish retraction. “It was a stupid mistake. It all happened on a Sunday when we had a skeletal staff. We noticed it ourselves the next day and ran a correction. What can you say.”

Visitors to a Berlin art space mistook a dead woman for a performance art piece. “Authorities said the 24-year-old woman, who apparently leapt from a window, discussed suicide in a videotaped interview with a group of artists the day before.”

When the new $60 million Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens this weekend, it will be the second-largest modern art museum in the US. “This museum has changed identities, names and directors more times than most people can count. Its meteoric rise of late is all the more remarkable given its checkered history and inauspicious beginnings. A museum that started as an adjunct to the public library, with volunteers footing the bills and guiding its fate, now stands poised to be one of the most influential institutions of its type.”

In the 1950s, Mark Rothko won the “most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter” to produce “600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York.” But in 1959 he “suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement” and in the 1960s sent nine of the paintings to the Tate in London. Why?

For the first time, Art Basel, which is one of the world’s top contemporary art fairs, is putting on a show outside its hometown. Where? Miami. And it’s being called America’s hottest art fair of the season. “While the most cutting-edge art raised some eyebrows, connoisseurs were keenly eyeing the more mainstream offerings, which include some of the best-known artists from the 20th and 21st centuries, including Keith Haring, Fernand Leger, René Magritte, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.”

“Years in the making, Art Basel Miami Beach was scheduled to debut last year, but it was postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ‘We want this to be the most important art show on the American continent, a cultural and social highlight of the Americas’.”

”This is the most important branding event that has happened in Miami in the last 10 years.”

It was a record year for the art auction business in Canada, with new highs set for individual artists plus the business as a whole.