Category: visual

Pat Sheil inherits a black velvet painting. So what’s the market? “The first thing we had to do was investigate the state of the black velvet art market. Initial inquiries were less than encouraging. The first valuer simply laughed, but at least he came straight to the point, without saying a word. The second fellow raised one eyebrow and assured us that there was nothing wrong with the frame.”

“A host of artists, designers and musicians have put brush to paper to create potential masterpieces for the annual Secret Postcard exhibition at the Royal College of Art… But buyers bid for the postcards without knowing who the artist is because all works are displayed anonymously and are only revealed once sold. The exhibition creates a great deal of interest from the public who have the opportunity to buy cheap art which could one day net them a fortune.”

A British art historian claims that she has found records proving the existence of John Sanders, an actor and painter thought to be responsible for the only living portrait of William Shakespeare. Trouble is, the painter Tarnya Cooper has ‘found’ is not the right John Sanders, judging from his age and relative inexperience at the time the portrait in question was painted. Still, historians feel that Cooper’s John Sanders may well lead them to the John Sanders they’re all looking for.

A few years ago the Mexican government hired an artist to paint a mural depicting Latin-American writers on a wall of the new San Francisco main library. The mural was finished and dedicated, but the Mexican government never paid the artist. A change in government swept out the official who commissioned the work and the new government is unwilling “to accept responsibility for decisions of the past.”

Britain’s Art Fund is celebrating its 100th anniversary, “during which it claims to have stopped nearly half a million works of art from going abroad.” The fund is arranging exhibitions all over the UK, some of them in unusual locations. None of the plans more unusual, though, than a proposal to put an Old Master painting in a private home. “Obviously there are security and conservation issues, but we seriously intend to allow an Old Master painting to be shown to an ordinary home. We are serious. I can assure you it will happen, the museums love the idea.”

Since 1903 the Art Fund has rescued “almost 500,000 treasures at risk of sale to private or foreign owners” and turned them over to public museums and galleries.

The Pechanga Indian Tribe has backed away from a deal with the financially troubled Southwest Museum in Southern California “The proposed deal would have given the Pechangas a chance to borrow thousands of the Southwest Museum’s artifacts, 98% of which are held, unseen by visitors, in the Mount Washington facility’s storage rooms. To display the artifacts, the Pechangas proposed a museum and cultural center of their own, which would rise near the tribe’s hotel and casino on the edge of Temecula. In exchange for the loan of artifacts, the casino-wealthy tribe was to have provided $750,000 yearly to the Southwest Museum for five years, then as much as $1.3 million yearly once the items were on display at the reservation.”

The Museum of Sex in New York has been open six weeks, and at $17, its admission price is high. But already the museum has attracted 15,000 visitors, many more than needed to “make a profit.”

About 60 artists placed dozens of human-like dolls covered in fake blood and vomit on the streets of Buenos Aires. The controversial art project angered many when “ambulances were called and passers-by distressed after seeing what they believed were dead bodies on the corners of some of the city’s major streets and avenues.”