Category: visual

An interesting trend emerged at Christie’s successful old master auction this week (during which a Rembrandt portrait sold for $28.6 million): “British and European bidders accounted for 82.5 percent of the buyers, while Americans made up only 15 percent. For a while now, we’ve been hearing that New York was becoming the center of the old master market, but this is not the case.” – New York Times

Ed Harris’s powerful biographical film “Pollock” may be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation. The scenes of Pollock standing over a giant canvas and creating his famous drip paintings in graceful swooping gestures as the camera discreetly dances around him offer a visceral thrill similar to watching a brilliantly choreographed action-adventure sequence.” – New York Times

The UK is strongly resisting a European proposal to give all EU artists a share of the resale value of their work. The British government has warned that its art auction businesses could suffer greatly if the law is passed and sellers begin to take their work elsewhere to avoid handing over a cut of every sale. – BBC

• THE ATTITUDE OF PARLIAMENT IS BIZARRE, particularly as a number of leading European artists including David Hockney have petitioned against the directive.” – London Evening Standard

It’s quite easy to pick on the follies of Post-Modernism. But to harken back to some “Golden Age in the 1960s, as a new critique of po-mo does, is just wrong-headed. The book appears “fixated on some late 19th century concept of order on the art scene – the artist in his (yes, his) studio, the work displayed in its correct place in the museum, the audience properly intimidated by Masterpieces, the moral value of Art interpreted by beady-eyed critics – perhaps the unhappy author of this book. But much has changed since the 19th century, not all for the worse.” – The Idler

Germany has decided to buy the Berggruen collection containing more than 170 works ranging from Cézanne to Matisse. The price was to be $200 million, with half the amount coming from the private sector. But no one stepped forward with the money, so the government will spend $100 million, keep half the art and sell the other half to finance the purchase. – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

The National Gallery of Canada is investigating the provenance of some of its artworks after it was revealed that they were purchased on the advice of a British art connoisseur who was later unmasked as a Soviet spy. Anthony Blunt drew on a network of fellow spies who acted as art dealers in Europe to make some of his acquisitions for the National Gallery. – National Post (Canada)

“Bilbao is amazing, but the proposed New York Guggenheim is more amazing (and also much bigger). It’s obvious that Gehry has given Bilbao a long hard look, figured out what works and what doesn’t, and taken a giant stride forward. You might think he’d just settle for another Bilbao. Bilbao is a great building, but it has some aesthetic problems it shares with other Gehry buildings. Gehry attacks those problems in this new design.” – Boston Globe

An Oslo art student glued labels on about 20 soft-drink bottles filled with chocolate milk or his homemade beer and mailed them as invitations to his art exhibition. But beer in one of the bottles sent to someone in the Norwegian parliament continued to ferment and it exploded in the parliament building. – New Jersey Online (AP)

The remote city of Geelong, Australia has not given up the idea of trying to lure the Guggenheim to locate a branch of its museum there. The city is proposing to finance a $1.5 million feasibility study for the project. – The Age (Melbourne)

A small Quebec auction house thought it had scored a coup when it got a Renoir to sell and touted it as potentially “one of the most important art sales in Canada.” But the painting “went as high as $1.45-million, but stalled before the auctioneer pulled the painting off the block because it did not meet the minimum price set by the owner. It had been estimated at $1.5-million to $2-million.” – The Globe & Mail (Canada)