Category: visual

Sotheby’s postpones it annual meeting as its largest shareholder pushes the auction house to distance itself from its former chairman amidst growing investigations into the company’s practices. – New York Times

Casino/hotel tycoon Steve Wynn helped get a tax break passed in Nevada last year that looks like it will allow him to get a tax break for the $5.5 million he charges the Bellagio Hotel to “rent” part of his art collection. – Las Vegas Review-Journal

Thieves are literally chiseling off the heads of statues at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, built some 1000 years ago. The trade in international cultural artifacts is hot – an epidemic that is irreparably ruining some of the world’s cultural treasures. – CNN

Do you know what your senator has hanging on his walls? Does it tell you anything about him or her? The Canadian Government’s Art Bank provides art to members of parliament. Too bad more of them don’t take up the offer. – National Post (Canada)

• Does putting art on the internet change the meaning of art? Students at Berkeley and Sonoma State Universities are posting and critiquing art to explore how the medium changes the process of art. “We are using the Net as our medium instead of print.” – Wired

There is no other 20th-century painter quite like Balthus. At the age of 92 he still paints, still in his own way, as always, resolutely ignoring the art-isms of his time – “I was never interested in other modern painters because I had my painting, which preoccupied my mind more than anything else.” – Financial Times

“Throughout the centuries, the grand, open-air museum that is Italy has been an easy target for thieves. The peninsula is littered not only with Roman ruins but also Etruscan, Phoenician and Greek artifacts – not to mention the vestiges of countless pre-Roman peoples and even prehistoric settlements. Today, the plundering of Italy’s archaeological treasures has become a highly lucrative business involving a sophisticated network of tombaroli, ravagers of archaeological sites; expert fences in Italy, Switzerland and England; and knowing buyers in the United States, Japan, Australia and elsewhere.” – Washington Post

In the furious competition for artwork to sell, today’s big auction houses skin their elbows trying to land prestigious – read lucrative – art to sell. That means combing the daily obits. And it means… – New York Times

London’s Royal Academy decided to stay open all night during its recent Monet show. It worked. The museum has become one of the top ten tourist attractions in Britain. “The exhibition, which cost £1.8 million to stage and four years to assemble, boosted the number of visitors to the gallery to 1.39 million last year, up from 912,714 in 1998. Nearly 8,600 people attended the show each day despite the queues and the high entrance charge of £9.” – The Independent (UK)

Only a few days after the Louvre opened its new collection of primitive art to the public, experts are saying that some of the pieces were almost certainly stolen. – The Observer (UK)