Category: visual

Four documents, which were discovered inside an ancient Japanese Buddhist statue while it was undergoing restoration in Kyoto, have helped art experts confirm the dates of the birth and death of Kaikei, a famous sculptor of Buddhist images during the 13th century. The documents included a mourning schedule in honor of the artist. – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

Pottery found in Eastern China dating back 4,800 years has inscriptions of Chinese characters. This predates by some 2000 years what were previously thought to the earliest Chinese characters found on bones and tortoise shells. – China Times

Well, actually, yes. A new show of art “consists primarily of drawings and paintings on paper gathered during the early decades of the 20th century from asylums in Germany, Switzerland and Austria by doctors at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Heidelberg.” – New York Times

The Detroit Institute of Arts has put up a flip chart next to a Barnett Newman painting. The pages attempt to walk viewers through the painting explaining it. “People aren’t born knowing how to look at a work of art,” says Nancy Jones, DIA education director. “It’s a skill. We need to help all people have a viable experience and that’s a fairly new approach. The old approach used to be ‘Here it is. Good luck.’ ” – Detroit Free Press

Art dealers are rushing to the web, and some are even claiming to be making money at it already. The Art Newspaper talks to art dealers about the experience so far. – The Art Newspaper

London’s Marlborough Gallery, convicted of defrauding the Mark Rothko estate in 1975 and accused last month of cheating the Francis Bacon estate, has also been fighting a legal battle over the estate of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters for the past two years. In 1998 a Norway court ruled against the gallery (to the tune of nearly $4 million to be paid to Schwitters’ family), but last month an Oslo appeals court reversed the decision. Now the family owes Marlborough $1.2 million in compensation. – New York Times

A growing number of stolen Chinese artifacts have been turning up in Japan, a trend Chinese archaeologists view “as a clear-cut example of a rampant global problem: the theft of cultural relics that are then given a false provenance and sold to private collectors and museums. The greatest number of such thefts occur in China, where farmers, construction workers and criminal gangs unearth thousands of relics, large and small, each year and quickly sell them to smugglers.” – New York Times

The newly renamed Tate Britain aims to re-present British art thematically. Does it work? “The Tate, it seems, has fallen into the hands of experts, not in art, but in marketing and presentation, and the pun in representing, worn thin already, is thrust home in every printing of the word as Representing – how much did they pay the wit who thought of that?” – London Evening Standard

Of late, British corporations have been a little more adventurous with the art they hang on their walls. “Over the past 15 years the profile of contemporary art has become much higher because of the media coverage of Damien Hirst and exhibitions such as ‘Sensation.’ The consequence is that chief executives are opening up to new approaches.” – The Times (UK)

Art and religion have a long history together. Russia’s Church of the Intercession is “the only intact example of 17th-century Moscow Baroque to have survived the ransacking of Napoleonic invaders and the desecrations of Stalin. It is a jewel of the Baroque, lovingly preserved by curators from the Rublev Museum. But President Vladimir Putin plans to restore the building to the Russian Orthodox Church, which is likely to return it to its original function as a parish church open to the public 12 hours a day. Art experts aghast at the prospect of a pious crush of stout, wet-coated babushki imperiling the fragile interior. So what to do? Defend and preserve it or use and lose it? – The Times (UK)