Category: visual

• Theoretically any work lent to a museum by a gallery or individual is for sale. But what are the ethics? The director of Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art has advocated selling exhibitions not primarily to raise money but as a service to artists and to encourage people to buy art. “I have put into our [strategic] plan that we should be taking an active role in encouraging the market,” she said. – Sydney Morning Herald

The Australian art market has taken off, with the take from auction sales doubling in the past three years. The lucrative market has attracted some new players. – Sydney Morning Herald

“You read them to your children at bedtime, now you can own them – at a price. The area of the art market that is now growing faster than any other is that of original illustrations to children’s books.” – The Times (UK)

British report says some 300 works of art in UK museums have questionable WWII provenance and could have been stolen by Nazis from their rightful owners. – The Guardian

• NAZI LOOT: British museums and galleries announce a list of art they hold that was looted by the Nazis and never returned to rightful owners. So will the art be returned? Not necessarily. “Arts Minister Alan Howarth told the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ program: ‘Just as it was wrong to take paintings off Jewish people in the circumstances of the Nazi era, so it would be wrong without a proper basis of evidence to take paintings off the national collections which are held for the public benefit.'” – BBC
  
  
• WHAT’S FAIR? “It is entirely proper that stolen pictures, especially those taken in the appalling circumstances of Europe under Nazi domination, should be returned to the families of their pre-war owners, but publishing lists of this kind invites false claims made, not with mischievous intentions, but through errors of recollection after 60 years or more – one Picasso looks much like another after so long a time. It is possible, even probable, that the list will provoke false memories, and once a false claim is made it may well be difficult for the gallery in question to prove or disprove the claim, leaving ownership in limbo.” – London Evening Standard

“Arguably the third most important commercial art fair in the world after Basel and Chicago, ARCO is to Spain what the Venice Biennale is to Italy or the Documenta in Kassel is to Germany: the largest and most important art-related event in the country. I was surprised to see entire middle-class families at ARCO on the weekend; hordes of bongo-playing art students vegged out en plein air just beyond the pavilion doors, smoking hash cigarettes to their little hearts’ content. But all the optimism, booze, drugs and quick money–and of all these this year there was plenty–could not have made ARCO 2000 less of an artistic fiasco.” – New York Press

Seattle entrusted the design of its new main library to architect Rem Koolhaas, who promptly turned around and presented an idea for a building that is…what, floating glass cubes, piled together in “a bazaar for books, computers, lectures and coffee, that augments the existing library of helpful reference librarians, children’s story time and quiet reading nooks.” – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Getty Images says it will buy rival Visual Communications Group in a $220 million deal that would create the biggest commercial library of pictures, images, and film clips in the world – about 70 million. – Wired

For all Al Taubman’s fabulous success running Sotheby’s these last 17 years, he forgot one thing, writes Thomas Hoving: “the basic point about what Sotheby’s had to be. Honest. The opposite of caveat emptor. Clean. Never-a-scandal. Caesar’s wife. Or, to quote from a renowned 1928 court of appeals ruling, ‘Not honesty alone but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.'” – Artnet

In 1964 Harold and LuEsther Mertz, a couple of rich American tourists, visited Australia. They decided to buy four or five Australian paintings but became so captivated by them they bought 148, assembling possibly the finest private collection of Australian paintings anywhere and shipped them off to America. Now they’re for sale, and Australian auction houses are lining up for the privilege. – Sydney Morning Herald

• Australian auction company competes with Sotheby’s and Christie’s for Mertz collection. – Sydney Morning Herald

The Smithsonian has begun renting itself out – its experts, its expertise, its artifacts – in an attempt to earn money to make up for budget cuts. Why? “The federal contribution to our budget has declined to the point that, while it will pay for some (not all) maintenance of our buildings and for about 75 percent or so of our staff, it will not cover any of the costs associated with mounting new exhibitions or educational programs. We no longer have the staff to do work in-house; contracting it out is very costly. And yet the public expects us to continue as we have in the past, and the belief that taxpayers’ money supports everything we do is widespread. It supports the infrastructure, barely, but nothing else. And from this deficit stems a great deal that is troubling, to those of us inside the institution as well as to outsiders like yourself.” – Washington Post