Category: visual

About last week’s auction sales: For these marquee New York sales, $2 billion seems to have become the figure that reassures a wider world that top end of the art market is humming, if not actually booming. Last week, that feel-good figure was achieved with the help of material not normally seen in Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales. Prices were also propped up, wherever possible, with hundreds of millions of dollars in financial guarantees.

Lucia Borgonzoni, undersecretary at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, is balking at the previous government’s agreement to loan a large group of Leonardo da Vinci works for the artist’s quincentenary next year. “How could any Italians be in favour of giving over these da Vinci works without asking for something equally important to display in this anniversary year? Leonardo was Italian, after all. Why don’t they loan us the Mona Lisa?”

The series of 14 sculptures, each well over 40 feet tall, depicting the development of a fetus inside a uterus is titled The Miraculous Journey and installed outside a new medical center for women and children. (Yes, of course they’re controversial.)

Wolfgang Beltracchi, convicted in 2011 of painting and selling a series of 14 forgeries that fetched a total of $45 million. He compares himself favorably to the likes of Jeff Koons: “I painted individual paintings and I never replicated them, they were always unique pieces from a certain context, a certain period, with a certain technique, with a certain narrative. These artists — Jeff Koons, but also Ai Weiwei, and there are many more — are promoted by great dealer and everyone earns a lot of money. It is trade, but it has no originality.”

The French historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr will present their 108-page study to President Macron this Friday, 23 November. In it they argue that the complete transfer of property back to Africa and not the long-term loan of objects to African museums should be the general rule for works taken in the colonial period unless it can be proven that these objects were acquired “legitimately”.

Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin was one of seven paintings stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal in 2012 by a group of Romanian thieves and thought to have been burned in a stove by the ringleader’s mother. On Monday, news broke that Tete d’Arlequin had been found in rural Romania: later, “it emerged it was totally too good to be true, part of an elaborate and carefully staged piece of performance art by a radical Belgian theatre company.”

The 5th-century mosaic of St. Mark the Evangelist, one of the few Byzantine religious artworks to have survived the original iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries, was hewn from a church wall following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. Investigator Arthur Brand (“the Indiana Jones of the art world”) found it in an apartment in Monaco.