Category: visual

Was a famous Caravaggio fed to hungry pigs? That’s what a Mafia informer told the authorities.

But, for the most part, new artists aren’t benefitting. Instead, it’s a contest for pieces that are hardly ever seen on the market. “Experts say the finest works rarely come up for sale, yet demand is increasing as newly wealthy Chinese buyers compete with financiers and Saudi sheikhs.”

The billionaire has launched an online art gallery called Sierra Fine Art LLC where he is advertising multimillion-dollar works by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse for sale. Wynn’s lawyer Michael Kosnitzky told artnet News that the billionaire has already transferred a “meaningful” amount of his fabled art collection into the business to begin his new chapter.

A dozen years ago, the casino mogul punctured the famous Picasso in his collection, Le Rêve, with a wayward elbow. (His peripheral vision is impaired.) So when word got out this week that another of his Picassos, Le Marin, was pulled from its scheduled auction because it had been damaged, folks wondered if poor Mr. Wynn was humming “Oops! I Did It Again.” But it seems he’s not the culprit this time, as reporter Katya Kazakina learned from a source.

The trustees of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which opened in Cape Town last September, suspended executive director and chief curator Mark Coetzee had just been suspended pending an investigation after he “failed to respond to questions about the institutional practices at Zeitz MOCAA.” There had been reports of concerns about “an alliance between Scheryn Art Collection, a fund that works with collectors to purchase works, and the museum and Coetzee.”

Of course any great artist needs their champions: the curators, gallerists and institutional directors who put their boundary-demolishing work on view. So we decided to pinpoint who exactly these people are. Who will we be talking about most fervently over the course of 2018, and the years that follow? Who’s making it happen? This, from our perspective, is a gathering of the people who are truly influential in art right now.

Yes, new Pulitzer winner Jerry Saltz is on the list and Roberta Smith is not. But the list is gender-balanced and includes two nonwhite women, so it isn’t necessarily propping up the patriarchy. (The list’s compiler is female, for what it’s worth.) And each choice has a well-argued justification.

Modigliani scholar Marc Restillini (who has gotten death threats for exposing forgeries): “My worries aren’t about the number of fakes, which is going down, but about the type of forger that we’re dealing with. We have people who are more sophisticated than those of 15 or 20 years ago. … I think that the scientific community [investigating art fakes] doesn’t realize this. Its response is naïve. Instead of taking necessary steps to fight forgeries, it’s taking steps that will encourage them.”

Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (1916) became the top lot in the Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on Tuesday when it sold for $85.8 million with fees, securing a new record for the artist — and for any work of Russian art ever offered at auction.”

Art dealer Jan Six now says that he has discovered a new Rembrandt, a portrait of an unidentified young man that he purchased at a Christie’s auction in London in 2016 for 137,000 pounds, or about $185,000. If he is right, “Portrait of a Young Gentleman” would be the first wholly unknown Rembrandt painting to be attributed in 44 years — and worth many millions more.