Category: visual

“The New York State Supreme Court on 7 May denied an injunction sought last week by collector Hubert G. Neumann to block Sotheby’s from offering a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting from his late wife’s estate. The work, titled Flesh and Spirit (1982-83), is to be offered in the auction house’s 16 May evening auction of contemporary art.”

“US lawmakers are working on legislation that would subject the country’s art dealers to financial regulation by the government and which could prove challenging for galleries, an art-law firm warned its clients this week. New York-based Pearlstein McCullough & Lederman said that legislation is likely to be introduced in Congress during the week of 14 May, adding dealers of fine art and antiquities to the list of regulated financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act.”

We’ve become so accustomed to interacting through our phones that we’ve forgotten about everyone else in the room. That obliviousness has found its way into more and more exhibitions across the country, as museums rebrand themselves as community spaces that foster “interaction” with hashtags and tweets. Encouraging that interaction has come at a cost.

The works include Vincent van Gogh’s “Six Sunflowers,” destroyed in a collector’s home during a 1945 U.S. air raid near Osaka, Japan; Johannes​ Vermeer’s “The Concert,” stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990; and one of Monet’s water lilies, destroyed by a fire at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1958.

“Recent radar scans of Tutankhamun’s tomb conclusively prove that there are no additional chambers or passages behind the walls of the famed pharaoh’s burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egyptian officials announced today.”

“The accident reportedly happened as the statue” – a marble of Saint Bibiana – “was being lifted back into place above the altar of Santa Bibiana, the church in central Rome for which Bernini created it in 1626. The newly restored work had been on loan for the first time in its history to the capital’s Borghese Gallery, which recently hosted a major exhibition of the Baroque sculptor’s masterpieces.”

“The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has announced plans to turn the French capital into a ‘refuge’ for items worldwide at risk of destruction, placing endangered objects in storage in secure buildings owned by the city authorities.”

It wasn’t a lack of vision or willingness that stopped them. In fact, the MoMA would have been the first public building the duo ever wrapped if the project had gone through in 1968.

Saltz used himself as a case study in success for late bloomers—after all, this is a man who worked as a long-distance truck driver until the age of 41 and has ended up the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic of a major magazine without formal academic training or a single degree. In the midst of his animated, sometimes rambling performance, there were some kernels of wisdom.