Category: visual

“The paintings, estimated to be worth around 35 million euros ($39 million), came under state ownership in 2008 when the government nationalised the failed bank BNP … They were originally set for the auction block at Christie’s but withdrawn after public protest.”

“The paintings, Seascape at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884/85), early works van Gogh painted in Holland, were stolen from the Amsterdam [Van Gogh] museum very early one December morning” in 2002.

“On 22 September, three dealers who operate the Metropolitan Fine Arts and Antiques store in New York were arrested for selling ivory works of art without a license – a felony in a state under a law passed in 2014 to limit the ivory trade. Officials with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation raided the shop and found 126 objects totaling $4.5m – including two pairs of elephant tusks, one of which was seven feet long.”

“Huh. As I suspected. The vaunted optimism of Shrigley’s thumbs-up to Britain’s glorious future is undermined by the deathly black hue of his appendage. Then there is the surreal monstrosity of the hugely deformed thumb. At seven metres high this is the tallest sculpture ever put on the plinth and, while that may seem the kind of statistic tour guides reel off, it has genuine relevance to how it works on a square that is also home to Nelson’s Column.”

“In the art world, blockchain technology may hold the key to overcoming one of its greatest challenges: the lack of transparency. Frequently described as the last unregulated market, the art world often operates on trust alone. But this trust keeps being tested, as recent forgery scandals such as the Knoedler Gallery fiasco and the case of German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi show. A networked digital ledger such as a blockchain could help keep track of a work of art’s movements without relying on a paper-based—and at times insecure—system of recording provenance.”

“The piece is a rare preparatory oil study for one of [Jacob] Jordaens’ best known works, Atalanta & Meleager, which hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid.” The painting, now estimated to be worth up to £3 million, had been abandoned in a storeroom at the Swansea Museum in Wales.”

Time was, everyone’s favorite sport was dumping on whatever crazy art the Turner Prize finalists had created. That was then. The critics are much more enthusiastic this year…

Nicholas Serota: “I need to repeat the fact that clearly people purchasing those flats were in no doubt that Tate Modern was going to build its new Switch House building and the character and uses of that building were widely known. People purchased with their eyes wide open.”

As AJBlogger Judith Dobrzynski reported yesterday, the Met is cutting staff.  “The Met has been contending with a ballooning deficit even as it aims to raise money for a $600 million new wing dedicated to Modern and contemporary art and to sustain its eight-year lease at the Met Breuer at a cost of $17 million a year.”

“The Basrah Museum has been planned for eight years and will join the National Museum in Baghdad as one of the most important institutions in Iraq. For the first time in a generation, the people of southern Iraq will have their own museum—a great achievement under extremely difficult circumstances.”