Category: visual

“Amid the turmoil at S.C. State University, which is scrambling to put its financial house in order, another drama is playing out on the Orangeburg campus of the historically black school. It’s a controversy within a controversy, and a significant collection of art is caught in the middle.”

“These great names are now in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins. And the replicas are carefully hung, in their original decorative frames, on the walls in Henry Bloch’s home. ‘They’re just wonderful. They are absolutely identical,’ Bloch says. ‘I often say, are you sure you gave me the copies?'”

“A pioneer of assemblage art, collector, autodidact, Christian Scientist, pastry-lover, experimental film-maker, balletomane and self-declared white magician, he roved freely through the fields of the mind while inhabiting a personal life of extraordinarily narrow limits. He never married or moved out of his mother’s house in Queens and rarely voyaged further than a subway ride into Manhattan, despite being besotted with the idea of foreign travel and particularly with France.”

“One thing I say in my sometime talk with regular folks who say they hate some art is that that’s good, it’s an authentic response. But maybe linger a little. Have another response. You might hate it even more, but you’ll have learned something about yourself. Resisting a new experience is really a sign of physiological health: we are whole from moment to moment and then we encounter something contradictory, and the proper first instinct is to feel threatened and to fight it.”

How Subhash Kapoor allegedly got stolen treasures out of India and (for hefty prices) into collections all over the globe – and how U.S. and Indian authorities finally caught him.

An infographic traces the route, complete with decoy statues, fake documents and money transfers.

“The French police have detained a low-level employee of the National Library of France in connection with the disappearance of a collection of 43 engravings by 16th-century artists valued at up to $4.4 million. It was the second theft uncovered at the library this year.”

“Xiao Yuan, 57, a curator at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in southern China, sold 125 of the exhibits for more than 34m yuan (£4m, $6m). In his defence, he told Guangzhou People’s Intermediate Court there were already fakes in the storeroom when he started work there.”