Category: visual

“Book collectors and dealers in Hong Kong and Europe have been quietly doing a thriving business in catalogues for exhibitions and auctions of Chinese arts and antiques. While China has always had a black market for imported art publications that cost a few dollars each, in-demand catalogues command prices in the thousands of dollars.”

“Zaha Hadid has filed a law suit against the New York Review of Books and architecture critic Martin Filler … claiming that Filler had falsely implied that she did not care about the working conditions of migrant workers on her projects in the Middle East.”

“Soaring prices and quick resales, especially of work by emerging artists, have fueled a perception that a new breed of collectors, fond of flipping art as they would a stock, have overtaken the market. … But separate statistical analyses conducted for The New York Times by two companies that specialize in evaluating art market data indicate that the hand wringing may be premature.”

“Emerging artists” may be a small slice of the auction market, but the private market for art is much bigger, and “flippers have every incentive to operate stealthily, outside of the auction system.”

In the latest of a series of art-bombings in Sofia, the figures in a post-World War II memorial to the Red Army were repainted to look like, among others, Superman, the Joker, Captain America, Ronald McDonald, and a black Santa Claus. The Russian government wants this to stop.

“They are ordinary objects from the not-too-distant past. They are the stuff of basements, like what you might find at a yard sale, or landfill. Yet, put under glass and labeled, and the things take on a magical air. The more mundane the things are, the more you wonder why they have been saved at all, the more magic they seem to have.”

Turbo Paul: “When it comes to negotiating the recovery of stolen art, the bad guys want to deal and tell the truth, the so-called good guys lie and prevaricate.”

“Suddenly it was possible to be unobtrusive. The camera fitted in a coat pocket. It didn’t need a tripod and was quick and quiet to operate. So photography became fluid, informal, intimate: the technology no longer got in the way of telling the story.”

“Museums are very public buildings that offer the promise, or at least the hope, of this intimate experience, the moment of seduction and insight. A museum master plan probably needs to be most concerned with organizing the traipsing around, but not at the expense of silencing that voice from the alley.”

“All this, of course, is predicated on the assumption that Monet has accurately captured a particular moment.”