Category: visual

“Three sandstone sculptures worth more than $1m stolen form India five years ago have been returned to the Indian government at a ceremony in New York.”

There were 6.7 million visits in 2013, up 20% from 2012 and up 13.5% from the previous record year, 2008.

“When looked at more carefully as an investment category, art falls short relative to many of the other assets to which it is frequently – and favourably – compared. These include both traditional and alternative investments, whether public and private equity, gold, wine, or residential property. Its lack of correlation to such assets is also questionable.”

“The more we thought about it, the more we talked about it, the more it made sense that if this is something that is going to help Detroit get out of bankruptcy faster, then it was something for the general good of the city.”

“Disconnected from its past, impatient with the present and tearing into the future under the vague banner of “The New,” it has ceased to be the sui generis institution it had been throughout much of its history. Instead it is virtually indistinguishable from every other museum of modern and contemporary art around the world.”

Michael Kimmelman: “It would be truly radical for MoMA to save the former folk art building, but that’s not what the museum has ever really been about. MoMA wants more gallery space, and the expansion that drives the planned demolition is just more MoMA madness.”

“Presidents of the Ford Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan will serve on a leadership committee that will coordinate the philanthropic effort.”

“Art experts are warning of the rapid spread of a new con-trick infecting the market, which involves cheaply produced works in the style of great artists being sold by dealers who dishonestly suggest they are genuine.”

“Three hundred of the most important of the 2,500 objects the Taliban had smashed have been painstakingly reassembled in recent years, and many of the others are arrayed in boxes and trays, awaiting their turn for restoration.”

But that’s not new – there’a a “remarkable scale and breadth of art that has been collected by corporations since the Renaissance, when the Monte dei Paschi bank in Siena decided it needed nice things for its walls and established what is thought to be the first corporate art collection, in 1472.”