Category: visual

“Under EU law, buyers already have the right to cancel purchases made through a website or outside the seller’s business premises where the buyer is not able to inspect the goods before the sale. Until now, auctions—whether conducted in the saleroom or online—were excluded as it was thought the right to cancel would encourage irresponsible bidding and could leave auction houses vulnerable to covering costs.”

“The Museum of Modern Art unveiled on Wednesday a sweeping redesign of its Midtown building, featuring a retractable glass wall, new gallery space and the opening of its entire first floor, including the beloved sculpture garden, free to the public.”

You know which one it is, most likely. Its number of visitors for 2013, though down by half a million from an unusually successful 2012, is still about one-third higher than the figure for the runners-up.

“The lack of transparency on prices (particularly from art galleries, which account for a good 50% of the market’s transactions, alongside auction houses) makes true comparisons to assets such as public equity, gold, property and wine very difficult.”

“How do you make the world’s largest coffee house feel like a neighborhood haunt? The answer: good design.”

The Marrakesh Museum of Photography and Visual Art has taken root despite difficulties in a country unused to the idea of art photography and, in some quarters, still suspicious of photography as a whole.

The collection at the Villa Ajavon in the old port city of Ouidah “is the first museum devoted to African contemporary art to open in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa.”

“It was always an ambitious mission to get a new group of people to think of themselves as art collectors and get them to spend their money on emerging artists. I think it worked great when we did periodic events, but because of our commitment to lower prices, it was hard to make ends meet when we had to pay rent every month.”

David Johnson said the campaign’s success means that MOCA has “a sustainable financial future for the first time in its history.”

“A small Pierre-Auguste Renoir landscape painting has set off a dispute between a major American art museum and a woman who said she purchased the painting for just $7 at a flea market in 2009. The Baltimore Museum of Art said the Renoir was stolen from its premises in 1951.”