Category: visual

The city of Bradford “had been insuring its 4,000 item collection for £20m but a new valuation found that 195 pieces alone were worth more than £30m.” And the city’s in debt – so should it sell some art?

“Hockney has said he is on the verge of ‘giving up’ on his birthplace over the sale, which would include some of his own paintings.”

The Musée Unterlinden decided to restore its greatest treasure: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Then the cultural brawl began.

“It might be hard to believe, but there are people traipsing around the world all the time in search of these kinds of paintings,” he said. “And I guess I hear from them because they want to find somebody else who knows why they’re doing this kind of crazy thing.”

“The artist Jim Starr has accused Damien Hirst of plagiarism. Hirst has put a picture of Rihanna as the snaked-headed monster Medusa on the cover of GQ.”

“The motion formally takes the fight over the fate of the DIA into court for the first time. The filing suggests major creditors are unlikely to agree to any restructuring plan if they believe Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is offering a low-ball figure for the value of the art. The move increases the chances that Rhodes will be forced to decide whether the art can legally be sold.”

“A previously unrecorded oil sketch by British artist John Constable has been discovered at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The painting, of trees underneath an unsettled sky, was found concealed beneath a lining canvas on the back of Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead, another work by the English Romantic painter.”

“The policy shift, enacted in June but largely unnoticed outside Italy, reflects growing concerns by Sicilian officials that their most important treasures are too often out of the country, while their own museums suffer.”

“Indeed, the two buildings hardly speak to each other. Rather, Piano’s addition sits implacably behind a screen of sentry-like elms, generally mirroring Kahn’s building in scale and materiality, but otherwise failing to engage it in any kind of meaningful dialog or to charge the grassy space between them. The head-to-head battle of architectural heavyweights never truly materializes.”

“It would seem that nothing in museums is now safe from this international exhibitions jamboree – no work plays too important a role within a collection, or is too fragile, or too unwieldy, to prevent curators from taking a gamble with its welfare (in hope of reciprocal loans and a curatorial buzz).”