Category: visual

” If anything, I’d say the list reveals a disheartening shortsightedness, made all the more depressing by the fact that it was compiled by some of the most high-profile people in the art world today.”

“How could anyone ever, for a minute, have mistaken those howlers for Vermeers? That’s easy. Connoisseurs are products of their times as much as anyone else, subject to the same unexamined assumptions. But it’s usually a connoisseur who soonest smells a rat. He or she does so not by being wary but by becoming puzzled in a normal pursuit of pleasure.”

“The astronomical prices reflect what Sotheby’s and Christie’s hope is a fortuitous collision between a global group of trophy hunters looking to buy and a handful of major collectors choosing the same moment to sell high-profile artworks, many of which have never been on the auction market.”

“According to Uwe Hartmann, because Hildebrand Gurlitt bought the works — many of which were taken from or sold under duress by their Jewish owners, or labeled as “degenerate art” and confiscated from museums — from Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Ministry, the younger Gurlitt has a legal claim to much of the trove.”

“Oystertecture” sounds whimsical but is now taken seriously, thanks to the eye-popping cost of massive flood gates proposed for Jamaica Bay.”

Blake Gopnik: “While forgery is very clearly an economic crime, it may not always be an artistic or aesthetic one. Forgers can even be an art lover’s friend. Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn’t get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.”

Peter Schjeldahl: “Wonders Gopnik, ‘Why not think of that picture as the sublime masterwork that Rothko happened not to have gotten around to?’ Well, because it’s not a ‘work’ at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive.”

A performance artist has been detained in Moscow after stripping naked and nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in a protest.

The winning bidder failed to make good on the $615,000 winning offer for the unique Banksy work, which had been donated to a New York City charity that fights AIDS and homelessness.