Category: visual

“At a glance they seem like familiar 19th-century botanical lithographs, the type you see on endless hotel room walls. But look closer and the plum appears to be running away, the raspberries look embarrassed and the grapefruit … well, it’s enough to make the viewer blush.”

“The UK government has confirmed that art is likely to be among the items seized as part of a drive to recover billions of dollars worth of assets siphoned off by the Qaddafi family during four decades in power.” The late dictator’s son Saif al-Islam “was known to be a keen art collector and reportedly active on the Islamic art circuit.”

Christopher Knight: “So the art market is a judge of quality, just like Mom and cousin Fred are, but hardly the best judge. There’s a simpler explanation as to why collectors and dealers aren’t the ones deciding who, finally, are the important artists. (Nor, for that matter, do curators, critics or the general public.) It’s because artists do.”

“April’s federal charges against the New York dealer Helly Nahmad included that he worked ‘to launder tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the illegal gambling business.’ While Nahmad has pleaded not guilty to all the charges in the indictment, the accusation raises the questions of whether (and if so why) art would be used in this way.”

“Around 30 activists from the group ‘United for Contemporary Art’ have been occupying the entrance hall of Budapest’s Ludwig Museum in the Palace of the Arts since last week. The protest, which is still ongoing, is directed at the ‘lack of transparency’ in the selection process of the Ludwig’s new director.”

“The German federal association of galleries and dealers … has, for the moment, won a major battle to keep VAT rates down on the purchase of original works of art. The European Commission has been trying to raise German VAT tax on original works of art from 7% to 19% to bring it in line with higher VAT rates in the rest of Europe.”

“For the first time in the contemporary art festival’s history, one of its pavilions will showcase art commissioned by the Vatican. The Holy See said on Tuesday that the works inside its debut pavilion were not overtly religious but had been inspired by the book of Genesis.”

Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral Square, Milan) sold for $37.1 million (£24.4 million) at Tuesday’s sale.

About six of his roughly 30 surviving paintings differ noticeably in style from the others, despite depicting the same people and rooms. Art historians have wondered if Vermeer had an apprentice, though there’s no surviving record of one. Scholar Benjamin Bistock suggests that this mysterious artist was one of Vermeer’s daughters.

After James Grashow found several of his older papier-mâché works gradually disintegrating as they were stored outdoors by their owner, he coped with the shock by creating Corrugated Fountain, “an assemblage of figures inspired by the Roman fountains of the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini” – made out of cardboard.