Category: visual

“For the fifth time in three years, the Museum for African Art has been forced to delay opening its new home at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, in East Harlem, as it continues to work to raise the money to finish the project.”

“In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower … there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser’s name, ‘Burma-Shave’.”

“Only months before its scheduled opening, a fire broke out at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art’s new building in Oslo, designed by Renzo Piano. Monday afternoon, a fire went up on the top floor, but firefighters had it under control by around 4pm.”

Political artists, abstract artists – all artists who aren’t strictly supportive of Bashar al-Assad’s government are under tremendous pressure in Syria these days. Yet a group of them has managed to smuggle their work to a gallery in Beirut – where it sold.

“The leader of the University of Melbourne’s art fraud unit has cancelled her attendance at an art forgery forum organised by Melbourne’s Art Series Hotels following hotel management’s decision to offer guests prizes of fake Andy Warhol pictures.”

“No one can doubt that those who run after art operate as if they were living on a different planet. This outburst of hubristic buying occurred less than a week after Sotheby’s registered its highest score ever, $330 million, in a sale of Impressionist and modern art.”

“Mr. Browner, now 86 years old, had only met Man Ray once before he and his brothers stepped in three decades ago to help their bereaved sister sort out the artist’s affairs. Today, Mr. Browner manages 15,000 copyrights for the artist and oversees licensing contracts worth roughly $300,000 a year–from Mandarin Hotel headboards embroidered with Man Ray’s images to Zara’s taupe-colored Man Ray shirts. The trust’s proceeds are split among a dozen heirs.”

“Over the past two years Wang Wei and her husband Liu Yiqian dropped a reported $317 million on their hobby. Now they need somewhere to display the collection they’ve amassed. The solution: a private art museum that Wang hopes will impart some class to China’s flashy nouveau riche.”

Christopher Knight: “The obscenity isn’t in the astronomical sums art has been fetching, it’s in the circumstances that make those prices possible.”