Arts news

• What do we really know about Islamic State’s role in illicit antiquities trade?

  29-02-2016 23:33
  
  How are stolen antiquities being smuggled out of Syria? How much does Islamic State (Isis) profit from this illegal trade? Can we do anything to stop it? These were some of the questions broached by investigators and scholars at a symposium on art and terrorism held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London last Saturday, 27 February.Mike Giglio, an investigative journalist with Buzzfeed who spends much of his time reporting from Turkey’s 560-mile border along Syria, has witnessed first
  
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• Criminal gang convicted of stealing antiquities and rhino horn from UK museums

  29-02-2016 23:18
  
  Fourteen men have been convicted for their roles in a criminal ring that targeted museums and auction houses across the UK, including the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Oriental Museum in Durham. The thefts and robberies involved Chinese antiquities and rhinoceros horn (valued by some for its supposed medicinal power), worth up to £57m.
  On 29 February, four Cambridgeshire men, all part of the same family, were found guilty of conspiracy to steal: Daniel “Turkey” O&rsq
  
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• Whistler’s girl restored to favour

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White: the Girl in the Muslin Dress (around 1870), a work that, until recently, had languished in a storeroom for decades at the Singer Museum in Laren, the Netherlands, after its authenticity was called into question, has been restored thanks to support from the Tefaf Museum Restoration Fund. A recent technical study showed it to be a work by Whistler, and scholars now believe that it is one of 50 rolled-up canvases that vanished after the arti
  
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• There's life in the Old Masters yet, as recent sales show

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  I’d like to propose a new collective noun for Old Master dealers: a grumble. Gather more than two of us together and we quickly become the Eeyores—the perennially pessimistic character fr om Winnie-the-Pooh—of the art world. We complain about almost everything except our own stock. In particular, many like to grumble about “the market”, and some even proclaim it to be dying.For example, the London-based dealer Edmondo di Robilant told the New York Times in 2015: &l
  
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• The Armory Show: preview of New York's stalwart fair

  29-02-2016 22:00
  When Frieze Art Fair launched its first New York edition in 2012, many asked whether the stalwart Armory Show would fold in the face of British competition. That competition seemed capably met by Noah Horowitz, the Armory’s director since 2011, but the fair’s future looked uncertain again last summer, when he departed to become Americas director for Art Basel.Heading into the Armory Show’s 18th edition, its new executive director, the former editor-in-chief of Artnet News, Ben
  
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• Tefaf sets its sights on New York

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  While contemporary art fairs open and close at an alarming rate, there was little expectation that The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf), one of Europe’s oldest and most stately, would be the next to add to the art world’s merry- go-round. So the announcement in February that the single-edition Dutch fair is to open two events in New York came as a surprise to many.
  Tefaf New York Fall and Tefaf New York Spring will launch between 22 and 27 October and 4 and 9 May 2017, with the Octobe
  
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• Tefaf Maastricht 2016

  29-02-2016 22:00
  Everything you need to know about this month’s Tefaf Maastricht as the fair prepares to launch two editions in New York
  
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• Tefaf 2016

  29-02-2016 22:00
  Everything you need to know about this month’s Tefaf Maastricht as the fair prepares to launch two editions in New York
  
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• Sexy, spotless and sure: the three golden rules of desire

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Determining the market value of a picture can be a surprisingly heartless experience. There before you stands a fine portrait by a great artist, whose energy and creative genius you see emblazoned on the canvas with brushstrokes as fresh as the day they were painted. Yet you must judge the work not by its painterly strengths, but by the sum of its component parts.Was the sitter important? Who owned her? Is she pretty? You mentally reduce the picture’s value as you realise that it is not t
  
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• Second helpings of UK’s Grand Tour

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Domenichino’s beautiful Baroque painting Madonna della Rosa (before 1627) is making a rare public appearance at Chatsworth House, the Derbyshire home of the Cavendish family for the past 450 years, as part of season two of the Grand Tour, a series of shows and events in Nottingham and Derbyshire that kicks off this month. The picture, which is normally in the family’s private quarters, will be on display in A Grand Tour of the Devonshire Collection (19 March-23 October), which explo
  
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• Put these on your shopping list

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  “Clematis” BroochHemmerle (2016)Hemmerle’s innovative, and rather unorthodox, desire to pair top-notch gems with often-overlooked materials such as iron, coral and wood has become its calling card. At Tefaf, this fourth-generation designer of haute joaillerie will preview its latest collection, crafted from aluminium—a metal now associated with everything from drinks cans to fences, but prized for its rarity in the mid-19th century (guests at Napoleon’s table dined
  
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• Parties settle in Knoedler case as court hears fakes helped keep business afloat

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  The Knoedler gallery, which had a blue-chip reputation that helped it sell almost $70m of Abstract Expressionist fakes, depended on the forgeries to stay afloat during its last decade-and- a-half. That was the testimony of the forensic accountant Roger Siefert in the two-and-a-half-week trial that abruptly ended in February when the Sotheby’s chair Domenico De Sole and his wife Eleanore reached a settlement with the former Knoedler director Ann Freedman, the Knoedler gallery and its owner
  
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• March is art month in the Gulf

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  The rest of the Middle East is in torment, but the Gulf remains an enclave of calm, where creativity, the art trade and reflection—some more, some less relevant—about what art can do for society can carry on. The ruler of Dubai has appointed a female Minister for Happiness and intends to build a great library. Barack Obama has emphasised America’s warm friendship with a region that some Westerners, who feel that it is the acceptable face of Arab culture, find reassuring. While
  
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• In the beginning: women kickstart South Asia scene

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  The third Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), held in Bangladesh’s capital last month, revealed just how important is the influence and drive of women in the South Asian art world. Women are creating museums, art spaces and biennials, running education programmes, supporting artists and initiating myriad projects to an extent that is probably unmatched anywhere else in the world.“Women are playing such a key part in the art scene in South Asia,” says Diana Campbell Betancourt, the artisti
  
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• In a barn in deepest France, something stirs

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  A group of dealers are joining forces to make tribal art more accessible to customers who live outside Paris, Brussels and London—the traditional European centres of the trade. At the first edition of the Bourgogne Tribal Art Show (26-29 May), around 25 dealers will show African, Oceanic, Eskimo, North American Indian, Pre-Columbian and Southeast Asian works in a converted barn in the tiny village of Besanceuil, in the Saône-et-Loire region of eastern France.There is a large group o
  
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• Georgia O’Keeffe blockbuster show to open newly expanded Tate Modern this summer

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Tate Modern’s first exhibition after it opens its new extension this summer will be a major show on Georgia O’Keeffe, the largest ever held in Britain. Key loans will include Jimson Weed, White Flower No. 1 (1932)—the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction. Deaccessioned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to fund other acquisitions, it was bought at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44.4m by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkans
  
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• Five pieces under €5,000: what you can get for less at Tefaf this year

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  €2,000-€5,000This group of Eskimo gaming markers or tallies, beautifully crafted from walrus ivory, dates to the mid- to late Thule Period (AD1600-1800). They can found on the stand of Anthony J.P. Meyer, the Parisian dealer and internationally recognised expert on Oceanic and tribal art. “They are a wonderful group of bird effigies that are so finely carved that the different species can be identified. There is a goose, a swan, a loon, a ptarmigan and a puffin,” Meyer say
  
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• Experts reveal the must-haves in their fields

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Asian export art
  The trade in Asian export art is catching up with its global roots. The continent-crossing field—ceramics, textiles, furniture and decorative objects produced in the Far East for export to the West between the early 15th and the mid-19th centuries—is now attracting collectors in its countries of origin. European and US collectors and museums have been active in the market for years, but the past decade has seen buyers emerge in Brazil, the Middle East and “esp
  
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• Escape from New York: on Greater New York at MoMA PS1

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  New York is a trap. An art exhibition claiming to show its breadth is a fool’s errand. You only ever see one part of a network, one level of a system. The task of representing this network through artists and their work is fraught. An exhibition with such ambition is a fanciful, essentially corrupt menagerie, useful for propelling one grand myth so we might cope with the collapse of all the others. 
  In New York the system in question is a market—a market replete with history, b
  
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• Don’t Pooh-Pooh this museum post

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  A new post at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is worth exploring if you like a certain honey-loving bear who counts Tigger and Eeyore among his chums. An advertisement for “exhibition research assistant: Winnie-the-Pooh; salary: £21,214” was recently posted on the museum’s website. The position—a fixed-term contract until July 2017—will be based in the institution’s Word & Image department. The blog dustbury.com says that bagging
  
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• Do Ho Suh: the fabric of life

  29-02-2016 22:00
  The Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh has made moving around the world—fr om Seoul to New York and now London—his life’s work. His sheer fabric structures, which replicate the architecture of his past dwellings, give shape to the transience, dislocation and shifting identities that Suh has known. Now the sculptures themselves are hitting the road: in February, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) opened Passage, a solo exhibition of predominantly new work (until 11 Septemb
  
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• Death and decay go on public display

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Show Your Wound, the curated display that accompanies Tefaf’s Modern section this year, has rich inspiration. This focused exhibition of seven artists attempts to introduce the fair’s visitors to new developments in art. It is infused with not only the spirit of Maastricht’s Medieval religious roots—the city has one street called Het Vagevuur, or Purgatory, and the 13th-century Helpoort, or Hell’s Gate—but also the spectre of a totemic figure in European post
  
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• Damned delight: heaven, hell and Hieronymus Bosch

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  During his lifetime, the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (around 1450-1516) enjoyed great wealth and respect, and his work was held in the utmost regard. His compositions, packed with pictorial innovations of an often grotesque nature, both surprised and delighted his audience, who were more accustomed to the idealised portrayal of nature found in 15th-century Flemish paintings and 16th-century Renaissance works. Within a decade of his death, artists were churning out hundreds of c
  
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• DADA: 100 Years On

  29-02-2016 22:00
  Horrified by the slaughter of the First World War, the Dadaists espoused irrationality to ridicule the logic that had led to war. But Dada’s influence has stretched far past 1918.One hundred years ago, in a small nightclub on Spiegelgasse in Zurich, a revolution in art began. A group of writers and artists of different stripes gathered to host the first Cabaret Voltaire—the starting pistol for the movement that became known as Dada. Founded by Hugo Ball and his partner Emmy Hennings
  
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• Cool doesn’t cut it: Andrew Lambirth on painting today

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Jean Dubuffet, in an interview in 1977, identified the main problem afflicting artists—which has grown only more pronounced since—as the muddling up of two quite separate functions: presenting and creating. “Creating is antisocial, swimming against the tide of what is already accepted and admired, but the whole business of presenting one’s work to the public is a highly social activity. And when you mix the two, you get something inferior, like a wine that’s been c
  
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• Cold War revisited

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Russian rebels are getting some love from the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dreamworlds and Catastrophes (12 March-31 July) explores how artists whose work was not sanctioned by the Soviet state “responded to Cold War developments in science and technology through utopian fantasies and anxious realities”, says Ksenia Nouril, the show’s curator. US artists such as Robert Rauschenberg documented the Apollo 11 moon landing for Nasa, but S
  
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• Can redesigning your stand boost your sales?

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  We are told that we live in an “experience economy”, where stimulation and entertainment are constant cravings. In a world where people are ever more aesthetically aware, art fairs have become theatre. Each stand must be a stage set, a spectacle showing the best art it can muster, with organisers quick to crack the whip in the form of stinging letters to exhibitors whose acts do not make the grade.The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) in Maastricht, the grand dame of art fairs, is no e
  
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• Brafa brushes off terrorism fears with record visitor and exhibitor numbers

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Hotels in Brussels may have taken a hit in the wake of the Belgian capital’s security lockdown in November, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, but the 61st edition of the Brafa Art Fair (23-31 January) nevertheless drew a record 58,000 people—3,000 more than in 2015—to the largest edition of the event to date. Although one German gallery pulled out over security concerns, the fair still had 11 more exhibitors than last year’s 126 participants.After the preview day
  
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• Bonhams fires eight in Hong Kong including deputy chairman for Asia, Magnus Renfrew

  29-02-2016 22:00
  
  Fuelling speculation of a slowdown in the Asian art market, Bonhams has fired eight staff in Hong Kong including its deputy chairman, Asia, Magnus Renfrew.Speaking to Bloomberg, Renfrew said he was "surprised and disappointed" by the decision, although he indicated there were other opportunities on the horizon. Renfrew joined Bonhams in September 2014, bringing bags of experience and contacts in the region having founded Art HK in 2008, which was later bought by the Art Basel franchise. Renfrew
  
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• First cultural destruction trial opens at The Hague’s International Criminal Court

  29-02-2016 20:40
  
  In the first case of its kind, the alleged Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi is due to stand trial on 1 March, accused of war crimes for ordering the destruction of cultural monuments. Al-Faqi is charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague with razing nine mausoleums and the 15th-century Sidi Yahia mosque in Timbuktu in northern Mali.
  Prosecutors say Al-Faqi belonged to Ansar Dine, an Islamist group with links to al-Qaeda. They also claim he led an anti-vice squad c
  
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• Iggy Pop Posed Nude at the New York Academy of Art for a Jeremy Deller Project

  29-02-2016 20:14 via artnews.com
  Ever the exhibitionist, Iggy Pop took a break from promoting his new album to pose in his birthday suit for art students at the New York Academy of Art as part of a work by Jeremy Deller. Iggy Pop Life Class, … Read More
  
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• French des-res for sale: 7 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms and a bunch of Picassos

  29-02-2016 18:45
  
  A 13th-century chateau up for sale in the south of France has a special feature that will appeal to art buffs—five frescos made by Picasso for an exquisite outdoor loggia of the historic residence. The Château de Castille, located near Uzès, was purchased in 1950 by the late collector Douglas Cooper; Picasso was a regular visitor to the seven-bedroom property in the early 1960s, wining and dining with Cooper and his then partner, the art historian John Richardson. The works,
  
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• Preview the ADAA Art Show 2016

  29-02-2016 18:42 via artnews.com
  The 28th edition of The Art Show, which is organized annually by the Art Dealers Association of America, opens to the public Wednesday, March 2, with previews on Tuesday, March 1, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The … Read More
  
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• ‘Allen Jones: Maîtresse’ at Michael Werner, London

  29-02-2016 17:50 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.Today’s show: “Allen Jones: Maîtresse” is currently on view at Michael Werner Gallery in London. The exhibition features eight paintings and is open through April 29.
  
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• ‘The Art World Needs a Re-Ignition in New York’: Elizabeth Dee on an Expanded Independent, Moving to Harlem, and the Future of Chelsea

  29-02-2016 17:38 via artnews.com
  The New York dealer Elizabeth Dee cofounded the Independent art fair in 2010 as a kind of scrappy alternative to the much larger Armory Show. From its fairly humble roots running out of the old home of the Dia Center for the … Read More
  
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• Imran Qureshi’s miniatures take over London’s Barbican—and a park in Bradford

  29-02-2016 17:25
  
  The Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi is due to unveil a painted Indian garden in a park in northern England this summer, inspired by the British Indian army that fought in the First World War. Qureshi, the subject of a major exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, will paint the flora and fauna on the paving at Bradford's Mughal Water Gardens in Lister Park. The work will remain in situ fr om June to September.
  “Qureshi lives and works in Lahore, a region that as part of the British Ra
  
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• Flower Power: Taryn Simon on Her New Show at Gagosian

  29-02-2016 16:51 via artnews.com
  In 2002, scientists at Johns Hopkins University determined that the average color of the universe is a pale beige, a hue that has since been named Cosmic Latte. This rather benign color also happens to be the foundation on which … Read More
  
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• Editor’s Letter: Icons | Spring 2016

  29-02-2016 16:44 via artnews.com
  A few months ago, on the heels of a merger with BMP Media Holdings, we at ARTnews announced that our magazine would become a quarterly. To many of our readers this understandably may have come as a surprise. After all, … Read More
  
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• Israel Museum’s longstanding and well-connected director to step aside

  29-02-2016 16:36
  
  The Israel Museum will be seeking a new director as James Snyder announced that after 20 years at the helm of the Jerusalem institution he will become its international president. The US-born director, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1997 having worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is due to take up the new role in January 2017.
  Snyder’s successful fundraising and the institution’s global network of supporters, which he has been instrumental in developing, enabled the institu
  
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• Can an artist ever really ‘own’ a colour?

  29-02-2016 15:21
  
  Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights to paint using Vantablack, the blackest black that has ever existed – but other artists are keen to use itColour is precious. Colour can drive you mad – especially if you are an artist. The colours that artists use can be as expensive as gold – which installationist Richard Wright painted on to a wall in Tate Britain to win the Turner prize - or as lethal as arsenic, which in the Romantic age was used to make the beautiful but deadly Scheel
  
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• Morning Links: VantaBlack Edition

  29-02-2016 14:17 via artnews.com
  VANTABLACK Anish Kapoor has been given exclusive usage rights to VantaBlack, a recently invented material that absorbs 99.96 percent of light that hits it—and artists are angry. [Daily Mail]THE FUTUREGoogle’s artificial intelligence gets its first art show. [Wired]The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has decided … Read More
  
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• Nothing, Glyndebourne, East Sussex, review: Unforgettable youth opera acted with blazing conviction

  29-02-2016 14:13
  
  Co-producers the Royal Opera House should ensure this flawless production is much more widely seen
  
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• In Case You Missed It: A List Of The Oscars Nominees, And The Winners

  29-02-2016 13:25 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Everything that was nominated and all of the winners, including at least one or two partial surprises.
  
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• Gerhard Richter slams proposed closure of Germany's Museum Morsbroich

  29-02-2016 12:55
  
  The German artist Gerhard Richter has spoken out against the proposed closure of Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen near Cologne, saying in an open letter to the city's mayor, Uwe Richrath, that plans to close the Modern and contemporary art institution and sell the collection are “alarming”. The museum was the first in North Rhine-Westphalia to dedicate itself exclusively to contemporary art after the Second World War.
  According to German press reports, Richter was inflamed by a repor
  
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• Let’s Talk About Penn Station And Design And What Went Wrong One More Time Before The Makeover

  29-02-2016 07:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Or, as the subheadline of this article has it, “What makes New York’s Penn Station suck so bad?”
  
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• Top Stories From AJBlogs For 02.28.16

  29-02-2016 07:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  Svend Asmussen, 100
  Today is the 100th birthday of the great Danish violinist Svend Asmussen. Without going into the details of Asmussen’s long, varied and influential career, let us simply recognize him as one of the handful (or… … read more
  AJBlog: RiffTidesPublished 2016-02-28
   
  Mavis Staples’ HBO doc hits relevant Civil Rights notes
  “I’m not as frisky as I used to be but I feel like I am,” Mavis Staples speaks the truth with a grin and a twink
  
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• A Berlin Museum Runs Tours In Arabic, Helping To Welcome Some Refugees

  29-02-2016 06:09 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The visits can be fraught. ‘Sometimes people say: ‘The Germans have all our heritage! They stole it!’’ said Zoya Masoud, 27, who led the Arabic-language tour that afternoon at the Museum of Islamic Art, which is part of the Pergamon Museum and filled with treasures from empires past. Often, the visitors say the art is probably better off in Berlin because so much in Syria has been destroyed by the war and the Islamic State, Ms. Masoud said.”
  
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• How To Discourage People Of Color From Going Into The Arts

  29-02-2016 05:06 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What happens when people of color are discouraged—both implicitly as well as explicitly—from going into the arts and humanities? Here, I’m not just talking about the lack of mentors or opportunities in these fields. I’m also talking about pressures from politicians, from college administrators, even from one’s own family.”
  
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• Can Crowdfunding Save JMW Turner’s House From Collapsing?

  29-02-2016 04:06 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Keeping it standing has involved clearing blocked lavatories by hand, shovelling up fallen bricks and plaster, chopping down trees whose roots were ripping apart foundations and, worse, sewer pipes, and scrubbing down all four walls of a room so cold and damp it had become covered in mould from skirting board to ceiling.”
  
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• Untitled(YEAH IF YOU STOP TO THINK ABOUT IT!)

  29-02-2016 03:53 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  the elderly woman has on a pink jacket, puma sneakers, and a brown curly wig. her heavy set daughter has on a black dress and a red brown sweat shirt. she moves as slowly as her mother.he just take life for granted, said the elderly lady. he just do. girls she gonna show  up. i want eddie to pick up a place. i’m not financing it    i want eddie to pick a placethe motown thing. i’m surprised they offer that rate. last time i went to a concert itwas eighty dollars.
  
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