Category: issues

British libel trial rehashes details of the Holocaust. Sometimes the trial is a jousting match, with historical documents and incidents as the lances. Other times, the debate is more disturbing. – Salon

New Canadian government budget cuts taxes but fails to deliver on expected increases for arts and culture. – CBC

British report says some 300 works of art in UK museums have questionable WWII provenance and could have been stolen by Nazis from their rightful owners. – The Guardian

• NAZI LOOT: British museums and galleries announce a list of art they hold that was looted by the Nazis and never returned to rightful owners. So will the art be returned? Not necessarily. “Arts Minister Alan Howarth told the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ program: ‘Just as it was wrong to take paintings off Jewish people in the circumstances of the Nazi era, so it would be wrong without a proper basis of evidence to take paintings off the national collections which are held for the public benefit.'” – BBC
  
  
• WHAT’S FAIR? “It is entirely proper that stolen pictures, especially those taken in the appalling circumstances of Europe under Nazi domination, should be returned to the families of their pre-war owners, but publishing lists of this kind invites false claims made, not with mischievous intentions, but through errors of recollection after 60 years or more – one Picasso looks much like another after so long a time. It is possible, even probable, that the list will provoke false memories, and once a false claim is made it may well be difficult for the gallery in question to prove or disprove the claim, leaving ownership in limbo.” – London Evening Standard

— that it will buy troubled auction house Sotheby’s for $1.6 billion. – Wired

• Previously: EBAY TO BUY SOTHEBY’S? Five-year-old eBay is reported to be interested in buying the troubled 256-year-old auction house. Valued by the stock market, eBay is worth nearly $20 billion, 16 times Friday’s closing price for Sotheby’s. – The Independent (UK)

“Should intellectuals push for a cultural embargo of Austria and try to starve the xenophobic rightists out? Or should they go to Austria and feed the vigorous internal opposition, which made itself apparent in a march of 250,000 protesters in Vienna this month? But such tactics could do a great deal of harm. “I can agree on a boycott on the highly official level,” says one critic and curator. But, referring to the Austrian Freedom Party’s crusade against contemporary art, he says, “it makes no sense to boycott us. We are already under attack inside Austria.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

Sydney’s Olympic Arts Festival is doing well attracting corporate sponsors. But Australia’s Minister for the Arts says continued corporate support after the Olympics end is crucial to a healthy Australian arts scene. Currently corporations fund only about 10 percent of the country’s arts expenditures. – Sydney Morning Herald

The American Museum of Natural History in New York goes to court to refuse to give back a 10,000-year-old, 15-ton meteorite to Oregon Indian tribes who say their ancestors once treated the rock as a sacred object. The rock is not the kind of sacred object intended to be covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a law covering the “repatriation” or important Native-American cultural objects, claims the museum. – New York Post

• Previously: Tribes work to make their case. – The Oregonian

“Pessimists are worried that Christie’s and Sotheby’s may not even survive the crisis. Derek Johns, a London dealer who was once a director of Sotheby’s, says, ‘It would be devastating if they became bankrupt.’ The optimists, on the other hand, say that Christie’s and Sotheby’s have survived drama and scandal in the past, and that a better, more competitive and less arrogant art market may eventually come out of all this.” – The Telegraph (UK)

• Previously: EBAY TO BUY SOTHEBY’S? Five-year-old eBay is reported to be interested in buying the troubled 256-year-old auction house. Valued by the stock market, eBay is worth nearly $20 billion, 16 times Friday’s closing price for Sotheby’s. – The Independent (UK)
  
  
• OF SINS AND SCANDALS: So what’s a little collusion? Other auction house practices may be legal, but they’re far from fair. – Artnewsroom.com
  
  
• SELLERS’ MARKET: “This sends a bolt of lightning through the marketplace,” said Scott Black, president of Delphi Management, a Boston money-management firm, and a serious collector who has spent tens of millions of dollars on fine paintings. “When you step into that auction room and raise your hand, you assume it’s a fair market. . . . I think a lot of people are going to think twice about the spring auctions.” – Washington Post