Tag: 11.24.03

A prominant Asian businessman has criticized Singapore’s public funding of what he called “elitist, intentionally avant-garde work which ‘may have no relevance at all’ outside of the West. He suggested that public funding of such ‘so-called art installations’ had become ‘disconnected from the community’ which they purport to engage with. Globalisation, he said, was a ‘double-edged sword’, tending to homogenise indigenous art movements while making them known to the world.”

A new generation of art sellers has emerged in New York. They “have been mounting shows in unusual spaces, featuring work that is fast, cheap, and exuberant—and produced more often by ‘collectives’ than by nineties-style art stars (not that any of these artists would pass up their own fifteen minutes). This fall, these players have become their own Establishment: Several of their artists were just tapped for the Whitney Biennial, and a number are members of the New Art Dealers Alliance, which declares that the ‘adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art’ is dead.”

“Over the past decade repatriation departments have been set up in museums across America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to return human remains to their places of origin. While research on human remains can reveal information about historic patterns of migration, lifestyle and disease – a substantial amount of energy, time and money has instead been committed to burying the evidence.”

“Art auctioneers are only human or so it’s said, and they and their staff are as prone to making mistakes as the rest of us. But how did the international saleroom Christie’s manage to list a painting by Ray Crooke for its art auction tomorrow night that it sold in August to Australia’s biggest-spending dealer, Denis Savill?” The new catalog lists the painting with a different title than the one it had when Savill purchased it, but all sides agree that it is the same work. This isn’t the first time that Savill has had a problem with Christie’s: the auction house “previously ‘mislaid’ three paintings he had bought at various auctions, and… recovering them took nine months in one instance and two years in another.”