Getting plinthed

Ciara from Ireland had the right idea. If you're going to bore everyone to death during your time on the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square, you might as well have a good time in the process. So she took up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and got slowly plinthed over the course of her sixty minutes of fame — a full four times the Warhol quota.

Antony Gormley's latest project — entitled One and Other — is open to anyone 16 years of age or older who is resident in, or staying in the UK. At time of writing, there were 23,408 applicants hoping to bag one of the 2,400 hour-long slots on the famously vacant Fourth Plinth.

You can take anything up onto the plinth as long you can carry it yourself. So you can't take a horse up there, or a blast furnace, or your car, but pornographic magazines, a few lines of coke and small improvised explosive devices are probably OK as long as you're subtle about it.

It's hard to believe it is almost half a century since the artist Vito Acconci curled up under a ramp in New York's Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated while the public walked above. Vito, London calling! There's still time to grab one of the 2,400 places!

But perhaps Acconci, Arnulf Rainer, Chris Burden — who nailed himself to the bonnet of his VW Beetle — and their crazy '60s avant-garde cohorts are to blame for raising our expectations where contemporary public art is concerned. Today it's enough to just sit up there like Ettie did this afternoon (above left), quietly reading her book on the Mitfords, knowing that in the process she was "being a tiny part of something huge."

But I need more than this from contemporary art.

The American art critic Rosalind Krauss wrote of "sculpture's expanded field" to denote the diversity of objects, activities, practices and processes that now qualify as sculpture. That field has become so vast and heterogeneous, and its perimeter fence so porous, that just about anything qualifies for access. In an act of uncritical generosity, Antony Gormley has just ushered in 2400 members of the British public.

Good luck to them. I'm off to get plinthed.

A viral embarrassment

I realise there is a serious of risk of Marbles-fatigue spreading like swine-flu if I continue to blog away on this topic to the exclusion of all else, but I can't resist noting an interesting contrast between two recent news items.

Speaking of viral phenomena, it was instructive to see that The Guardian's poll on the Parthenon Marbles attracted almost as much attention as the paper's coverage of the demise of Michael Jackson.

And how interesting that British Museum director Neil MacGregor now seems unable to announce a single new initiative for his museum, launch any fresh innovation, or indeed do anything meaningful in the world without feeling the need to accompany every utterance with a defence of his beleaguered institution's position over the Parthenon Marbles. How long is he prepared to continue this embarrassing charade?

MacGregor has just joined forces with Tate supremo Nicholas Serota to tell the world that the future of museums lies on the internet. Hold on, let me write that down in case I forget. I thought the future was going to be somewhere else.

"The challenge is, to what extent do we remain authors," said Serota, "and in what sense do we become publishers providing a platform for international conversations?" The British Museum would do well to respond to that question by engaging with the Greeks in a conversation about the future of the Parthenon Marbles without attaching obstructive preconditions.

"In the past," says Serota, "there has been an imperfect communication between visitors and curators. The possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now. There will be a big shaking-out — a discrepancy will arise between those institutions that grasp these opportunities and those that do not." But there will never be a big shaking-out while a backward-looking British Museum-style Establishment rearguard impedes progress.

Serota may have been referring to the British Museum's abject failure to listen to the wishes of its public.

Neil MacGregor says the Parthenon marbles issue is "yesterday's question." But clearly it's not. The Guardian poll reveals that it's very much today's question and will be tomorrow's question too, and indeed will still be the question on everyone's lips the day after that and the day after that and into next year and throughout the next decade until the British Museum does the right thing as advised by 94% of respondents to the Guardian poll and sends the Marbles back.

"The Greek government has a clear position that the [Marbles'] removal [from the Parthenon] was illegal and therefore this conversation cannot happen," said MacGregor in a clear contradiction of his colleague Nick Serota's earlier advice to provide a platform for international conversations. How undignified and contradictory does all this look?

Conversations between encyclopedic museums, their public and their international partners won't happen until the museums pull themselves out of an anachronistic mindset, put aside petty questions of ownership and legality and other constraining conditions, and be generous in their approach to cultural diplomacy.

Serota is obviously right that if museums learn how to harness internet communications technology in creative ways they could ultimately become more active publishers and broadcasters. Such initiatives will surely open up new revenue-generating opportunities but that will only further inflame those nations who believe their material culture was unfairly appropriated during the era of collecting.

Before these big internet ideas are likely to work there are even bigger issues that will need to be addressed that bear on the sharing and return of cultural objects. The Marbles issue won't go away.

British Museum finally spots colour on the Parthenon Marbles

The British Museum has grandly announced the results of "a new study" indicating that the Parthenon in Athens was originally painted in various colours, notably 'Egyptian Blue'. Evidently a Dr Giovanni Verri has been shining a light onto the Marbles held by the British Museum, leading him to conclude that the ancient temple was once decorated in shades of blue, red and probably gold.

"We informed our Greek colleagues," Dr Verri said, "and they responded warmly, saying they are interested in examining these flecks themselves."

What is this all about? For generations it has been common knowledge among art historians and archaeologists that the Parthenon and its sculptures would originally have been decorated. Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting of 1868 — Pheidias and the Parthenon Frieze (shown above left) — depicts the sculptor showing Athenian citizens around his team's handiwork high up on the scaffold.

By the mid-nineteenth century, a lively debate was raging in British scholarly circles over the question of polychromy — the colouring of sculpture — but it was not about whether the ancients painted their buildings and sculptures, but about how and to what extent.

Today, even virtual reality reconstructions of the Parthenon use nineteenth-century sources such as Benoit Loviot's Cross-Section of the Parthenon of 1879-81 (Ecole des Beaux-Arts Paris) (right) as their guide to the use of colour on the Parthenon. These late nineteenth-century sources were themselves drawing on much earlier research by architects such as Jacques-Ignace Hittorff (1792-1867) and Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) which had established beyond doubt that Greek temples and sculptures were coloured, both with 'applied' polychromy (paint) and 'natural' polychromy (the use of naturally coloured materials such as gold and ivory).

Not even this was enough, however, to convince some skeptical British sculptors that polychromy was an acceptable way to proceed in the modern world. John Bell, writing in 1861, insisted that, "in these civilised days, the colouring of statues is not an advance, but a palpable retrogression towards earlier times of less intelligence, and of a lower dispensation and, moreover, as far as art is concerned, that a decadence would at once ensue on a general adoption of such practice."

It was that kind of aesthetic prejudice — a determination to keep sculpture white (and thus by extension morally uncontaminated) — that led to the British Museum scraping the Parthenon Marbles with wire brushes in the 1930s in an effort to restore some notional whiteness.

It is thus hard not to see the recent announcement of "new" research results — timed to coincide with the opening of the New Acropolis Museum — as another indication of how defensive the British Museum has become over its retention of the Parthenon Marbles. So the Greeks have "responded warmly"; of course, they always do. But how much better it would be if the British Museum would reciprocate that warmth and permit the Greeks to conduct this kind of research themselves — on all the Parthenon Marbles — by returning them to Athens.

British Museum on the back foot over Parthenon Marbles

If the image, left, had appeared in Hello! magazine, the headline might have read: "Lord Elgin invites us into his beautiful stately home to look at the fragments of the classical past amassed by his forebear Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin". Elgin's desecration of the Parthenon left him seriously impoverished but clearly the £35,000 he received from the British Government in exchange for the Parthenon Marbles was enough to secure a more than comfortable future for his ancestors.

I found this image on a Greek television website alongside an interview with the present Lord Elgin. Sadly the video was dubbed into Greek so I have no idea whether his lordship was accepting his family's responsibility for that heinous crime against the classical heritage or justifying it as cultural rescue. No prizes for guessing...

There's been a blizzard of news and opinion pieces on the Marbles issue in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, they have veered from the downright stupid, such as Richard Dorment's hysterical rant in the Daily Telegraph (here), to more balanced and insightful pieces such as the article by Helena Smith in yesterday's Guardian.

Smith reports that the Greeks, having played the patient supplicant for decades, may now be ready to "take the gloves off" in order to secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens. "We are no longer willing to play the nice guys," a senior member of the culture ministry told The Guardian. "The British Museum has lost the argument. It is now on the defensive. In a year's time, I can assure you, it will want to give the marbles back."

The opening of the marvellous New Acropolis Museum to universal applause has clearly strengthened Greece's will. It has also exposed the British Museum to fresh ridicule, revealing it as out of step with current thinking on museums and cultural property and hopelessly out of touch with public opinion.

If you're looking for evidence that the British Museum is on the defensive on this issue, take a trip to the Duveen Galleries. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours in the sweltering heat of that ugly room (right) where Elgin's trophies of conquest are so clumsily arrayed.

It's clear from the plethora of new information panels running around the walls of the adjoining rooms that the British Museum is straining to justify its retention of the Marbles in the face of overwhelming public opinion that wants them returned.

Needless to say, in the BM's narrative, Elgin is framed as a hero rather than the cultural vandal that he was. The fact that the Marbles that remained in Athens (about half of the total) are in better condition than those in London demolishes the British Museum's claim that Elgin rescued those he took. It also makes a mockery of the British Museum's claim to have protected those in its care. London scrubbed them with wire wool in a misguided attempt to make them white, while Athens used up-to-the-minute laser technology to sensitively restore theirs.

We will never know how much damage was done by Elgin's cronies in sawing the sculptures off the building. Some pieces crashed to the ground when the winches gave way. But whenever the British Museum refers to any visible damage on the sculptures in London, it is always attributed to Morosini's bombardment of the building in 1687, ignoring Elgin's depredations. However it is clear from eighteenth-century drawings from casts that after the 1687 explosion many of the sculptures were in better condition than after Elgin's goons had finished cutting them up.

I love visiting the Marbles in London, but I would love visiting them far more if they were in Athens. This is because, unlike Ian Jenkins, who is the curator of the Marbles at the British Museum, I appreciate their architectural significance. Like many of his forebears, Mr Jenkins is clearly uninterested in this aspect of their significance or he would by now have done something to redress their bizarre configuration in the Duveen Galleries. Immured in this gloomy sepulchre, their relationship to the building for which they were designed is almost impossible to grasp.

Jenkins was interviewed on NPR radio about the Marbles. He began with the astonishing statement, "We regard Elgin as being a conservator. No Elgin, no Marbles." Who is this "we" to whom he refers? That a modern museum curator could be so blind to the available evidence defies belief. But whether or not Elgin ""saved" them, this is no justification for retaining them.

Jenkins also insists, quite wrongly, that the aspiration to "reunification" is flawed since it is predicated on the assumption that if they were brought together they would make a whole. This is another deliberate attempt to misrepresent a realistic and archaeologically-informed approach to reunification. Everyone is aware that we can never make the Parthenon whole again. But we could make it more whole than it is now.

Jenkins says that for a loan to be agreed, Greece must acknowledge Britain's legal ownership of the Marbles. Again, who is he speaking for here? In fact, the British people demand no such thing from the Greeks. How do we know this? A recent Guardian poll offered further incontrovertible evidence that the large majority of the public (94.8%) want to see the Marbles returned. It was not scientific — internet polls rarely are — but it was broadly in line with most other public opinion polls on this topic.

The British Museum's last remaining line of argument is that only in London can the Marbles be understood within the context of other cultures. The visitor to the British Museum can compare the Greek achievement with that of the Persians, or of ancient Mesopotamia, and so on. This ideal visitor, endowed with a sufficiently sophisticated visual awareness to grasp the finer nuances of formal stylistic development across cultures, is a myth propagated by museum curators out of touch with their audience.

In fact, the evidence suggests that such art historical subtleties are beyond the average visitor. As Louvre director Henri Loyrette told a conference at the British Museum, "Most of our displays mean nothing to people. Indeed, a survey of Louvre visitors revealed that 67 percent of those questioned in the Archaic Greece room could not identify a personality or event connected with the period." (The Guardian, 27th November, 2003).

Just as MPs were recently exposed for holding the electorate in contempt over expenses, so too the British Museum is now in danger of losing the trust of its public. Bonnie Greer, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, insists that the Marbles must remain in Britain. Ms Greer, look at the polls. You do not speak for me, nor, it seems, for the majority of the British people to whom you owe a duty of care.

Read 'em and weep: welcome to The New Art Market

The colonization of the art market by speculators of one sort or another has been one of the most talked-about themes in the specialist art press in recent years.

Nowhere was it more evident than at the epochal Damien Hirst auction last September which brought new millionaire collectors scampering like lemmings to the cliff edge. Sure enough, later that very same day, Lehman Brothers collapsed, the global financial markets tumbled and the storm clouds of recession closed in like one of those apocalyptic John Martin paintings.

The Hirst sale catalogue — a four-piece boxed set encased in glossy gold and diamond-spattered gun-metal grey reinforced cardboard, weighing all of 2.9 kilograms — sits on the shelf above my desk, an obdurate emblem of an out-of-control art market on steroids. If it falls off, it will surely kill me stone dead.

Now, with the market in a state of enforced cold turkey, the deep baritone of moral outrage continues to echo around the blogosphere and on the television channels. The market currently looks like a Warhol car crash as prices plummet to new lows, consignments wither, catalogues shrink, galleries close. Commentators and journalists seem intent on apportioning blame.

Some point the finger at millionaire hedge fund managers for driving up prices. Or if it wasn't the hedgies it was the auction houses for acting as principals, clipping the ticket on both the buy and sell sides while blithely waving away accusations of a conflict of interest. And if it wasn't the auction houses it was the dealers for supporting their artists by artificially inflating the bidding when their works came up for sale. Occasionally even the artists are blamed for having throttled up their studios to industrial-scale production levels to meet the new global demand. Hell, when you can't find a scapegoat, blame anyone! Blame everyone!

The most overt instance of this headhunting to date (there will be more) was last night's BBC Four documentary The Great Contemporary Art Bubble, in which Ben Lewis, an Evening Standard journalist in a trilby and spectacles the size of the Brooklyn Bridge, trolled around the world in an electric car like a scruffy public health inspector visiting roach motels. One minute it was the dealers who were to blame by protecting their artists at auction, then it was the auction houses for offering guarantees. What did he expect them to do? Er, they're businessmen, Ben.

Sotheby's CEO Bill Ruprecht told me in an interview in 2003, "You take a different kind of risk when you take a principal position and I expect to be rewarded for that. I have never lost money on a principal position." I bet he wouldn't say that today.

Lewis seemed genuinely shocked that some dealers were in the practice of bidding up their artists at auction, seeing this as yet another manifestation of a venal market. But this too is nothing new. The painter J.M.W.Turner used to send a butcher's boy to London auctions to bid up his pictures incognito to ensure they wouldn't be sold too cheaply.

The genetic code of today's market was written between 1680 and 1750. If Lewis had bothered to cast his eyes back that far he'd have found that a good deal of what irks him about the market today has always been there. That doesn't make it right. But it does help us to understand how we might set about correcting it.

This was the basic problem with Lewis's knee-jerk documentary. It was poorly researched and bereft of historical perspective save for the obligatory excavation of the last boom in 1989-90. That always gets dragged up because you can point the finger at Sotheby's $53 million loan to Alan Bond to buy Van Gogh's Irises (Bond defaulted), among any number of other market-pumping practices rife at the time and since. Corruption is everywhere if that's all you want to see.

It seems clear on the basis of recent developments that a new art market might now emerge out of the present carnage. It will be born out of a shift in axis from the primacy of the seller to the buyer. There will be more, not less, speculation. The availability of information will improve but that won't necessarily mean greater transparency, or not yet. Transaction prices will have to fall; they've already reached unsustainable levels. There could be new alliances between the traditional auction houses and the online data providers — which have already started to appear. The trade will find their roles challenged by a new breed of artists' agents who will work at lower costs (and thus for a smaller cut). Old fashioned connoisseurs — already as endangered a species as art critics — will increasingly give way to the bean counters, number crunchers and other bottom-feeders.

One organism that may survive will be the grizzled hack in a pork-pie hat driving around in a limited edition artist-modified electric car. We'll always need entertainment.

Picking up the Parthenon pieces

On a recent visit to Stockholm I heard how the marvellously energetic Swedish Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles have on two previous occasions returned to Athens small fragments from the Parthenon that had been picked up as souvenirs by Swedish nationals during visits to the temple many years ago (left).

Their 'owners' had evidently suffered a crise de conscience, prompted, it seems, by the growing international tide of opinion that favours the return of the Parthenon Marbles still held in London. Last June the Vatican returned a piece, as did Italy last October (left).

In both the Swedish cases the small fragments were gratefully accepted by the archaeological authorities in Athens. Cynics might argue that these minor acts of restitution are more symbolic than functional since we're talking here about the kind of object that can be fitted into a suitcase or hand luggage rather than large architectural members. But let's not underestimate their symbolic value nonetheless, for they could end up having a functional value too. It is acts like this that illustrate the extent to which international attitudes towards cultural property are changing, not at an elevated bureaucratic level but where it really counts — among the people, the demos.

Nobody is arguing that it could ever be possible to fully reunify the Parthenon. But the notion that every year pieces are returned to Athens from around the world — be they tiny souvenirs collected during less enlightened times by innocent tourists wandering around the monument or more significant pieces acquired by museums in the great era of collecting in the nineteenth century — demonstrates that not everyone shares the views promulgated by acquisitive directors of encyclopedic museums.

This week it emerged that two US tourists who chipped off a piece of the Colosseum in Rome 25 years ago have returned it, along with an apology for taking it (here and here). Like the pieces of the Parthenon recently returned to Athens, the bits of the Colosseum were small enough to fit into a pocket but they clearly grew in size in the minds of their owners whose conscience eventually got the better of them.

Inside the package from California was a note that read: "We should have done this sooner." According to one news report, Rome's archaeology officials have accepted the couple's apology and the local tourism officer has invited them to return to the city.

"Every time I looked at my souvenir collection, and came across that piece it made me feel guilty," wrote the Californian collectors. "It was a selfish and superficial act." Those are sentiments that the majority of British people feel whenever they wander into the Duveen Galleries in the British Museum in London, but they are powerless to act.

If Athens made an appeal to the world to return even the smallest souvenirs picked up from the Parthenon, it would increase pressure on the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles held in London. After all, in terms of motivation, there is little if any difference between the Californian couple who picked up fragments from the Colosseum and squirrelled them home, and Lord Elgin hacking off major sections of the Parthenon in the hope of adorning his ancestral seat. Both acts were ethically wrong. One of them has been righted; the other has not.

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The Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles: An Ethical Approach
The full transcript of my talk delivered to the Swedish Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles at the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities in Stockholm on April 25th can be read here

Gone fishing...

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Ransoms revisited

Mark Durney over at Art Theft Central has just posted a helpful piece about art theft ransoms here.

It reminded me of a news item I logged a few years ago from the New Zealand website, Stuff.com (link sadly no longer operative), which reported police concern that, "people are dealing with criminals themselves in order to recover stolen property," after a Christchurch car-yard operator paid a NZ$5000 'ransom' to secure the return of a stolen rally car. Evidently the following year (2006, I think) a stolen sculpture was also the subject of a NZ$10,000 ransom payment, although police didn't hear about it until the operation had been completed.



Interestingly, this latter case was allegedly "facilitated" by the editor of a New Zealand newspaper — the Kapiti Coast Observer.

These reports happened to come hot on the heels of the allegations that the Tate had paid a ransom to "buy back" the two J.M.W. Turner paintings — Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour: The Morning after the Deluge — stolen while on loan to Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle in 1994, about which Mark writes.

At the time, Tate director Sir Nick Serota and former head of operations Sandy Nairne (now director of the National Portrait Gallery), both denied that the £3.1 million was paid as a ransom. But the allegation made in the BBC2 documentary 'Undercover Art Theft' — that the money was paid to intermediaries acting on behalf of the Balkan mafioso who was holding the pictures — proved difficult to refute (although equally difficult to prove).

At the end of the documentary German reporters declared their determination to continue digging. But if you were Nick Serota or Lord Myners (then chairman of the Tate), wouldn't you have stipulated that the one sacred condition of any payment be that the paper trail be untraceable afterwards? 



As Mark points out in his blog item, the payment of ransoms to secure stolen art is not new, and neither is the involvement of the media in that process. One occasion occurred in the 1960s when the German illustrated news magazine Stern acted as go-between in negotiations over the recovery of a Tilman Rimenschneider sculpture of the Madonna which had been stolen from a mountain village church in Southern Germany. 



Stern's editor, the respected journalist Henri Nannen, engineered a ransom payment to the thieves, using his journal as the intermediary. It worked and the sculpture was recovered (Nannen is shown above left with the sculpture), although the police and local magistrates were hopping mad about it. (See Hugh McLeave, Rogues in the Gallery, Boston, 1981, pp96-108). Indeed history seems to have indicated that Nannen's intervention led to a spate of further church thefts in the region, seemingly undertaken by opportunist thieves encouraged by the possibility of a ransom (supporting the 'boost' theory to which Mark refers).



Then a few years ago, we heard that art crime experts were expecting the perpetrators of the Henry Moore sculpture theft to stick their heads above the parapet by demanding the reward of £100,000 reportedly offered by the Henry Moore Foundation. It now seems more likely that the Moore (and indeed a Lynn Chadwick work stolen around the same time) may have been melted down.

The Tate commented that the most important objective in the Turner negotiations was the recovery of the works of art. What about ethics? The fact that by paying a recovery fee the Tate might have sent out the wrong message to other criminals seems to have been ignored, along with the fact that art theft often involves violence.

"The investigation [into the Tate's Turners] was never completed," a spokesperson for Frankfurt magistrates told the American art magazine Art News around the time the BBC2 documentary was broadcast.

They might not have delivered on that, but renewed scrutiny from Michael Daley of pressure group Art Watch suggests this one hasn't yet run its course. Daley believes Lord Myners was being "either incredulous or disingenuous" when he said in a letter in 2005 that no ransom had been paid. (Telegraph link here).

Are we entering the era of guerilla activism in cultural heritage?

So, Cai Mingchao (left), who claims to be the winning bidder on the Qing Dynasty rat and rabbit heads from the Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé collection at Christie's in Paris last week, turns out to be an adviser to the foundation in China that seeks to retrieve looted cultural heritage. Cai is refusing to pay for the bronzes, according to the Reuters news agency (reporting here).

Are we entering an era of guerilla activism, where sabotage of art auctions becomes another weapon in cultural heritage repatriation disputes?

Last October, Cai Mingchao — the general manager of Xiamen Harmony Art International Auction Co. — was among the buyers at Sotheby's sale of Chinese art in Hong Kong, according to William Verdult. After the sale Cai told reporters, "The purchases are as much about patriotism as a love of art ... Many of us just want these Chinese treasures to come home,'' thereby demonstrating the nationalist fervour driving Chinese cultural heritage claims.

There has been much talk this week, following the Bergé auction, of the possibility of China looking to the law as a means of pressing for return of its treasures. This would be a mistake, successful Italian cultural lawsuits notwithstanding.

But what chance cultural diplomacy, particularly where a still bloated art market is involved?

Evidently the Zodiac rat and rabbit heads in dispute are still in Paris. It is highly unlikely that Christie's would have released them without payment — or at least some form of down payment. The auction house made a number of significant loans to buyers at last week's sale, but it would be surprising if they did so in this case.

It could, of course, turn out to be another grand publicity stunt by the Chinese. Either way it's going to be fascinating to see how this one plays out.

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Picture of Cai Mingchao above: REUTERS/Christina Hu

Bergé ne bouge pas. Vive la décadence!

When it comes to cultural objects, it seems that invoking the 'universal' is asking for trouble.

When the American writer Edmund White visited Yves Saint Laurent at his home in Paris in the early 1990s, the designer spoke warmly of his erstwhile companion and business partner Pierre Bergé:

"A marvellous man — an intimate friend. We started the house together. He's very artistic, he reads everything — he has a universal culture, he's a universal man. Poor thing, he became a businessman for my sake. [...] The business is an eagle with two heads. [...] Even dead an eagle would frighten me. I'm terrified of predators." (Edmund White, Arts & Letters, Cleis Press, 2004, p315).

Ironic, then, that it was two quite different heads that cast a shadow over the Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris this week.

Much has been written about the pair of mid-18th century Qing Dynasty bronze heads (above left) which formed part of the elaborate 'Zodiac' water fountain in the Emperor Qianlong's Summer Palace until reportedly looted by British and French troops in 1860 at the end of the Opium Wars. One of the most helpful recent articles on the topic came from the blog of Richard Spencer, the Daily Telegraph's China correspondent (So who did loot those French/Italian animal heads?).

As Spencer's piece made clear, the story of how the two animal heads ended up in Europe is a long and tortuous one, the exact historical details of which remain shrouded in mystery.

In 2007, the billionaire Hong Kong financier Stanley Ho donated a horse's head sculpture from the Zodiac fountain to the Chinese government after reportedly acquiring it from a Taiwanese businessman for $8.84 million. Another was said to have ended up in a Beverly Hills swimming pool, which is an interesting variation on the bunny in the boiler, the rat up the drainpipe and the horse's head in the bed.

Bergé seemed loftily unmoved by Chinese attempts to stop the sale (Don Corleone would have known how to call a halt to it). Yesterday I read that Chinese Kung Fu action film star Jackie Chan has now entered the fray, condemning the sale as "shameful", adding, "Now we have lost two more pieces. This has made me really angry." If someone had told him about it before the sale we might have been treated to a Bruce Lee-style Cultural Heritage Rescue Drama in which Chan storms into the Grand Palais and aims a few well-aimed kung fu chops and high kicks to liberate the rat and rabbit from the clutches of the evil collector.

But sadly not. Instead the sale demonstrated once again that when the genteel realm of cultural heritage squares up to the art market it is usually the latter that comes out on top.

That said, having incurred the wrath of the Chinese cultural authorities, Christie's business dealings in China will henceforth be subjected to greater levels of forensic scrutiny by Beijing. So China may yet have the last word in this curious cultural stand-off.

Away from all the unseemly wrangling, the rest of the YSL sale saw some extraordinary prices changing hands. London commuters could be heard muttering in astonishment this week on reading in their newspapers of the staggering €21.9 million (£19.5m; $28m) which changed hands for the 'Dragon' armchair (right) by the Irish-born modernist designer Eileen Gray. That price was a real marmalade-dropper, even to jaded art market commentators like me.

This iconic object (already dubbed 'the Turd Chair' by philistine hacks) enjoyed pride of place in Yves Saint Laurent's rue de Babylone sitting room and may even have been the chair in which he languished like a Proustian neurasthenic while being interviewed by Edmund White.

"Decadence attracts me," Saint Laurent told White. "It signals a new world, and for me the struggle of a society caught between life and death is absolutely magnificent to behold."

How prescient.

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Behind the scenes at the Universal Museum No.1: The Melanesia Research Project

Republished with the kind permission of Percy Flarge...

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Structural change gathers pace in the art and antiques trade

We all knew that eBay was a route to market for illicit antiquities but the news that treasure-hunters armed with metal-detectors have been unearthing ancient treasures from British soil only to offload them via eBay and other websites is further proof of the extent of the illicit trade. (Here's a summary of the problem from The Guardian's Maev Kennedy).

The rise of eBay is not entirely unrelated to the steady downturn in the UK antiques trade. It might seem something of a non sequitur, but I was startled to see that this week's Antiques Trade Gazette (left) was almost entirely devoid of advertising from the big three auction houses.

There was a time when the weekly 'Gazza' — long regarded as something of an institution to the British art and antiques trade — was a massive slab of a thing, its 130-odd pages held together by the mortar of numerous single-page ads for Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams (and, at one time, Phillips). Such was its indispensability to the top auction houses and to a thriving pre-internet trade that former Phillips Chairman Christopher Weston once described it (much to the chagrin of its owner) as "a license to print money".

The ATG was founded by Ivor Turnbull, a former Fleet Street diarist who saw a gap in the market for a trade newspaper. Just before he died, after building the paper into a model of impartial, if slightly unadventurous, market reporting, he sold it to the Daily Mail Group. In keeping with the late-nineties Zeitgeist, the DMG set about turning the ATG into a mouthpiece for its own commercial interests, which were increasingly in direct competition with the paper's advertisers. Sadly, nobody was on hand to safeguard the paper's integrity and it duly succombed to the dead hand of corporate manipulation. It's hard not to see its current anorexia as in some way related to that intervention.

Coincident with the takeover of what was originally the industry's only useful publication was the advance of the internet, which has effectively driven a coach and horses through the UK antiques trade. Provincial auctions, never the the most enterprising and forward-thinking sector, failed to respond quickly enough to the opportunities the internet promised, preferring to see it as a threat to their territory. What followed was the steady migration of large sectors of the market onto low-cost platforms like eBay.

Then in stepped the Fine Art Auction Group (FAAG), a clutch of ambitious City boys intent on dragging provincial auction houses kicking and screaming into a bright new profitable future. What this meant was consolidation — buying up auction houses into one central group, the sharing of technology, advertising and expertise, and cost-cutting through economies of scale, all of which was designed to maximise revenues.

This week's ATG reported that auction house Dreweatts (owned by FAAG) has decided to close Neales, the Nottinghamshire auction house it acquired in 2005, thus driving the final nail into the coffin of a local business that, until FAAG took it over, had survived since 1830. So much for 'consolidation'.

This summer the ATG is organising a new auctioneers' conference at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham. I had hoped that it might confront some of the more sensitive aspects of the UK auction industry, such as the growing controversy about insurance charges (recently discussed on the Museum Security Network Google Group), and the need for fresh initiatives to combat the trade in stolen goods and illicit antiquities. But no. Ethics? Schmethics! Instead the emphasis will be on safeguarding your business in a downturn.

Nothing wrong with that, you might say, except that the business technology being promoted is the ATG's own Live Bidding system. You can see why they're doing this. Print media is on its knees. Advertisers are in flight and online news outlets offer better editorial coverage at much lower cost.

But why hasn't the UK auction community and its professional associations — RICS, NAVA, SOFAA — not banded together before now to build technological solutions that belonged to them — a kind of British Drouot — rather than allowing a private equity group to step in and effectively control their businesses?

Major changes will play out in the online auction realm over the next twelve months as the ATG's the-saleroom.com (its live bidding platform) goes head to head with its main rivals Live Auctioneers in the US and Invaluable's Invaluable Live! service to occupy the space vacated by eBay Live Auctions.

It's certainly a battle worth fighting in the light of a new survey conducted by UK trade body LAPADA which revealed the internet as an increasingly important trading platform for the trade. Some 67 per cent said they had sold stock online in 2008 (compared to 58 per cent at the 2007 survey) with 45 per cent making online purchases (39 per cent in 2007).

Globalisation and the Art Market

The European Fine Art Foundation, which runs the annual European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht has commissioned another of its own special reports seeking to assess the state of the international art market.

This year's report — entitled Globalisation and the Art Market, Emerging Economies and the Art Trade in 2008 — has been published to coincide with the 2009 fair, which runs from 13th to 22nd March. The problem is, the research for this report was conducted prior to the cataclysmic credit crunch. We didn't need an expensive survey to tell us that India, China, Russia and the Middle East were emerging players in the global art market. One couldn't pick up a magazine or newspaper back in the heady days of 2007-08 without reading about burgeoning new economies impacting on the art trade.

Dr Clare McAndrew (right), who prepared the report, has thus merely confirmed what we already knew, or, worse, delivered something that is no longer valid. For example, the report describes Dubai as "the leading art market centre in the Middle East with 2007 sales of about €150 million", but this weekend Paul Lewis reported for the Guardian that Dubai's banks have stopped lending and its stock exchange has plunged 70%, while "the real estate bubble that propelled the frenetic expansion of Dubai on the back of borrowed cash and speculative investment has burst." Against that scenario it's hard to see Dubai continuing as the art market force the report describes.

Dealers canvassed for the TEFAF report revealed that prior to the art market boom they were accustomed to dealing with "a smaller group of more traditional collectors with a high degree of connoisseurship". The boom then ushered in "a new generation of 'global shoppers' with a lot of money, not as much specialist knowledge and with different motivations for buying art, including investment, prestige, fashion and nationalism." Certainly it was that constituency that drove the contemporary market to the vertiginous heights from which it has since plummeted. And interesting to hear mention of the word 'nationalism' which has become such a spectre to devotees of the Encyclopedic Museum.

It will be fascinating to see whether the modern and contemporary art section at this year's TEFAF in Maastricht suffers from the recent exodus from the marketplace of the fashion-driven 'global shoppers' mentioned in the report. TEFAF — traditionally associated with the Old Masters market — has never sought to compete with the Basel, Miami Beach or Frieze contemporary art fairs, leaning instead towards classic modern rather than cutting-edge contemporary for its 20th-century art sector. This may spare it the kind of bruising now being suffered by the auction houses.

Ben Janssens, the London-based dealer in Oriental art who is chairman of TEFAF’s Executive Committee, told me this morning that despite the prevailing doom and gloom he was optimistic about this year's fair: "There is a large percentage of specialists in fields other than contemporary art that have not been affected by the recent crisis." Those collectors who are still buying are concentrating on quality, says Mr Janssens, but prices need to be sensible. "If dealers come to Maastricht with good things, realistically priced, they will do well."

Meanwhile, says Janssens, "There is definitely a readjustment going on and there are areas where people will obviously look to cut costs." Judging from the seriously under-nourished ATG sitting on my desk, it would appear that the auction houses have already begun that process, trimming their advertising to match their seriously depleted consignments.

As one art journalist friend observed this morning, there were more 'specialists' featured in the front page of this week's Christie's Impressionist catalogue than there were lots. "How many specialists does it take to change a light bulb?" he quipped.

Will we ever have a conversation about the Parthenon Marbles that is free of controversy?

In its online coverage of the planned June opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens (left), Canada's CBC News offered an abrupt summary of the Parthenon Marbles debate to date. It closed with the paragraph: "The Parthenon, a fifth-century temple dedicated to the god Athena, had its roof blown off in a 17th-century explosion, when it was used by the Ottomans for munitions storage. The marbles taken by Elgin were fragments left after the blast."

Hmm. "Fragments left after the blast" makes it sound as if the temple sculptures now in the British Museum were lying scattered on the ground waiting for a visionary antiquarian to sweep them up and spirit them heroically back to London for posterity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Then again, I suppose if CBC had given the more accurate account — "The marbles taken by Elgin were hacked from the building using crude saws" — the British Museum and other 'cultural property retentionists' would have seen this as equally incendiary.

Will the June opening of the New Acropolis Museum deliver a breakthrough in this age-old stand-off? The lines currently being rehearsed by BM director Neil MacGregor suggest not. A couple of nights ago he appeared for just a few seconds in a BBC news item about the British Museum's current Shah Abbas exhibition devoted to the treasures of ancient Iran.

The exhibition, MacGregor mumbled, enables us to have a "conversation" about ancient Persia. In yet another subtle genuflection towards the 'Universal Museum', he went on to insist that the British Museum is the only place on earth where such "conversations" can be had, thereby exposing the extent of his self-delusion. Increasingly, whatever MacGregor is talking about, one senses that he's really talking about the Parthenon Marbles.

I cannot remember a time when the Parthenon Marbles were discussed in any terms other than as a cultural controversy. Sure, archaeologists and classicists will convene from time to time to chew over the academic aspects of the Parthenon and its architecture. But in the public sphere the architectural significance of these venerable ancient objects has become almost entirely occluded by an unseemly diplomatic stand-off.

The British Museum now has the first real opportunity to break that impasse by acknowledging that the Greeks have finally created in the New Acropolis Museum a superb and entirely appropriate environment in which to unite the existing fragments. This would enable everyone to see the Marbles for what they are rather than for what they have become. Moreover, it would reveal the British Museum as a visionary, enlightened, and truly 'Universal' museum that places objects and their appreciation above petty considerations of legal title.

But even were Mr MacGregor and his trustees to refuse to return the Marbles (which remains the most predictable outcome), I for one firmly believe that once the New Acropolis Museum finally opens on June 20, the only relevant conversations about the history and continuing cultural significance of the Parthenon Marbles will be those that take place in Athens where their architectural significance once again becomes abundantly clear.

As for the British Museum, as long as it refuses to return the Marbles, any 'conversations' it seeks to preside over will increasingly be seen as parochial, anachronistic and irrelevant.

Busking on Benin: The Encyclopedic Museum runs aground

Further to my interim item of earlier today on British Museum director Neil MacGregor's recent public lecture on the foundation and contemporary function of the BM, the full lecture is recorded here. It comes across as the most desperate defence of the 'Universal' or 'Encyclopedic' museum since James Cuno's recent book.

This evening I spent an enjoyable hour making Greek feta pies and slurping white wine while listening to MacGregor's lecture on the iPod, pausing only to splutter with mirth at his floundering attempts to justify the historical development of the institution over which he presides. Try as MacGregor might to focus on the British Museum's many strengths, he will never silence the skeletons rattling noisily in its basement storerooms. Better, surely, to acknowledge their presence; better still to let a few of them out.

Neil MacGregor is generally renowned as an inspiring and erudite speaker and so it was all the more peculiar to hear him thrashing around trying to justify the BM's retention of the Benin brasses on the grounds that they were fashioned from a raw material originally supplied by European traders. He sounded like George Bush busking on particle physics.

I was also surprised and disappointed that he failed to refer by name to the Benin-born contemporary artist Romuald Hazoumé as the creator of the striking installation La Bouche du Roi, which the BM recently acquired (and which I reviewed here). Clearly the badge of anonymity historically attached to African 'tribal' or primitive' art still lingers in some quarters.

Above all — and most pertinently, given James Cuno's recent muscular pronouncements about a nascent nationalist strain in cultural politics — it was telling to hear MacGregor's rehearsal of the profound and immoveable 'Britishness' of the British Museum. Clearly it's all well and good for the British Museum to use its collections to tell the stories of other cultures, but when those same cultures request the return of their cultural objects in order to reclaim their autobiographical rights they are accused of a sordid and destructive 'nationalism'.

Is it any surprise this Universal Museum thing just won't go away?

Trade and Plunder: The curious twisted logic of the Universal Museum

I was fascinated to see an item in this month's Museums Journal commenting on a lecture given recently by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. For some reason whenever Saint Neil delivers a rapturous address to his congregation I always seem to be otherwise engaged.

Anyway, it seems that during his talk, MacGregor sought to justify the British Museum's controversial retention of the Benin brasses by referring to the historical trade in copper between Europe and Benin. According to Felicity Heywood of the MJ, MacGregor "argued that if the BM could prove that traded copper was melted down to make the brass plaques, then it has a right to the objects."

I see, so if I sell you a raw material and from that material you make something, the fact that it was made from the material that I sold you gives me the right to steal it back from you, along with a good deal of your other possessions as well, while killing several members of your family in the process if necessary.

Yeah, that makes sense. Who said encyclopedic museums were on the defensive?

Hubris and greed — welcome to the art market dead pool

Alexandra Peers' recent piece in New York Magazine refers to an artist calling himself Buck Naked who has started a blog entitled Death Watch to name-check those art dealers most likely to fall victim to the severe art market contraction currently taking place. Visitors can register and effectively blow the whistle on gallerists or businesses that they know/guess are in debt or which are unlikely to be able to ride out the recession.

What's worrying some in the trade is that the forum could become a self-fulfilling prophesy and may even encourage short-selling of the galleries mentioned.

One member of the trade has called the site, "Ghoulish! Obscene! Dishonourable! Tasteless! Potentially Harmful! Gruesome! Offensive in Every Way Imaginable!" Such gushing praise will be echoed by the many artists still unpaid by defaulting galleries who overstretched themselves during the years of milk and honey.

Buck Naked has responded to the criticism thus: "Yes, (most) dealers do work their asses off, but some, including those on this list, have displayed incredible hubris during the good times. Multiple spaces which they really couldn't afford, and treating artists as a free source of capital, to be paid back whenever it's convenient. Gruesome? Maybe. But these are gruesome times, and this list is not unseemly."

I'd have to agree with that. The Death Watch blog clearly genuflects towards FuckedCompany.com of beloved memory, founded by Philip 'Pud' Kaplan in 2000, which reached cult status during the dotcom meltdown for its shameless monitoring and broadcasting of doomed startups (FC logo reproduced with apologies above left).

One thing common to the dotcom period and the recent art market boom was the hubris to which Buck Naked refers. Hubris, and greed. Oh, and the fact that both the sites mentioned above had a loyal following among 'victims' of that greed and hubris. In the case of FuckedCompany it was the employees kicked to the kerb by their employers; with Death Watch it's the artists left twisting in the wind by their dealers.

Having been approached in 2006 to help fix a prominent online contemporary print company that had started to great fanfare during the dotcom period, I subsequently discovered that the directors from whom I took over had, in the previous five years, quietly but effectively bled the company dry through a combination of corporate mismanagement and embezzlement. But it's one thing to syphon off venture capital injected by credulous shareholders who should have known better, and quite another to play fast and loose with money rightfully due to artists whose work had been sold.

Now we're seeing similar scenarios played out all over again. Is it any wonder that artists are seeking new routes to market that swerve round the gallery option?

On a related note, The Guardian's arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins wrote a good piece in Sunday's Observer about the current art market correction (here) in which she said, "Only bad artists and clueless, greedy collectors should fear the consequences of the economic meltdown. For the rest of us, it's an ideal time to bring some rationality back to the art world." She forgot to mention the dealers and auctioneers.

I agree with most of what she wrote and almost snarfed orange juice down my nose on seeing the quote from a Sotheby's contemporary art suit who counselled, "Don't worry, there is a return to seeing the real object and what kind of presence it has, what's great and what is not so good. And what's great will nowadays sell." Ah, OK. And there I was, worrying...

It's easy to snort with derision at these silver-tongued plonkers and other art market bottom-feeders. But why did Ms Higgins wait until the correction had actually begun before pulling the trigger on the greed and poor judgement that has accumulated like so much scum on the surface of that rancid pond in recent years? She could have said this months ago, so what stopped her? Perhaps she feared the short-sellers. One upside of the current correction might be a return to fearless criticism. If it's bad, then say it's bad. If the hedge fund guys short-sell it as a consequence, so be it. Fucked Gallery RIP.

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Death Watch Stalks Galleries Alexandra Peers in New York Magazine

"A colony of bats would have been better protected": Antique dealers an endangered species as Anthropologie muscles in

There was the unmistakeable whiff of the sepulchre about Antiquarius this morning following the news that the Grade II listed Arts & Crafts period building on the Kings Road will be occupied later this year by wealthy US fashion giant Anthropologie. (See my earlier story here).

Fifteen minutes after opening time this morning there was barely a dealer in sight, the only activity coming from the on-site greasy spoon that serves the dealers who show here. The handful of traders who had bothered to turn up looked as if their world was about to end as they wearily unlocked their stands. Most were unprepared to talk. Perhaps they fear that publicizing the imminent closure of the centre could dampen what little business is left to scrape together before everyone is finally evicted in a few months time.

The deal that now looks almost certain to go through would allow wealthy US fashion chain Anthropologie, (which also sells antiques and decorative objects from its 100 stores across the US), to acquire the lease from owners retail property investment company London & Associated Properties (LAP). Since acquiring it in 2006, LAP has made several attempts to secure planning permission to develop the building, but all their applications have been turned down. However, this doesn't seem to have stopped them going ahead with internal structural alterations.

Under the new deal, Anthropologie will work under the auspices of English Heritage to fund and execute a restoration of the listed building (right, constructed in the 1920s by the Temperance Movement) before turning the Kings Road premises into its first London outlet.

Before restoration can begin — which insiders say will commence this summer in time for a planned Anthropologie opening before Christmas — permission must be granted by the owners of the building, Cadogan Estates. All the signs are, however, that approval will be granted, particularly now that local residents' associations have approved the plan.

One dealer who was prepared to talk about the imminent closure was ivory dealer Malcolm Simpson who has been trading at Antiquarius for 35 years. "If we had been a colony of bats, we'd have been better protected than we have been," said Mr Simpson. "They don't care about the dealers who occupy the building. We don't matter. We have never been asked or told about anything, or ever invited to a meeting. All decisions have been taken without consulting us."

Mr Simpson, who pays £450 per month for his stand, believes that the centre will have ceased trading in a few months time. "We used to have an annual lease on our stands. Then a year or so ago, when they began discussions to sell the building, they halved the lease to six months. Then recently it was cut to a month. Now we're all on borrowed time."

Mr Simpson remembers when the same property company, LAP, evicted all the dealers from another of its antiques centres, Chenil House just 100 yards down the Kings Road. The building was subsequently let to the Daisy & Tom childrens' toy and fashion company. However, Daisy & Tom soon closed and the Chenil building, like the Mall Antiques Centre in Islington — yet another recent victim of LAP's voracious business plan — now stands forlornly unoccupied.

One Antiquarius silver dealer who asked not to be named also expressed disgust at the way the dealers have been treated by their landlords but accepted that times change. "I've been here 30 years," he said. "Nobody has asked me once what I think or has ever spoken to me once about what's going on. We're all being kept in the dark. Nobody knows what's happening or whether we'll have to leave. That's big business for you. Fashion. It's all money, money, money. You just have to accept it and move on."

Wandering the dark warren of shuttered stands at Antiquarius this morning, one sensed that an era — and another strand of the UK antiques trade — was drawing to an end. Outside one could see further evidence of how antiquated and behind the times Antiquarius had become. The painted sign attached to the wall of the building in Flood Street announces the presence of "over 120 dealers" (today there are barely 50), while the sign still shows the telephone number as 0171, a code that changed almost ten years ago.

Antiques and Anthropologie: Dealers to be evicted from Chelsea antiques centre as US fashion chain acquires Kings Road premises.

Anthropologie, the US fashion and accessories retail chain, has acquired the Antiquarius building on the Kings Road, Chelsea, currently home to around 80 antiques and collectables dealers who will be evicted to make way for an Anthropologie store, trade sources have told Artknows.

This was the main story on everyone's lips at the Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair in Battersea Park today where a mood of cautious optimism prevailed following an encouraging first day's trading. Some business was being done despite the credit crunch and one or two exhibitors were celebrating the fact that the resurgent dollar had even encouraged a few Americans to come and buy.

Just how much this small upward blip in confidence could be attributed to the Obama bounce following yesterday's inauguration was unclear. Certainly it represented a glimmer of cheer in an otherwise gloomy world.

I say gloomy, because while some Americans were exercising their credit cards in Battersea, other US business interests were having an altogether less positive impact on the antiques trade elsewhere in London as word quickly spread that the cult American fashion and accessories retail chain, Anthropologie, had acquired the Kings Road premises of Antiquarius (right) and is poised to evict the dealers based there.

Coming so soon after the recent eviction of dealers from the Mall Antiques Arcade in Islington, the last thing the London antiques trade needs right now is the demise of yet another iconic antiques centre. But clearly fashion retail is now king.

Only last week, top-drawer English furniture dealers Mallett announced their imminent departure from their Bond Street premises on the grounds that they were no longer prepared to pay the extortionate rents. But they also confided that another reason for moving is that the once classy ambience of Bond Street has been besmirched by an invasion of multi-national fashion brands like Gucci, Armani and Versace, all of which require massive architect-designed flagship stores from which to sell their tacky merchandise.

As if this downbeat news were not enough, long-established Knightsbridge furniture dealers Norman Adams has decided to cease trading altogether after witnessing a change of taste in recent years that has dealt a body blow to the market for English period furniture.

The UK antiques trade — enfeebled, superannuated, and desperately out of touch with the modern world — had it coming. Cocooned in complacency date-stamped 1975, it has consistently failed to reinvent itself in the face of changing tastes while luxuriating in a refusal to embrace the digital age. (I recently requested from a leading UK trade association a digital copy of a letter it had written to the BBC and was sniffily told that only a hard copy existed. Er, scanner?).

Now desperately rearranging the deck-chairs as the water level rises, the antiques trade perhaps deserves to be muscled out of prime locations where consumers want a different form of shopping experience. Quite how the trade will reinvent itself in the face of these setbacks, to say nothing of the credit squeeze, is anyone's guess. But don't expect any great innovation from such a sleepy cultural backwater. Just get settled in your wing chair, switch on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow and float peacefully off into a catatonic state.

Meanwhile, by way of contrast, Anthropologie has been an amazing success, not only in offering consumers appealing fashion lines, but also in selling decorative antiques from the same outlets. This isn't a case of a sprat to catch a mackerel. With sales reaching $400 million in 2006, it's marlin-fishing on a grand scale.

The business began life in 1992 as a single store operating out of Wayne, Pennsylvania, at that time under the auspices of parent group Urban Outfitters, Inc. In 1994, the brand was taken over by Long Island entrepreneur Glen Senk and his business and life partner Keith Johnson, who together saw a gap in the women's fashion and accessories market. In a relatively short space of time they turned Anthropologie into a US-wide cult brand patronised by film stars and other celebrities, with flagship stores in Los Angeles and New York, including a 12,000 square foot branch that opened last year in the Rockefeller Centre.

Keith Johnson, spotted at this week's Decorative Antiques Fair in Battersea, is Anthropologie's antiques buyer. Each Anthropologie store is notable for its glamorous interiors fitted out with unusual decorative antiques and historical objects sourced by Johnson on his frequent trips to Europe and elsewhere. At first the antiques weren't for sale, but pretty soon buyers who called in for a new dress began asking the price of the decorative objects on show.

Clearly the ambience conveyed by the antiques promotes the core business of fashion and accessories, but all the evidence suggests that it's a reciprocal pull. According to House & Garden magazine, Anthropologie is not only one of the most popular fashion brands in the US, but also America's No.1 purveyor of decorative antiques.

Now it seems it won't be long before Chelsea shoppers are sampling the Anthropologie experience, albeit at the expense of Antiquarius (left). Whether the presence of one of America's leading designer fashion outlets will make up for the demise of the antiques centre in the minds of London shoppers remains to be seen. The Antiquarius building at 131-141 Kings Road, Chelsea, began life in the 1920s as a gentleman's club and pool hall before becoming an antiques centre in the 1960s. It is regarded as the oldest and most famous of the capital's antiques centres, home to around 80 dealers in decorative antiques and collectables.

"It won't be Keith's decision to kick out the dealers from Antiquarius," said one dealer at the Battersea Decorative Antiques Fair. "After all, Keith's a dealer himself in effect. But it will happen."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Antiquarius management were not answering the telephone when I called today for a comment. Doubtless they were too busy reading the writing on the wall. However, one dealer at the centre did confirm that the premises had been bought.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Anthropologie confirmed that the company will be opening stores in Europe in the near future, but said that a date and location "has not yet been released."

Watch this space.

Jock McTitian — Transfer Window About To Close

Glasgow South MP Ian Davidson has added his voice to those opposing the spending of public money on acquiring Titian's Diana And Actaeon from the Bridgewater collection (left). An announcement is expected at any moment confirming that the necessary £50 million has been raised.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland's 'Good Morning Scotland' programme, Mr Davidson, argued that it was difficult justifying spending such sums on "a picture by a long dead Venetian — it's not as if it's Jock McTitian."

This was interesting for all sorts of reasons — not least the way in which Davidson used the nationalist card (generally used to argue for the retention of cultural property) to argue against its acquisition. Titian wasn't a Scot. Ergo, why keep it?

But leaving aside the finer points for and against acquiring the picture, what struck me most was the way in which art history as a discipline once again subtly emerged as the whipping boy. "Very few people will ever have heard of Titian," said Davidson, unwittingly revealing his own ignorance of the history of western visual culture. "Many will have thought he was an Italian football player. What is the point of wasting this money in this way?"

His comment reminded me of a 2006 edition of Celebrity University Challenge featuring television journalists against television drama writers. The TV-hack team — comprising Kate Adie, Michael Buerk, Bridget Kendall and, I think, Nick Robinson — were shown three famous paintings from British national collections and asked to identify the picture and the artist. I recall the images included Sir Henry Raeburn's Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, from the Scottish National Gallery (right, top), Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage Portrait from the London National Gallery (bottom right), and Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano (centre), also from the National Gallery. The journos muttered and exchanged mystified expressions.

Should we be critical of them for not recognizing any of these pictures? After all, these guys are justifiably celebrated for their war-reporting rather than for their knowledge of art history. But it was notable that rather than the usual frustrated finger-clicking indicating that they knew but couldn't quite dredge up the answer, they all displayed totally blank faces as if they'd been asked to compute the molecular density of moon rock. The skating cleric aside, the other two pictures are, let's face it, seminal images from the history of art.

The fact that a handful of prominent BBC news journalists were unable to identify three of the most internationally famous images from UK national collections perhaps underscores Ian Davidson's point that one of the greatest artists of the Italian High Renaissance could be an Italian footballer for all it matters to the British public.

So isn't it time to promote the teaching of art history at primary and secondary school level? It remains a highly popular subject at university, but why isn't a basic knowledge of art history recognised as a valuable component of children's intellectual development and enshrined as such within the national curriculum?

I was interested to read that Munira Mirza, London Mayor Boris Johnson's director of cultural policy, has included in her manifesto: "raising the profile of art history in schools". Bravo.

This ought to be adopted as a matter of urgency. If our children — and indeed our celebrity news hacks — had a better visual education then perhaps these perennial issues over whether or not to save a picture for the nation would not be quite so fraught with marginal bickering. Most people would know who Titian was and would have some idea of his significance to the development of Western painting.

All we'd need to do then is decide whether or not to fork out for it. The transfer window for Jock McTitian is about to close. Hold the back page.

Crowds, crowds, and celebrities

Crowds were very much in evidence in central London yesterday afternoon – at blockbuster art exhibitions, at football matches and at political demonstrations.

While Annie Lennox, Bianca Jagger and thousands of others assembled in Trafalgar Square to protest against the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, another crowd of biblical proportions descended upon Ye Olde Tate Britain to catch the Francis Bacon show before it closes in a fortnight's time. It wasn't that long ago that the Hayward staged a sizeable retrospective of Bacon's work, but his place in the public imagination, like the price of his work on the international art market, just keeps on growing.

The sheer size of the crowds willing to wrestle for a poor view of Bacon's paintings stood in stark contrast to the scant few dawdling through the last days of the Turner Prize exhibition. Hardly surprising, I concluded, given the standard of work on display. This year the preponderance of video-based nonsense was striking. I have limited patience for much of this stuff. There are never enough benches to allow you to sit down and concentrate properly. There is no way of telling whether you've entered the darkened room at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the piece. Does it matter? Who cares? What's the wing-span of an African butterfly? Did I remember to switch off the oven? Shall I have a latte or an espresso when I leave here? I wonder what's on at the Hayward?

I was momentarily intrigued by a Runa Islam video of a woman smashing a perfectly good china coffee pot, but the rest reached a level of tedium so profound that it quite literally propelled me out of the building and over to the South Bank to catch another slice of the Warhol show.

Like so many Hayward exhibitions, this one is horribly over-designed, probably because the curators always need to do something radical to distract us from the sensation of being trapped in a nuclear bunker. Bianca Jagger turned up again here, this time as the subject of one of Andy's polaroid portraits of 1979. But like just about everything else in the room it was displayed too high up and in such gloom that it couldn't be properly appreciated. Sorry if this all sounds a bit critical. It's meant to.

Warhol may have been one of the progenitors of the now pervasive video work that is a stock element of every contemporary art fair and Turner Prize. You can credit him with starting the trend but you can't blame him for how pretentious it all became. I sat for a good half an hour, mesmerized by a soundless film of the Velvet Underground and Nico jamming in the Factory.

But what helped end my gallery perambulations on a high note was a short video Andy shot in 1980 of a conversation between Henry Geldzahler, former curator of contemporary art at the Met, and his friend and erstwhile colleague, Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of couture.

The two were seated on a couch in DV's boudoir (left), a corpulent Henry lounging at one end in a sharp grey suit, puffing on a cigar and stroking his wispy grey beard, Vreeland staring down at him from her great gondola-like nose and giving forth in her gravelly baritone.

The conversation turned to the Louvre. Vreeland related how as a five year-old living in Paris she and her sister would be taken with clockwork regularity to see the Mona Lisa. On each occasion their nanny would position them in a different part of the gallery to demonstrate that wherever one stood, La Gioconda would always be watching you.

On one occasion in 1911, late in the afternoon, as their zealous guardian was once again re-positioning them to labour the point, a guard entered and told them the museum was closing, it was time to leave. The next day, the Mona Lisa was stolen.

"We were the most famous children in Paris," Vreeland boomed. "We were the last children to see the Mona Lisa before she was snatched!" Seventy years later, Diana Vreeland was still dining out on the story.

So using stolen art as part of a process of self-aggrandizement is nothing new. It's just not always done with such elegance.

Now you see it, now you don't... 'Caravaggio' copy may be still missing

First it was reported stolen; then it was reported to have been recovered. Then it was suggested that it had not been recovered but was still missing. And then a nasty murder seems to have crept into the usual toxic brew of museum-break-ins, rumour, counter-rumour and underworld goings-on. Meanwhile, the painting at the centre of it all is not even the real thing, but a version of the original work by Caravaggio.

Back in August, I reported here that the painting known as The Taking of Christ, or The Kiss of Judas, stolen in July from a museum in Odessa, was not, as widely reported at the time of the theft, an authentic autograph work by Caravaggio, but a copy, albeit a very fine copy, of the original work by the artist now in the National Gallery in Dublin.

A couple of days ago it was reported that the version stolen in Odessa had finally been recovered. Had this been the case, the cycle from theft to recovery would have been considerably more contracted than tends to be the case with most thefts of major masterpieces, which can take years to resurface, if at all. But then it was suggested that the picture recovered in Ukraine was not the one stolen in July. The Caravaggio copy was still missing.

One can't help wondering whether the thieves - having undertaken the low level research required to establish that they were indeed in possession of the real thing - discovered that the authentic work was in Dublin and that theirs was a copy.

Clearly the Odessa version has value, having been executed to a high standard and perhaps even roughly contemporaneous with the autograph work. But it is not the real enchilada, as most serious Caravaggio scholars established decades ago, and as I made clear in my earlier piece, which drew on some first-rate scholarship published many years ago in The Burlington Magazine (relevant articles cited here).

Nevertheless, the case raises intriguing questions about relative values on the illicit market. It was also interesting and amusing to note that earlier authoritative reports notwithstanding, most news wires seem to have insisted on reporting the recent alleged recovery as if the Odessa picture was Caravaggio's original.

Art Daily reported the recovery here; the French language APA agency reported it here; and a Russian language online news journal covered it here together with a suggestion that the Odessa work was still missing.

Will the Caravaggio copy please stand up!

Romuald Hazoumé makes a difference

The extraordinary multi-media installation – La Bouche du Roi (1997-2005) by Benin-born sculptor Romuald Hazoumé (left) went on display last night at the Horniman Museum in south east London. This is the penultimate venue on the work’s UK tour before it takes up permanent residence in the British Museum, which recently acquired it for its permanent collection (with help from The Art Fund). Hazoumé is represented by London’s October Gallery.

There is no equivalent term in the art world for what in music is known as ‘world music’, but whatever you call it, The October Gallery is its spiritual home and centre of operations.

La Bouche du Roi (Mouth of the King) is a symbolic representation of an Atlantic slave ship that for three hundred years transported slaves from Africa to North America and Europe. The work employs the plastic petrol cans (above right) that have long been a prominent feature of Hazoumé’s work. Like Picasso, who with the subtlest manipulation transformed a bicycle saddle and handlebars into a bull’s head, so Hazoumé shows us the petrol can as African mask.

This is the great power of so many Nigerian contemporary artists – their ability to identify pure sculptural form in the most humble and neglected objects and materials. El Anatsui has done it with tin bottle tops; Nnenna Okore is doing it with newspaper, string and burlap; Hazoumé does it with petrol cans. It's tempting to see this as part of the legacy of European modernism and its discovery of the objet trouvé or ‘readymade’ – Picasso and Duchamp being the obvious grand masters. But of course they in turn took their lead from ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ objects. So the true source of the river was, and remains, Africa.

But Hazoumé is not interested in settling old historical scores or exacting revenge on Africa’s former colonial looters and tormentors. He is more concerned with what Africa can do today to address what he sees as modern forms of slavery. Hazoumé’s slave ship is not the stinking hulk that plied the waters off West Africa in 1700, but the edifice of economic exploitation that every day forces thousands of African men and women to risk their lives transporting black market petrol from Benin to Nigeria for a pittance. What makes La Bouche du Roi so important is its contemporary resonance, the way it draws attention to the immiseration and impoverishment visited upon countless millions of Africans by bankers and vulture capitalists.

The floor-based arrangement of La Bouche du Roi (aerial view shown left) comprises 304 black plastic petrol can ‘masks’ (which have assumed the colour and patina of bronze) stacked in serried overlapping rows to evoke the cramped conditions on board a slave ship. The masks are juxtaposed with sheaves of tobacco, spices, old gin bottles and a musket to represent the goods traded for slaves. These historical references provide the critical underpinning for the installation’s main contemporary theme, revealed in a short accompanying video documenting the petrol-couriers of modern-day Benin.

Shown in subdued lighting and with various ripe smells piped into the gallery to lend an evocative ambience, the installation is further animated by a background soundtrack of cacophonous voices speaking the Benin languages of Yoruba, Idaacha, Mahi, Mina and Holli to signify the slaves on board ship.

When I met Hazoumé at the Horniman yesterday he spoke passionately about the meaning and purpose of the work. “La Bouche du Roi is about what is happening now. Slavery continues today but in different forms. Now it is run by the bankers who oppress the weak people in the pursuit of profit, profit, profit.”

I asked him how he felt about the installation being shown at the Horniman Museum, and indeed owned by the British Museum, both institutions which, controversially, continue to hold important collections of the royal brasses looted from Benin by the British in the infamous Punitive Expedition of 1897 (above right).

“I have no problem with that!” he exclaims. “It is better that they are in the British Museum right now. If they were sent back to Benin they would be immediately sold to the Japanese and copies would be put in the Benin museum in their place. In Benin they need the money, you see, to buy votes. There is still too much corruption.” I ask if this is a view shared by many of his compatriots. “Of course! Everyone believes this!”

Well, not quite everyone. Barely a day goes by without another polemical essay appearing on the internet condemning the British Museum’s retention of the Benin brasses and calling for their return. Athens may now be in a position to look after the Parthenon Marbles more effectively and responsibly than the British Museum has ever done, but is Benin yet ready to take back and look after its own historical treasures? Not according to Romuald Hazoumé.

Although it focuses attention on the plight of many contemporary West Africans, La Bouche du Roi does not wallow in post-colonial angst or self-pity. Instead it comes across as a rallying cry, a call to arms.

At the same time, it provides a welcome critical contrast to the apparent willingness on the part of many bling-addled British contemporary artists to shore up the values of an unethical marketplace and pander to the vapid cult of celebrity.

Personally I’m delighted the British Museum had the vision to purchase La Bouche du Roi. It will look marvellous alongside the Benin bronzes…until Benin is in a position to receive them back.

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La Bouche du Roi is at the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, south east London, until 1st March 2009 and at The Herbert, Coventry from 3rd April to 31st May.

Portrait of Romuald Hazoumé courtesy October Gallery. Photo credit: Erick-Christian Ahounou

M.F.Husain's works "have survived" Taj Hotel siege

Contrary to the widely circulated news report covered by Express India and numerous other Asian media outlets (including, surprisingly enough, Taj Hotel owners, Tata Group, which reported it here), the three large paintings by Indian modernist M.F.Husain which have hung in the hotel's lobby since 2000, may not have been destroyed after all.

This morning I spoke with a leading Mumbai-based art consultant (indeed a member of the original team that catalogued the Taj collection in 2003) who confirmed off the record that the Husain works in question did survive last week's terrorist attack.

Requesting anonymity, he said it was too early to assess the precise extent of the damage to other works in the collection but given the circumstances of the siege some damage was "inevitable".

The news that his lobby paintings have emerged unscathed will doubtless be welcomed by 93 year-old M.F.Husain who, according to the reports cited above, was preparing to paint a fresh series to replace those "destroyed" in the attack.

More on this over the next few days.

Mumbai terror attacks take their toll on Taj Hotel art collection

It might seem perverse to be monitoring the plight of works of art as a result of a terrorist attack but all too often the collateral cultural damage gets overlooked on these occasions. This was certainly the case with the nasty little war between Georgia and Russia earlier this year (the cultural heritage implications of which I reported here).

Meanwhile, as those two countries still squabble about who was responsible for the damage to their ancient sites and monuments, attention turns to the carnage in Mumbai.

One of the worst hit locations during last week's terrorist attacks was the Taj Hotel (lobby shown above left), an internationally acclaimed cultural icon and a symbol of India's thrusting new economy. Less well-known is that the Taj, owned by the Tata Group, has a vast collection of historical and contemporary works of art, an unknown number of which were damaged in the recent carnage.

Perhaps the most significant reported art casualty was a series of three paintings by Maqbul Fida Husain (born 1915), the grandfather of Indian modernism, whose auction record (for Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12, right) currently stands at $1.6m (Christie's NY, March 2008).

In 2000, Husain was commissioned by Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata (whose family are major art patrons) to make a work for the Taj Hotel. Husain took up temporary residence in the Taj for several months, painting three large works for the hotel lobby. A widely syndicated report (here) suggested that those paintings were destroyed in last week's 59-hour siege.

The plight of other works by important Indian artists such as Anjolie Ela Menon (born 1940), Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001), Tyeb Mehta (born 1925), Jamini Roy (1887-1972), Syed Haider Raza (born 1922), and Krishnaji Howlaji Ara (born 1913) is unknown. When I phoned the company this morning a Tata Group spokesman confirmed that the Taj hotel's art collection is currently housed in the 'Palace wing', which is out of bounds until further notice. The company declined to comment on the state of any of the works in the art collection.

M.F.Husain, now 93, (left) has told reporters he will paint new works for the hotel as a tribute to the Tata family and the Taj hotel staff "who laid down their lives for others."

"I have decided to paint a series of paintings condemning the attack," Husain said. "I am sure some day the Taj will regain its glory and I hope to show these paintings there."

Built in 1903, the Taj is home to a collection of 2500 works of art. In 2003, the auction house Bowrings (now defunct) was called in to catalogue and value the collection as part of the hotel's centenary. They unearthed treasures that not even the Taj management was aware of, describing it as one of the "finest collections of contemporary Indian art in existence," and worth millions. They also found evidence that many works in the collection had suffered significant neglect (see New York Times report of 2004 here). A very fine quality work by K.H.Ara, for example, was found to have been damaged by other heavy canvases leaning against it.

Such depredations may fade into irrelevance in the light of last week's terrorist attacks, as M.F.Husain seemed to acknowledge. "The Taj has so many paintings apart from mine," he told reporters. "I shudder to think what has happened to them. The Taj is the only hotel in Mumbai which has given so much importance to modern art."

Art Crime — A timely educational initiative

Is art crime increasing, or has the threat simply been more keenly felt as prices on the art market have risen exponentially in recent years? Can the history of art crime teach us anything about how to secure collections today? Should we see art 'heists' — the theft of masterpieces from major public and private collections — as in any way related to the illicit trade in cultural heritage? Why has the retention and recovery of cultural heritage become such a critical issue to developing nations? Is the trafficking in art and cultural property connected to other forms of trafficking — in people, drugs and arms? To what extent has globalisation exacerbated these problems and what can be done to address them? How can museums secure their collections while safeguarding the principle of open public access that constitutes their raison d'être? Are museums doing enough to honour their moral obligations in researching the provenance of Holocaust-related assets in their collections, and acting properly on the results of that research?

Crimes against art and other forms of material culture have become one of the most pressing social problems in an increasingly globalized world. Understanding the nature of the problem and how to address it requires an awareness of the complex interconnections between the art market, archaeology, museology, cultural identity, art law and art policing.

Now an opportunity has arisen to engage with these issues in a new Masters programme organised by the recently founded Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA).

The first course takes place next summer in the delightful setting of Amelia, a hilltop town in the province of Terni in Umbria, Italy (pictured above left), an hour or so outside Rome. Having been recruited as one of the course lecturers, I have an interest in seeing it succeed. However, personal matters aside, with cultural heritage now such a hot international issue, with art prices still accelerating, and with the interconnections between art theft, the drugs and arms trade and people-trafficking becoming ever more apparent, never has there been a more appropriate moment to launch a serious educational initiative of this kind.

Information about the course is printed below, but further details can be found on the ARCA website here or feel free to email me or the course organisers who will endeavour to respond to any questions.

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MA Program in Art Crime Studies
ARCA (The Association for Research into Crimes against Art) is pleased to announce a new Masters Program in the study of art crime and cultural property protection. 

The first Masters Program in International Art Crime Studies, the program will provide in-depth instruction in a wide variety of theoretical and practical elements of art crime: its history, its nature, its impact, and what can be done to curb it. 

Courses are taught by international experts, in the beautiful setting of Umbria, Italy. Topics include art history and the art trade; museums and conservation; art security and policing; criminology and criminal investigation; law and policy; and the study of art theft; antiquities looting; war looting; forgery and deception; vandalism; and cultural heritage protection throughout history and around the world. 

It is the ideal program for art police and security professionals, art lawyers, insurers, curators, members of the art trade, and post-graduate students of criminology, law, security studies, sociology, art history, archaeology, and history.
 
Format and Schedule
This interdisciplinary program will be taught by twelve visiting lecturers, each lecturing for two-week clusters within their given fields of expertise related to the study of art crime. 

The program includes many more lecture hours than a standard 9-month long MA program (over 300 lecture hours and over 70 seminar hours), but will condense the lectures into three months (with the dissertation in a subsequent three). This format permits students and professionals to undertake the program of study over the course of one summer, either during a hiatus from work or between other academic programs.
 

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Faculty and Courses

Art History
Professors David Simon and Veronique Plesch, Colby College

Conservation, Connoisseurship, & Museums
Dr Patricia Garland, Senior Conservator, Yale Art Gallery

Criminology
Professor Matjaz Jager, Director of the Institute of Criminology at the Law Faculty, University of Ljubljana

Introduction to the Art World
Dr Tom Flynn, Art Historian and Writer

Archaeology & Antiquities: Crime, Trade, & Protection
Dr Derek Fincham, Loyola University

Art Crime & Its History
Noah Charney, Art Historian, Art Writer, and Director of ARCA

Criminalistics: Organized Crime & Art Investigation
Professor Bojan Dobovsek, University of Maribor, Faculty of Criminal Justice

Art Policing & Investigation
Richard Ellis, Security Advisor and Former Director, Scotland Yard Arts and
Antiques Unit

Organization of Art Crime: Villains in Art and Artful Villains
Professor Petrus van Duyne, Faculty of Criminology, University of Tilburg

International Comparative Art Law, Policy, & Policing
James William Hess, Esq.

Forgery & Deception in the Art World
Professor Travis McDade, Library Administration, University of Illinois College of Law

Art Protection: Museums, Security, and Handling
Anthony Amore, Director of Security, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
 
The first program will be held 25 May 2009-31 Aug 2009 in the city of Amelia, Italy, about one hour outside of Rome.  No more than thirty students will be accepted.
 

The contemporary art market – mad as a rubber crutch

Getting a press pass to Frieze Art Fair is like trying to book afternoon tea with Osama Bin Laden. I got in by digging a tunnel in the childrens’ playground at the far end of Regent’s Park and emerged beneath one of the tables in the fair’s restaurant, Le Caprice, where the toffs were shovelling down the lobster and fizz.

There’s little point in asking the dealers whether they’re doing any business at Frieze; at any rate not the New York or London dealers. Most of them looked crazed and paranoid as if a 747 was about to crash through the roof. The meltdown in the financial markets has already worked its way through to the art market, which traditionally takes at least a year to feel the reverberations. This is because unlike previous bull markets in this sector, this one has been driven by the same locusts who brought Armageddon to the banking system.

But the correction has now begun. The fact that this year the Frieze organizers, determined to protect their investment, broke with protocol and issued a lengthy post-fair press release full of gushing encomiums from the participating galleries indicates that the slide is on.

“This market downturn will be a good thing,” one leading London art insurance broker told me this week. “It will mean a return to quality, criticism, and excellence and hopefully goodbye to all the flaky speculators.” He cited the case of Richard Prince, whose work vaulted in price from £300,000-£400,000 to £3-4 million in twelve months, a market leap with no rational explanation. Meanwhile, one of the thrusting young provincial UK auctioneers currently riding the wave of the over-hyped ‘Urban Art’ movement, told me, “Art criticism is dead. We don’t need the critics any more. The auction market is now the most reliable arbiter of an artist’s quality.”

He must be wearing glasses made from mud. Or perhaps a cardboard pair like that given to me by a representative of German group Perplessi while I was wandering around Frieze (which I model here right). Most of the art looked better while I was wearing them, probably because I couldn’t see a thing with them on.

A few minutes later, the charming Sunitha Kumar Emmart of Bangalore-based Galleryske, handed me a small rubber crutch (shown above left), which I will treasure forever. This little artefact seemed symbolic of the whole contemporary art market and almost as significant as the unholy mess being created on the booth of crazy Buenos Aires gallery Appetite. Here, artist Diego de Aduriz was keeping busy rearranging mountains of detritus – consumer trash, cardboard, string, plastic bottles, foam, paint, etc.

When he got bored with that, Diego wrestled with his associates using shaving foam (left), which seemed eminently sensible.

“These days have been exciting and intense,” Appetite gallerist Daniela Luna told me afterwards. “People’s response was awesome. I think almost impossible to forget for anybody who presenced many of the performances [sic]. It had amazing moments, some sublime, some even dangerous or violent...”

I did presence the performance. Diego offered a refreshing contrast to the repressed profile of the average Frieze art dealer. Here he is (right) getting to grips with a crucifix made out of cardboard tubes.

After three hours of aimless wandering from booth to booth like a catatonic flâneur, I was beginning to feel the need for something more supportive than a rubber crutch. At that point a woman handed me a type-written sheet before dissolving back into the crowd. It read:

“I know I said I wasn’t going to come to London but how could I not reach out to you now that we find ourselves in such a crisis. I can imagine what you are thinking, that this hysteria has nothing to do with you, that, again, American arrogance poisons the planet, that this trauma hurts brokers and politicians but not those of us who have to work for our money and have far too little of it to lose. But you’re wrong; this kind of mess can’t be so neatly explained. I’m sure you are suffering. Things are spiralling so far down that I fear you are collapsing under the weight of the news. Where are you my love? Why won’t you send me some word?”

OK. If you’re out there, here I am. Come and get me!

Lipstick and a pig: Sarah Maple makes her mark

We hear a lot these days about how the more fundamentalist strains of Islam are allegedly curtailing the basic rights of people in western democracies by resorting to various forms of cultural intimidation. If you’d seen The Daily Telegraph earlier last week you’d have encountered what at first sight seemed like yet another example of this.

The Telegraph’s Mandrake diarist reported on a new exhibition of paintings by young British woman artist, Sarah Maple on show at Samir Ceric’s new SaLon Gallery in Westbourne Grove, West London. According to the Telegraph, one painting in particular – the self-portrait entitled Haram (shown above left) – has incurred the wrath of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).

The oil on canvas shows Maple, herself a young British Muslim, wearing traditional Islamic dress and cradling a pig. According to The Daily Telegraph report, Mokhtar Badri, a spokesman for MAB, objected to the work on the grounds that Muslims are “taught to keep their distance from pigs because they are unclean”. The Telegraph item reported that MAB “plans to visit the SaLon Gallery to demand that it remove Maple’s painting” when the exhibition opens on October 16. Accordingly, SaLon Gallery had been preparing to increase its security provision ahead of yesterday evening’s opening.

Perhaps understandably, the Telegraph story was picked up by one or two blogs and other media outlets. James Brandon at something called The Centre for Social Cohesion posted an item to Europe News which repeated the Telegraph’s claim that that “members of MAB planned to visited the SaLon gallery and demand that the painting by Sarah Maple is withdrawn from the exhibition.”

But when I contacted Dr Badri by phone this week he confirmed that neither he nor his organization had ever planned or threatened any such action. Dr Badri had still not seen the painting when I called him. He did, however, say that he would be interested to see and support the work of a young Muslim woman artist but would only visit the show if the pig painting were not on view since Muslims consider pigs to be unclean. He emailed me a lengthy and detailed statement which he had forwarded to the Daily Telegraph and which gave a different impression to what the Telegraph piece communicated. He was angry at having been misrepresented.

Was this a media attempt to incite ethnic division where no real controversy existed? And shouldn’t a body calling itself The Centre for Social Cohesion have attempted to approach MAB for its side of the story?

Sussex-based Maple, 23, makes work based on her own experience of Islam and if MAB had indeed been willing to visit SaLon Gallery to support the artist she would probably have had to remove the bulk of the work in the exhibition. But that’s not the sole focus of her work. She also likes to poke fun at popular attitudes towards conceptual art and at the stupidity of the art market.

Sensationalist news reports notwithstanding, at last night’s opening Ms Maple was clearly enjoying the publicity that the furore over Haram had generated. She’s been described as the next Tracey Emin or Sarah Lucas (two of her role models) and meeting her one can see she’s got art-star destiny written all over her.

Last night, dressed in a short strapless dress covered in lipstick kisses, her hair piled up in an unruly Winehouse bird's nest (left), Sarah told me she was trying to provoke debate about women in Islam but was not trying to insult fellow Muslims. “It's difficult though; we live in scary times,” she was recently quoted as saying. “I really do not want to offend. Why would I want to offend my own religion? I get great responses on MySpace from western Muslims from all over the world who are really positive and happy to have found someone like them!”

I asked her if she slept easily at night or lay awake worrying about the reaction her work might cause. She insisted that the only thing keeping her awake was the continuous swarm of work-related ideas buzzing around her head. And doubtless the prospect of fame and fortune as the new enfant terrible of British contemporary art.

London art dealer slams The Art Newspaper for “gutter press” journalism

“If the art market goes down, nobody’s going to be buying your rag,” London modern and contemporary art dealer Ivor Braka told The Art Newspaper’s Editor-at-Large Anna Somers Cocks in what appeared to be an impromptu video interview outside Sotheby’s in Bond Street just before the Hirst auction (view the video here).

Mr Braka was openly criticizing The Art Newspaper for its earlier report that Damien Hirst’s former London dealer White Cube was sitting on a significant freight of unsold Hirst works.

The report was not factually correct, claimed Mr Braka. “It was an inaccurate article and to deliberately sabotage an artist’s sale at this point, and particularly Damien’s, is beneath contempt.” In a rather lame defence of the article, Ms Somers Cocks responded with, “Well, we, erm, believe that article to have been based on fact." Clearly this was not good enough. Either it was fact or it was not. 'Based on fact' is not a justification for publishing something so potentially controversial.

Braka went on to claim that Hirst deserved more respect than The Art Newspaper had afforded him since he had done a great deal for other artists. “He has done more for British art in the last decade than anyone else,” said Braka, without a scintilla of irony.

But most worrying, not for The Art Newspaper, but for the culture of art publishing, was Braka’s sinister prediction that The Art Newspaper itself would suffer if it dared talk the market down. “It could be extremely damaging for The Art Newspaper,” Braka warned Somers Cocks. “It stands to lose a lot of revenue, in terms of advertising. Also, if this impacts the market of Damien, which it could do, because financial people read your paper and perhaps take more notice of it than perhaps they should, then that is particularly bad because nobody is going to buy your paper. If the art market goes down, who cares, nobody is going to be buying your rag.”

Listening to this, you could mistake Braka for a member of the Gambino crime family. But of course the art trade is a mafia of sorts and here was the firmest confirmation to date of the extent to which the art press is institutionally enslaved to the market. If it dares bite the hand that feeds it the consequences will be made all too clear.

In the event, it seems the “financial people” to which Braka referred either failed to read the offending article or read it and didn’t care, or read it and didn’t believe it. Either way, the Bond Street encounter was perhaps most notable for revealing how nervous art market insiders like Braka had become prior to the Hirst sale. Lehman Brothers bank had just nose-dived to oblivion and many believed that if the Hirst sale tanked the whole party might finally be over.

But just as speculators screwed the global financial markets, leading to the meltdown we’re all suffering, so speculators are still busy screwing the art market. Don’t blame the art press. Blame the hedge fund managers and other freeloaders who have sent art prices into another unsustainable dimension that bears no relation to quality or artistic merit.

In The Art Newspaper video Ivor Braka looked positively demented.

How will he look if and when the market finally comes tumbling down?

Snakes on a plane: Damien Hirst takes off

There’s a scene in the cult movie Snakes on a Plane when Samuel L. Jackson declares, “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”

That pretty well summarises how I feel about Damien Hirst taking over the art market.

For a while earlier this week it seemed as though the entire global art market was holding its breath to see whether Hirst’s decision to cut out his dealers by consigning 200 lots of new work to Sotheby’s would effect a historic realignment of the tectonic plates underpinning the global art trade. Spectators were broadly divided between those privately hoping the sale would fall flat on its face, thereby ushering in a long-overdue correction in art prices, and those desperately hoping it would keep the party going and not blow a hole in all the overpriced stuff they’d already invested in.

Both positions were in some measure vindicated. Nobody can say for sure what really happened on Monday and Tuesday for there is no transparency clause in the Faustian contract between Sotheby’s and Hirst – two of the art world’s most shrewd and ruthless operators.

But broadly the experiment seemed to succeed. Certainly the consistent demand over the two days once again underscored the art market’s bizarre resistance to global economic storms. Some of the world’s biggest banks and insurance companies are filing for bankruptcy, global money markets are close to meltdown, homes are being repossessed in their thousands, and yet the art market continues to rise ever higher into the nanosphere like a rogue hot-air balloon powered by private capital.

The result of the Hirst sale will have delighted those who want the good times to keep on rolling. But every time the global art index enjoys yet another significant boost as it did in London on Monday evening, so there will be that much more pain when the downturn finally comes, and come it will.

The most incomprehensible thing about the Hirst phenomenon is how few discerning commentators are prepared to stand up and say what they really think – that most of this stuff is wretched tat. But such is the relentless power of the media and the clout of capital that a false consensus prevails. If you were to place what one might call, for want of a better term, “real art”, side by side with Hirst’s factory output, then aesthetic comparison becomes unthinkable.

Last week I enjoyed a tour of the British Museum’s Hadrian exhibition in the erudite and entertaining company of the show’s curator Thorsten Oppen. It was one of the most enthralling exhibitions I have ever seen and I emerged enlightened and enriched into the rainy gloom of Bloomsbury.

From there I scootered across town to view the Hirst show at Sotheby’s. To describe this short journey as a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous would be the understatement of the year. As I entered one of the numerous galleries chock-full of formaldehyde vitrines and mass-produced spin and spot paintings, I overheard a plummy art lecturer addressing a gaggle of expensively-dressed ‘ladies who lunch’ as they circled one of the sale’s expected highlights – The Golden Calf (illustrated above left).

“Notice, as you move around the tank, the magnificent, hanging scrotum of the Charolais bull,” gushed the guide. “In my quieter moments I like to treasure the thrilling image of this frisky beast advancing purposefully on the ladies of the group.” He then gestured to a butterfly painting hanging nearby. “And this majestic piece surely belongs in the cupola of a baroque church in Rome.” Turning to one of the glamorous women in his party, he murmured lasciviously, “Imagine, Celia, this masterpiece hanging on the ceiling above the marital bed! What a thing to gaze upon on those evenings when the VCR has failed!”

Society dames lap up such Etonian double-entendres. But who was their breathless cicerone? Well, no names, no pack drill, but suffice to ponder how one can simultaneously hold down, among other roles, freelance Hirst cheerleader, art market journalist for the world’s leading art newspaper, and adviser on contemporary art investments for the world’s leading art investment fund. It is as revealing a symbol of the serpentine, compromised nature of the modern art market as one is likely to find.

Cue Samuel L. Jackson…

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Golden Calf image courtesy Sotheby's

Fog of war obscures state of cultural heritage sites in Georgia

The recent hostilities in Georgia have again focused attention on the impact of armed conflict on the region's ancient sites and monuments.

One of the oldest countries of the South Caucasus region, Georgia is particularly rich in cultural heritage, containing countless archaeological sites and medieval and later buildings of great historical significance. The country has three sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List and a further fifteen on the Tentative List for possible inclusion.

In 1991, following the fall of communism, Georgia became an independent nation. However, like many of its neighbours it has struggled with the transition from a relatively impoverished Soviet satellite state to a full-blown market economy.

The conflict of the early 1990s in the Russian-backed separatist republic of Abkhazia in north western Georgia brought widespread looting and damage to the region's cultural heritage. As a result, the website of ICOMOS, (the International Council on Monuments and Sites), has stated that "the entire cultural heritage of Georgia is endangered."

Maka Dvalishvili, director of the Georgian Arts and Cultural Centre (GACC) in Tbilisi, and Fulbright Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, told me it is too early to make an accurate assessment of the impact of the recent war on the region's cultural sites. "At the moment, there is no way to get to the key areas to assess the damage. It is not even safe for local residents. There is a real risk of unexploded mines and the armed forces say it will be two weeks before the territory is safe enough to enter."

A monitoring group from the Georgian Ministry of Culture in Tbilisi is standing by, ready to go in.

Nato Tsintsabadze, an architect and advisor on cultural heritage matters to ICOMOS and the Georgian Ministry of Culture, told me, "A plan is being prepared for monitoring and emergency response to war-damaged cultural heritage in the country which will take place after (and if) the European peace-keepers enter in the occupied territories. There are some efforts to gather information through interviewing displaced people from central Georgia."

Meanwhile, the draft of a preliminary report prepared by ICOMOS Georgia for Mr. Dinu Bumbaru, Secretary General of ICOMOS, states that, "On 7 August, ICOMOS Georgia professionals were at the village Ateni (near the town Gori) working on the 6th-century Ateni Sioni Church when shelling of the village had started. Fortunately, all the team had managed to leave the village together with other civilians without losses. Regretfully, there are casualties among our colleagues and their families working in the field of heritage preservation of Georgia."

There are around 345 registered historical monuments and archaeological sites within the main conflict zones (Gori District, Java District, Akhalgori District, Kareli District), some 53 of which are in, or near to, the city of Gori itself, which saw heavy Russian shelling. In the environs of Gori are the cave city of Uplistsikhe (dating from the 1st millennium BC up to the late Middle Ages) (left); the Church of Ateni Sioni (7th century architecture, 11th century murals), and Ikorta Church (12th century).

The ICOMOS draft reports states that, "We are especially concerned with news of rockets being fired into the Uphlistsikhe rock-cut city (5th-century BC-7th century), a site on the World Heritage Tentative List, but since the site is not accessible we don’t have information about the scale of damage. The horrifying news of looting of the 11th-century Samtavisi Cathedral [illustrated at the top of this article in eastern Georgia some 45km from Tbilisi and another candidate for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List] shocked us. But again details are not known."

The Georgian city of Gori, birthplace of Joseph Stalin (and home of the Stalin Museum right), 47 miles from the capital Tbilisi, is also home to the medieval citadel of Goris-Tsikhe, which dates back to the pre-Christian era. Gori suffered severe Russian airstrikes during the recent conflict with numerous human casualties and many residential and public buildings reduced to rubble.

Lying within 3-5km of Gori are monuments of inestimable archaeological importance, says Maka Dvalishvili. "These are really wonderful sites from antiquity, but although the bombs fell nearby, the reports we've received from local museum directors suggest that no major damage was done. Again, it is too early to be sure."

The ICOMOS report says, "It is difficult to count sites at risk beyond the war zone, since the missile attacks were going on entire territory of Georgia (sic) and it is still ongoing in western Georgia, though with less intensity."

Another village to suffer heavy fighting was the village of Nikozi, some 20 km (12 miles) outside the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. Maka Dvalishvili says, "The village contains the 10th century Church of the Archangel, a 5th/6th century Domed Church, a 16th/17th century Bell Tower, the 10th/11th century Archbishop’s Palace, and walls and other structures dating from the Middle Ages. The final state of the architectural ensemble is uncertain".

Reports say that after evacuating the archbishop from Nikozi the Russians fire-bombed his palace. One unconfirmed eye-witness report from the village of Nikozi stated: "There is the Nikozi diocesan church in our village. Yesterday, when I came there, I found the bishop Isaia and his congregation praying. The shelling started just at that moment. The monastery was also bombed. The Bishop had to take his congregation out of there. We passed several villages on foot. The Bishop contacted the priest Andria, who came for us with a minibus from Gori. Only the bishop Isaia and the priest Antoni [were] left behind, saying 'We cannot leave now' and they went back under fire and this disaster. They are there even today. We left. I could imagine anything, but shelling the Orthodox Church." (source: www.ireport.com)

The International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) has issued a 'Watch List' of "Georgian museums in uncertain conditions situated in regions occupied by the Russian Army." The list includes the Joseph Stalin State Museum in Gori, the Sergi Makalatia Gori Historical & Ethnographical Museum, five further museums in and around Gori, and two museums in South Ossetia.

Thea Paichadze, Head of the Division of Museums and Moveable Monuments at the Cultural Heritage Department of the Georgian Ministry of Culture, says that reliable information remains hard to get.

"There are several museums in the conflict region Shida Kartli (particularly in Samachablo — so called by Russians 'South Ossetia'). We don’t know anything about three of them: Ivane Machabeli House Museum (in the village of Tamarasheni, near Cxinvali [Tskhinvali], capital of Samachablo [South Ossetia]), Didi Liakhvi Gorge Museum-Reserve (in the village of Kurta left) and Iakob Gogebashvili House Museum in the village of Variani, Gori district, where fire bombs were thrown in the morning of 8th August."

"When the bombing started the population fled and those who left are unreachable. So we don’t know what was happened with these museums. The whole population was evacuated from the villages of Tamarasheni and Qurta, where everything was destroyed and possibly the buildings of the museums as well."

Ms Paichadze says that while Gori’s Stalin Museum management had a little more time for evacuation, they managed to evacuate part of the exhibits. "After being properly documented, they were handed over in my presence for temporary storage to the one of the Tbilisi museums. Yesterday the director [Robert Maglakelidze] went back to Gori, all the windows of the building are broken, but fortunately nothing else is damaged." (For more on the plight of the Stalin Museum see AFP report here).

In reports reminiscent of the Iraq Museum crisis of April 2003, the situation at the Ksani Gorge Historical–Architectural Museum in Akhalgori is also unclear. "Russian troops entered few days ago," Thea Paichadze told me. "I have very frequent phone conversation with director of museum. Georgian population left the village. His family also, but he is staying alone at the museum and looking over it. He secures it and takes care as he can do (but what he can do?) For several times he could manage to protect museum from Russian soldiers, although he is afraid of how long he can resist them. The exhibits/ artifacts can not be moved out of the building. The biggest part of it is well packed and moved to more safe places of the building, while rooms are sealed. Because of current situation in the museum I immediately informed the deputy minister, which has contacted ministry of internal affairs and asked for support.  At this stage they also can not do anything."
   
The ethnic nature of Georgian separatist conflicts is a source of further anxiety among cultural heritage professionals, not least for what the future might hold for the ancient sites and monuments. "A real worry — and it's a very serious point," says Maka Dvalishvili, "is that if relations deteriorate further the South Ossetians might cause deliberate damage to ancient Georgian cultural sites in their territory."

Reports by websites and bloggers sympathetic to Russia and the Russian-backed South Ossetians claim that Georgia had razed Tskhinvali to the ground in a way reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad or the invasion of Fallujah by US counter-insurgency forces in November 2004.

"Humanity witnessed a real cultural catastrophe as the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, was completely destroyed in a few days," wrote one contributor to the website The Voice of Russia.

The Voice of Russia website goes on to quote Aleksandr Kibovsky, a historian and the head of the Russian Federal Service for the Preservation of Cultural Values, who said, "The culture of South Ossetia suffered a great loss" [...] "The region of South Ossetia was always remarkable for its unique monuments of history and culture. Now, we can only remember that the residents of now-destroyed Tskhinvali used to have two museums, a theatre, and a library… Apart from this, there were hundreds of unique archaeological and architectural monuments there, some of them going back several centuries, and, now, as a result of the Georgian invasion, everything is lost forever. How cruel and cynical it was to destroy the cultural heritage and memory of a whole nation in a few days!”

The fog of war makes apportioning responsibility for the destruction an onerous task, however. For every claim there is a counter-claim. Reports from international news agencies who visited Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, after the shelling (here for example) state that most of the city remains standing.

More news of the Georgian cultural heritage situation will follow on this blog as the security situation in Georgia and surrounding region improves. Tom Flynn welcomes writing and journalistic assignments. Contact: tom flynn at bt internet dot com.