Very entertaining: art market feeding frenzy revs up again

Auctioneer Henry Wyndham (left) had the right phrase for it as his gavel hovered in the air at Sotheby's in London last night — "Fair warning".

A split second later a new world record was established for a work of art at auction as an anonymous telephone bidder forked out £65,001,250 ($US104,327,006) for Giacometti's L'Homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) from 1961.

£65 million. You would think the news of someone parting with such a jaw-dropping sum of money for a bronze sculpture would warrant a place on the Business pages. After all, this has nothing to do with art; this is financial speculation on a grand scale — to say nothing of the insider dealing and other chicanery that goes undetected behind the scenes whenever such vertiginous transactions unfold at auction.

But no, this isn't business; it's show business. The BBC in their infinite wisdom filed the story under Entertainment (left).

I wonder how entertaining such an event will seem to the immiserated denizens of Port au Prince for whom that $104.3 million would have gone a very significant way in rebuilding hospitals, schools and other parts of their wrecked infrastructure. A mere fraction of that sum would throw up a few thousand corrugated tin shacks of the kind pre-quake Haitains used to call home and which must now seem like a distantly remembered luxury.

Nothing offers quite such a striking illustration of how polarised our world has become than a couple of hundred of the Stinking Rich breaking into applause at Sotheby's just because an anonymous billionaire on the telephone has coughed up $100 million for a work of art. The likelihood that the purchase was funded by the sort of Wall Street hocus pocus that took the world's banking system to within an inch of Reaper Time makes it all the more nauseating...or entertaining, depending on your epistemological bias.

There is something richly symbolic in this particular work of art setting a new world art market record. Just as Damien Hirst's pill cabinets came to symbolize a market high on greed, so Giacometti's striding man offers an ironic totem for how, in a single tap of the hammer, the art market has veered from recession-induced anorexia back to bilious over-indulgence.

It will be interesting to see if this price serves to encourager les autres, bringing more blue-chip works to the block and more billionaires to the trough. If so, we could be back in the elevator, even though we haven't yet fixed the roof. Fair warning.

'Who's the artist?' - Open Forum at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

A podcast of the open forum I chaired at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge on 21st January is now available via the Fitzwilliam Museum website here and via the University of Cambridge's Streaming Media service here.

The panel, which included the sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld, Dr Timothy Potts, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Rungwe Kingdon, director of the Pangolin Editions bronze foundry, and Johannes von Stumm, President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, convened to discuss the relationship between contemporary sculptors and the studios or foundries that execute their work.

The discussion touched on issues relating to authorship, originality and authenticity, knowledge of materials, the role of criticism in the reception of contemporary sculpture, and the impact of the market on craft skills and techniques of manufacture.

The event was organised to coincide with the closing days of the Fitzwilliam Museum's annual 'Sculpture Promenade', (right), which this year featured work by Terry New, Diane Maclean, Wu Wei-shan, David Begbie, Johannes von Stumm, Andrew Stonyer, Charles Hadcock, and Richard Fenton.

Open wide, say 'Bomaaaaaarzo!'

Has British tennis ace Andy Murray been taking time out from net practice to stroll the cultural pleasure grounds of southern Italy?

The curious gaping cavern that opened in his face on winning the Australian Open this week bore a striking resemblance to the grimacing grotto that graces the Mannerist sculpture park at Bomarzo in Viterbo.

You can fit around fifty tourists in there at any one time.

And the grotto at Bomarzo accommodates around the same number.

American silver: punching above its weight?

The silver punch bowl (left) has had American bloggers chattering this week after it sold at Sotheby's in New York for $5.9 million against an estimate of $400,000-800,000. The previous record price for a piece of American silver was $775,750, set in 2001 and again in 2002.

So what accounted for this seemingly extraordinary price, arts bloggers are asking.

Three points spring immediately to mind. The first is the obvious one that some objects are so historically significant that the usual rules don't apply. This bowl — by the Dutch-American silversmith Cornelius Kierstede (1674-ca.1757) — has a fascinating history, as the catalogue description, reproduced below, makes clear.

The second is that connoisseurship — upon which auction houses traditionally built their reputations — has withered on the vine in most fields, with many of the most knowledgeable experts jumping ship from the auction houses into the trade in order to partake of the greater riches that can be made there. So don't express too much amazement at the differential between an auction house's pre-sale estimate and the price an object eventually makes. Moreover, how frequently does this happen with blue-chip paintings, which rarely have arts bloggers dropping their marmalade?

The third — and the most likely explanation for the price of the silver punch bowl — is the arrival into the market in recent years of a new breed of collector drawn from the ultra-high-net-worth realms of banking, hedge fund management, private equity, and so on. Their identification of high-ticket fine art as an attractive portfolio-expanding haven in which to park their surplus wealth had a game-changing effect on the art market.

But while their involvement had previously been limited to painting and sculpture, more recently the financial speculators, art funds and other structured investment vehicles have begun turning their attention to decorative arts and collectables. The impact of their activities on the fine art market was made all too clear during the last art market bubble that burst in October 2008. All the evidence suggests that the cycle is now beginning again. Will it now spread into the decorative arts as well?

Some commentators are asking whether there is another, more intriguing, explanation for the price of the punch bowl. I suspect not. This is the nature of auctions. You only need two or three determined parties for whom money is no object and anything can happen. The punch bowl is unquestionably a museum quality object (which makes it even more attractive to investors), but that doesn't mean it will have been bought by a museum. However, if it does end up in a museum it will probably be thanks to a wealthy, tax-incentivized collector of the kind referred to above, many of whom (in the US, at least) sit as trustees on museum boards.

Tax-payer bail-outs notwithstanding, we've seen the size of the bonuses bankers are currently set to trouser after a record year. That might be the real story behind the punch bowl. If you're celebrating another boardroom bonanza, can you think of a better object from which to dish out the booze?

American arts blogger Judith Dobrzynski helpfully reproduced Sotheby's catalogue description for the punch bowl, which runs as follows:

The bowl has descended in the family of Commodore Joshua Loring, whose stately home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the Loring-Greenough House, has been preserved as an historic site. A Royalist, Loring abandoned his residence in August 1774 to take refuge in Boston, and the family emigrated to London in 1776. According to tradition, the bowl was hidden in a well on the property during the Revolution. Retrieved by the family, it descended quietly with them in England, completely unknown, until the owners sent a grainy photograph to Sotheby's London silver department in March of 2009.

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Avatar: Black Hawk Down meets Pocahontas

"We'll blow a hole in their racial memory so big they won't come back for a hundred years", says Colonel Miles Quaritch (left) in Avatar, James Cameron's sprawling adventure movie.

The gung-ho Quaritch has the entire military-industrial complex at his fingertips but is ultimately vanquished by a computer-generated Pocahontas with an attitude problem. If only he'd offered them partage.

Had he survived, Quaritch would have made an excellent director of an encyclopedic museum.

A History of the World in Looted Objects

The most remarkable thing about the British Museum's forthcoming collaboration with the BBC — A History of the World in 100 Objects — is the almost total lack of critical response to the project from any quarter save for a few lonely voices of indignation echoing from the African subcontinent.

Instead we've witnessed a nauseating media hagiography of British Museum director Neil MacGregor in which he single-handedly educates the world from the comfort of his beautiful Bloomsbury office. We hear of "Saint Neil", a "suave and smooth-talking Scot", with a "lilting highland brogue", a "skilled diplomat" with "infectious schoolboy enthusiasm", a "natural storyteller" and "the most fortunate man alive."

Already it's clear that nothing will be allowed to derail this apotheosis on its upward trajectory to Mount Parnassus. Well, I'm sorry to fart in the lift, but I have one or two problems with this project.

The first objection is that like all British Museum projects since MacGregor took over the directorship, it marshals in its support so much Establishment apparatus that it forecloses critical reactions. This used to be called Gleichschaltung, but let's not overdo it. After all, this is culture, not politics, or so MacGregor would have us believe.

Tellingly, for example, in this particular instance the British Museum has refused to divulge the full list of objects until the first broadcast on 18th January.

The problem for those of us with a critical interest in the history of encyclopedic museums and how they're run today is that many of the directors of these institutions have demonstrated that they simply cannot be trusted. MacGregor fatally blotted his copy book when he helped formulate, and later published, the notorious Universal Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums without consulting any museum directors beyond the sacred inner circle of the Bizot Group (a cabal of leading directors of universal museums in Europe and North America).

What few people realise is that MacGregor's activities on behalf of the British Museum, although dressed up as a laudable didactic mission of public enlightenment and edification, are actually part of a more urgent project to protect the beleaguered edifice that is the Encyclopedic Museum in Europe and North America.

In a rapidly globalizing world, these institutions are under growing pressure from developing nations to negotiate a more equitable spread of the world's historical material culture. Until recently, those claims were relatively easy to repel. After all, few developing nations had the facilities or resources to curate the cultural objects pillaged from them during the age of empire. But all that is rapidly changing.

A nice well-meaning Radio Four series it may appear, but behind the scenes at the museum MacGregor's BBC project is a rearguard action that Sun Tzu would have been proud of. What's at stake are the epistemological foundations of his institution. If MacGregor deserves praise at all, it is for adopting a cannier strategy to achieve his ends than the blizzard of dismal 'anti-restitutionist' publications launched on the world by James Cuno, provocative director of the Art Institute of Chicago.

MacGregor's mission, according to The Times, is to challenge our "sloppy Eurocentred thinking":

"Instead of spreading out a flat map with Europe at the centre, we have spun the globe at various points," says MacGregor. "History is a dynamic process, it's never one version that's 'handed down' to us. We are telling various versions of history that add up to a greater truth about the world."

We could bleat on about imperial nations dictating the historical narratives, but let's park that for a moment. Compare MacGregor's globe-spinning rhetoric above with what he told an interviewer when the Parthenon Marbles issue neared boiling point just a little while ago: "The history of the Marbles in relation to the Parthenon is now over. They are now part of a different story."

In a delicious irony, that story is the one the British Museum has 'handed down to us'. A History of the World in 100 Objects presents a flat map of the world with the British Museum at the centre, and 'twas ever thus. That's what I call sloppy Eurocentred thinking.

And although the Parthenon Marbles may not figure among the objects in the series (no, too risky!) don't assume for one moment that they aren't there in the background — the 100-ton marble elephant in the room.

"I hope that the series will serve to point out that the very word ‘Mediterranean’ is no longer sustainable," says MacGregor in another subtle attempt to undermine Greek claims for return of their looted heritage. "It is a sea which, despite the claim of its name, is not and never has been in the middle of the earth.”

Hooray to that. Yet Neil MacGregor's project is a clear attempt to position The British Museum, despite its name, in the middle of the earth. In reality, though, the axis is shifting and power is moving inexorably east, away from Europe and North America, and towards the developing nations. That's the real unfolding story of the world.

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A History of the World in 100 Objects, narrated by British Museum director Neil MacGregor, begins on BBC Radio Four on 18 January.

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Captions to images
Top left: The 'Cyrus Cylinder' in the British Museum, recently requested by Iran and currently the subject of fresh research after two related objects were suddenly discovered in the British Museum's collections.

Lower right: The bust of Nefertiti which is at the centre of a dispute between Egypt and the Neues Museum in Berlin, which is refusing to return it.

Things to do in the snow: a lesson from the late Lynn Chadwick

They say when the going gets tough, the tough get going. During the harsh winter of 1962-63, there was none tougher than British sculptor Lynn Chadwick.

That winter, temperatures in the UK dropped to their lowest since 1740. On 29 and 30 December 1962, a blizzard across south-west England and Wales brought snowdrifts six metres deep, blocking roads and rail routes, bringing down telephone and power lines and leaving villages cut off.

Chadwick and his family had moved in 1958 into Lypiatt Park, a large neo-Gothic house in the countryside outside Stroud, Gloucestershire. By 1963 they were accustomed to the rigours and relative solitude of rural life, but the winter of ’62-63 proved a particularly challenging time. Because transport routes were blocked, supplies were hard to get, so Chadwick looked to what raw materials lay at hand. He had for some time been dismantling redundant agricultural machinery for its component parts which he stored in an outbuilding at Lypiatt Park.

Chadwick had spent the previous summer of 1962 in Cornigliano in Italy, working alongside the American sculptors Alexander Calder and David Smith to produce works for an open-air sculpture festival in Spoleto. Inspired by that experience, on his return to Britain Chadwick began to use the archive of discarded objects he’d found at Lypiatt Park to make sculpture. The fact that he was snowed in seems to have concentrated his mind in a new direction.

David Smith’s daughter Candida later reported how her father’s Italian adventure had been followed by a fertile period of activity, as if “the creative explosion and the resulting enormous installation in Spoleto ignited a fire that did not burn out.” Chadwick clearly experienced a similar creative outpouring during the harsh winter that followed his return from Italy.

Inevitably, the nature of the found materials he was using informed the abstract tenor of the works that began to emerge from his studio, but the contact with Smith must also have played a part. The result was a significant body of wintry looking abstract works of great formal elegance.

Although relatively little attention has been paid to them until now, the objects Chadwick created from found materials during that harsh winter places him alongside the great twentieth-century blacksmith sculptors Julio Gonzalez and David Smith.

The Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942), who taught Picasso to weld, once summarized the challenges facing the artist who aspires to ‘draw in space’:

“The important problem to solve here is not only to wish to make a work which is harmonious and perfectly balanced – No! – but to get this result by the marriage of material and space. By the union of real forms with imaginary forms, obtained and suggested by imaginary points, or by perforation – and, according to the natural law of love, to mingle them and make them inseparable, one from another, as are the body and the spirit.”

Chadwick’s preferred way of working was broadly in harmony with the philosophy outlined by Gonzalez. He rarely began a sculpture with a pre-planned idea of the direction it would take, but instead allowed his technique to guide his creative instincts. Working with found objects required him to collaborate with pre-existing forms which, to use Gonzalez’s words, he mingled and made inseparable.

The titles Chadwick chose for some of the works of this period – Insiders, Indicators, Transmuters and Starters, for example – may seem randomly applied. But the formal themes that distinguish the Insiders from the Indicators, the Starters from the Transmuters, were clearly of personal significance for Chadwick. The Insiders (Insider III shown right) may have been named in playful homage to his Cornigliano hosts – the Italian 'Italsider' steel company who had granted him the use of their abandoned steel factories during the summer of '62.

In each of the unique works Chadwick produced during that winter we see him drawing on his own experience and resources, tapping into his innate feeling for totemic form. This is particularly noticeable in the ‘Starter’ series (Starter I shown left) in which he cannibalizes machine components, fusing together drums, camshafts, cogs and wheels to maximize the visual interplay between the engineered indentations, perforations, threaded and milled surfaces of circles, squares, shafts and drums. The results are twentieth-century industrial equivalents of the ethnographic idols that inspired Picasso and his modernist contemporaries half a century before.

Rarely if ever has a severe winter been so bountiful for British sculpture.

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Images
Top left: Lynn Chadwick, Insider IV, 1963
Second (right): Lynn Chadwick, Square, 1963
Third (left): Lynn Chadwick, Indicator II, 1963
Fourth (right): Lynn Chadwick, Insider III, 1963
Bottom (left): Lynn Chadwick, Starter I, 1963

In for a penny...

I can't think of a better way to end a year of banker-driven, greed-induced recession than with the immortal words of Ezra Pound reading his own Canto XLV — 'With Usura':

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With Usura (1937)

With usura hath no man a house of good stone 

each block cut smooth and well fitting

that delight might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall 

harpes et luz

or where virgin receiveth message 

and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

no picture is made to endure nor to live with

but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper, 

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling.

Stonecutter is kept from his stone 

weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
wool comes not to market

sheep bringeth no gain with usura 

Usura is a murrain, usura 

blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand

and stoppeth the spinner's cunning. Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura 

Duccio came not by usura

nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura 

nor was 'La Callunia' painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis, 

Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.
Not by usura St Trophime
Not by usura Saint Hilaire,
Usura rusteth the chisel

It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

It gnaweth the thread in the loom 

None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;

Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered 

Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb

It stayeth the young man's courting

It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis

Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

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NB — Usury: a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production.

Caveat emptor: Coming to an iPhone near you...

There was a time when if you scratched your nose at the wrong moment at a public auction you could find yourself the proud owner of a vast mahogany breakfront bookcase or a set of 12 Chippendale dining chairs that you didn't want, or a £500,000 Old Master painting you couldn't afford. At least that's what the standard auction myth would have you believe.

But while auctioneers are too experienced to mistake your twitching or your scratching as serious bidding, it does seem we are now poised to enter a whole new dimension where bidding at auction is concerned. In the same way that the internet made it possible to view and buy art without having to walk past the obligatory Courtauld-educated Cerberus-like intern posted at the door of every swanky art gallery, so now you can bid at auction while sitting in a traffic jam. All thanks to a new iPhone app made available by Invaluable Live!

I won't bang on about this (you can check out this versatile little tool on Invaluable's website here). Suffice to say that I used to dream about a service like this back in 2002 before the technology was available.

This sort of application ought to come with a health warning. It's already illegal to use a cellphone while driving. Using an iPhone while driving and bidding at auction at the same time takes the concept of risk to a whole new level, not only in terms of what you might accidentally crash into while bidding, but what you might accidentally buy while driving.

"Honey, I'm afraid a terrible thing happened on the way home."

"Oh my God. What did you hit?"

"Nothing. I bought a Jack Vettriano by accident."

"That's it. I'm out of here and I'm taking the kids...."

Breaking with tradition: Sir Thomas Lighton joins Agnew's

It has just been announced that Sir Thomas Lighton (left), until recently Managing Director of Cork Street modern and contemporary art dealers Waddington Galleries, is to join the venerable old firm of Agnew's as Chief Executive.

This is interesting in that it signals Agnew's desire to move more bullishly into the 20th century and contemporary art fields after generations as one of the world's leading Old Master dealerships. The firm will continue to deal in its core specialities of Old Masters and British paintings, watercolours and drawings, but like just about everyone else it has clearly realised the need to embrace contemporary art more actively.

However, the appointment is also interesting in that up until now Agnew's has always been run by members of the family. Lighton will be the first Chief Executive who is not an Agnew.

The clannish ambience of Agnew's was brilliantly captured in a photograph by Lord Snowdon taken in the mid-1960s (right [click image to enlarge]) which shows the Agnews' board sitting together in a tight circle like members of the Gambino crime family (left to right: Richard Kingzett, Colin Agnew, Hugh Agnew [the chairman], Geoffrey Agnew, and Evelyn Joll). Notably, Messrs Kingzett and Joll were present by virtue of having married into the family. It seems they've subsequently dropped the need to wed an Agnewette as a qualification for membership.

I don't know Tom Lighton personally, but speaking with my journalist's hat on, he was unfailingly courteous and helpful on the few occasions I had reason to approach him while he was Waddington (once to request that he try and persuade the late great Barry Flanagan to return some books that I'd lent him — Barry never did).

If Agnew's elder statesmen give Lighton the latitude to do what he needs to do, there is no reason why he shouldn't bring the firm kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

His old colleague at Waddington — Leslie W — helped initiate a similar change at the previously Old Master-dominated TEFAF fair in Maastricht, so Tom will have had some experience at teaching old master dogs new tricks.

But there is also distant modern pedigree at Agnews's on which to build. It was at Agnew's 'Young British Painters' exhibition in 1937 that a fresh-faced Francis Bacon made his debut.

African art: the next China?

I've just received a flyer from Bonhams, inviting consignments for their next African art sale, scheduled to take place on 10th March 2010 at their New York galleries on Madison Avenue.

The flyer says:

"Bonhams' sale of African Modernist and Contemporary Art in April 2008 was an unrivalled success, setting many new world record prices and casting a spotlight on the African artists who are now achieving an international reputation.

The sale was a clear indication that the market for these works is buoyant and if you wish to take advantage of this strength now is the time to consign."

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But actually, the sale (which was in April 2009, not 2008) was far from "an unrivalled success." I was at the sale and if you paid careful attention as I did, and ignored the chandelier bidding (when the auctioneer pretends to be taking real bids when none are actually being offered), it was clear that this is market is patchy at best and barely breathing at worst. If 50 percent sold is a buoyant market then Bonhams' way of measuring buoyancy differs from mine.

Bonhams' flyer makes it sound as though their sale helped promote certain artists ("who are now achieving an international reputation.") In fact, it is galleries like London's October Gallery that are doing most of the hard work and taking all the risks to promote African contemporary artists such as El Anatsui, Nnenna Okore and Romuald Hazoumé. Bonhams are merely bandwagon-jumping, as all auctioneers do.

Moreover, the more prominent artists included in the sale — such as the multi-talented South African artist William Joseph Kentridge, and the Netherlands-based painter Marlene Dumas — are already established names in the overarching contemporary art field. An untitled work by Kentridge in charcoal and coloured chalk failed to reach its estimate of £20,000-30,000 at Bonhams' sale, as did an oil on canvas-board work entitled Refuge in the Library, which had been expected to make £100,000-150,000.

Meanwhile, Marlene Dumas, whose market star has risen exponentially in the contemporary art field over the last ten years, was represented by The Blonde — a small work in washy watercolour and pencil on paper depicting a reclining nude (right). This too failed to attract a buyer at an estimate of £80,000-120,000.

Those unfamiliar with the art market and the auction process will read Bonhams' promotional puffs and believe that all is well in this market. It's not.

Giles Peppiatt, Head of African Art at Bonhams, said after the April sale: "A lot of people are looking at this market thinking it might be the next China. We are hoping that in a couple of years this art market niche will be turning over as much as £10m."

Wishful thinking? Or a self-fulfilling prophecy? Roll on, March 10.

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The rare, museum-quality work illustrated above left — an acrylic and watercolour on card entitled Negritude by the late Nigerian modernist artist Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu (1917-1994) — made the top price at Bonhams' April sale, fetching £66,000 against an estimate of £20,000-30,000.

David Lester: Who beat him up?

The photograph shown left — of Florida-based fine Art & Antiques fairs impresario David Lester — has just been circulated as part of his advertising for the Olympia International Fine Art & Antiques Fair, in which Lester and his wife Lee Ann recently secured a controlling stake. Lester wants you to think he's been viciously attacked by disgruntled members of the art and antiques trade who oppose his reforms.

But wait. He's also from Florida, so there could be another simple explanation for why he looks like that.

Lester has always been regarded as something of a marketing genius in the antiques industry, a commercial sector hopelessly stuck in the past. But has he gone too far this time?

The photograph shown here was at the top of a widely circulated email from Lester alerting recipients to the opposition his proposed changes to the Olympia fair have been receiving from the trade following a series of meetings with prospective exhibitors. "Some dealers were more combative than expected," he reports.

Lester goes on to quote David Moss, a fairs journalist for London-based trade newspaper Antiques Trade Gazette, who opined, "Life is a learning curve for all."

The email goes on to deliver a mind-numbing list of proposed changes for the Olympia fair. But while reading these you're assuming that some crazed dealer in fine porcelain or period silver has already taken it upon himself to turn Lester's face into a Martinware bird.

It's only at the end of this dismal advertising stunt that he delivers the real punch line:

NB. David Lester’s picture above actually reflects recent surgery rather than being physically attacked by dealers at the London meeting. No offense is intended to any dealer. This image is just to make you smile.

Well, it didn't. It was a cheap stunt that merely reinforces the tired old saw that antique dealers are basically mindless thugs who will resort to the knuckle sandwich when the temperature rises. Did Lester consult David Moss before quoting him out of context like that?

Apparently, Lester's black eyes are a result of surgery. What kind of surgery? We know the ageing denizens of Florida give too much of their time and money to ham-fisted plastic surgeons with a Picasso complex, but is this more serious? I think we should be told.

The antiques trade is clearly in far worse shape than we imagined.

Funky caryatid brings British Museum director out in the rain

At first it appeared to be just another tourist strolling through the grounds of the British Museum as 26-year old American graduate student Mary Phillips, the daughter of a Greek immigrant, conducted her one-woman peaceful protest appealing for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens (left).

But on closer inspection the concerned-looking middle-aged man in the pale blue crew neck sweater skulking in the background turned out to be none other than British Museum director Neil MacGregor, coming to check out the opposition (right).

It was Mary's first visit to London and she chose to spend her first Sunday in the capital standing in the freezing driving rain dressed as a caryatid, holding a panel bearing the words 'Please let me go home'.

Despite the urge to hurry into the museum to shelter from the inclement weather, many visitors instead paused to read Mary's message and take a few photographs. It's not every day you see a caryatid dressed in leggings and a pair of Doc Martens (left). But it was her appeal for the return of the Marbles that struck a chord, with many people vocalising their support and encouragement before heading into the museum.

Approached for his view of Mary's one-woman appeal, Neil MacGregor at least had the good grace to applaud her fortitude in braving the elements, calling her act "an elegant way of making her point," before shuffling back to his office.

Mary, 26, who has a degree in classical languages from the University of Pittsburgh, was born in the same year that the British Committee for the Reunification of the Marbles was founded, confirming that every generation delivers new supporters arguing for reunification.

"I recently visited the awe-inspiring Acropolis Museum in Athens," Mary said, "and saw for myself how worthy a place it is to receive back its marbles. The return of the Marbles would be a British cultural gesture of singular poignancy."

Also present on Sunday was English student and recent 'Fourth Plinthian', Sofka Smales who afterwards posed for a photo with Mary (right). Nineteen year-old Sofka used her time as part of Antony Gormley's project to promote the return of the Parthenon Marbles. "I feel really passionate about this", explained Sofka, a student at London’s Central St. Martins College. "I have always felt that the Parthenon Marbles should rightly be returned to their country of origin. Especially now that a first class museum has been built to house them."

Mary will now proceed to Athens where she may once again dress as a caryatid to generate further support for the cause.

Caryatids are supporting columns carved in the form of women, which became common in ancient Greek architecture during the early classical period.

The example (shown left) in the British Museum was looted by Lord Elgin from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens at around the same time he desecrated the Parthenon. It is not, however, included in the Greek appeal for the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Nationalism, cultural hybridity and a hole in the ground: James Cuno at the London School of Economics

James Cuno (left), director of the Art Institute of Chicago, seems to spend more time travelling the world promoting his books than he does looking after the encyclopedic collections over which he presides.

Yesterday evening an audience of around 60 people — academics, students, journalists and others — assembled at the London School of Economics to listen to Cuno rehearse his now familiar arguments about the ownership and fair distribution of cultural property. There on the panel to challenge him were Tatiana Flessas, professor of cultural property law at the LSE, and Dr Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association.

The event was organised by a right-leaning think-tank, which operates under the grand name of The Institute of Ideas.

Cuno's big idea is that the collections of the world's great encyclopedic museums are being used as a political football by so-called "nationalist cultural property retentionists" — which is his derogatory term for source nations who were robbed of their material heritage during the imperial era and who would now like some of it returned, please.

During his allocated ten minutes, Cuno offered a summary of what has become his idée fixe, which is that most calls for the return of cultural objects are motivated by a creeping nationalism that he finds sinister and destructive. In support of his ideas, he loves referring to "cultural hybridity" "alterity", "the fluidity of cultural identity" and other tropes drawn from the discourses of cultural politics and post-colonialism. At root, however, his mission is to shore up the concept of the encyclopedic museum — a fortress whose boundaries are everywhere under challenge. Once again he reiterated the patently absurd notion that encyclopedic museums should be established everywhere.

Cuno's highly political presentation — which, paradoxically, sought to criticize what he saw as the politicisation of culture by source nations — was followed by a few short comments from Tatiana Flessas.

Professor Flessas sought to point out that many encyclopedic museums are themselves national creations and are thus also instruments of nationalist agendas — actors taking up nationalistic positions by claiming the power to interpret, contextualise and assign meanings to the objects in their collections. "That building up the road is not a branch of museums UK plc, it is The British Museum", she said, drawing one of the few ripples of laughter in an otherwise rather po-faced evening.

Maurice Davies referred to Cuno's suggestion that Italy, and effectively all countries east and south of it, are guilty of devising retentionist laws (in contrast to an implied suggestion that Britain and America do not). But he countered that Britain too has its nationalist retentionist laws to claim ownership of ancient artefacts uncovered from its soil, as does the US with its own national claims over newly discovered native American objects — "so there's a lot of nationalism about", he convincingly concluded.

Davies went on to speak of his experience in helping to forge legislation and resolve disputes concerning human remains. "I have no problem with culture being political," he said. "If repatriation of remains can return a tiny amount of power to Aboriginal peoples, a tiny amount of what was taken from them through colonialism, then that can only be a good thing." He also pointed out that former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello had confirmed that the return of the Euphronius krater to Italy (after a welter of legal pressure forced its hand) ultimately resulted in a new wave of cultural cooperation between the two countries and a host of fresh Italian loans to the Metropolitan Museum. Cuno dismissed this as negligible and insisted that relations between the two nations were still not that good. Unlike Montebello, who saw the benefits that issued from the affair, Cuno risks coming across as a bad loser.

Finally, it was the turn of the audience to participate, but unfortunately the Institute of Ideas mistook it for an edition of the BBC's Question Time and chose to allow several members of the audience to ask their questions one after the other before turning to the panel for responses. As a result, many good questions were left unanswered and none of the panellists were pressed on any point. Events like this rely on a good authoritative chair with a sound grasp of the issues to steer the discussion. Sadly, last night we didn't have one.

One young woman valiantly tried to throw some light on the issue of the Parthenon Marbles, asking: "What does the panel suggest Greece might do to move beyond nationalism and advance its claim for return of the Marbles?" This was another good question not properly addressed, although it drew this from Tatiana Flessas: "The British Museum will literally have to fall into a hole in the ground before it gives up the Parthenon Marbles and if that's not national and nationalistic, what is?"

Finally, there were lots of calls for transparency (another nebulous buzzword), but again no clear steer on the issue. One thing that is rarely if ever talked about is the relationship between museums and the art market. As long as there is no transparency in the art market (and without some form of regulation this is not likely to change), there will never be transparency where collecting and museums are concerned.

Events like this often end up generating more heat than light. This one left us all in the cold and dark. But at least James Cuno shifted a few copies of his book, on sale outside the conference room, which I suppose was the real point of the evening.

Inexplicably, two thirds of the way through the event's allocated time, with plenty left to discuss, the chair announced it was time to get down to the pub. I suggested that before retiring to the boozer, could we please have a show of hands on the return of the Parthenon Marbles?

The result: 29 in favour of return, 32 against.

Sometimes only a couple of beers will dispel the gloom.

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Breaking news update
The New York Times has just weighed into this debate again, John Tierney filing a piece here criticizing Egypt's antiquities tsar, Zahi Hawass for his avowed determination to seek the return of significant Egyptian antiquities held in Western encyclopedic museums.

Unsurprisingly, Tierney quotes Cuno: “It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange. And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.”

Meanwhile, these objects remain the property of Western nations whose encyclopedic museums benefit from the revenues generated by these objects through cultural tourism, etc. Possession is nine tenths of the law and 100 percent of the revenues too.

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"They came like thieves in the night" – How ABN Amro impounded €40 million worth of art from Dutch museum

As the specialist art press busies itself with yawn-inducing non-stories such as Tracey Emin’s feeble 'defence' of Damien Hirst’s critically demolished paintings at the Wallace Collection, a story with rather more significant implications for the art world has been unfolding over in Holland, as I reported here.

The collapse of Dutch DSB Bank NV on October 19, following a run by customers who withdrew €600 million worth of deposits, led to its main creditor, the mighty ABN Amro, seizing works of art that were destined for the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, currently under construction (above left). The museum was the brainchild and private passion of DSB Bank’s owner Dirk Scheringa, a former policeman turned financial trader and banker and latterly the owner of champion Dutch soccer club AZ Alkmaar.

The impounded works of art – including pieces by René Magritte, Lucian Freud, Marlene Dumas, Carel Willink and Terry Rodgers – were confiscated without prior warning from ABM Amro. The paintings, drawings and sculptures were scheduled for the inaugural exhibition in May 2010 of the almost completed €30 million state-of-the-art museum in Opmeer, North Holland (above right), which, had it been completed, would have been larger than the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Video footage of the seizure (see YouTube item posted on my blog entry below) showed curators in tears as the trucks arrived just a day after the museum’s parent company DSB Beheer also filed for bankruptcy in the Dutch courts. Local Dutch press quoted a canteen lady who said: "They [ABN Amro] came like thieves in the night."

The run on the Scheringa Bank appears to have been sparked by critical remarks by the Dutch economist Pieter Nijman Lakeman on the popular breakfast television programme Good Morning Netherlands. It seems Lakeman effectively urged customers to withdraw their money from DSB Bank on the grounds that it had levied excessive fees for mortgages. It was all dismally reminiscent of the demise of British bank Northern Rock here in the UK last year, which also followed a run by its retail customers.

Dirk Scheringa himself (left) appeared on Dutch television to express his bitterness about how matters had developed, saying, “We are not bankrupt, we were destroyed.”

What has been almost entirely overlooked in the affair is the impact on the artists whose work was owned by the museum or on those who were making work to be shown at the new museum next year, some of whom have not been paid. For all the negative press Dirk Scheringa has received regarding his financial dealings, many artists speak of his passion and commitment as a collector.

Earlier this year, the Scheringa Museum was hit by thieves who made off with works by Salvador Dali and Tamara de Lempicka (see Art Theft Central here and the New York Times here). That unfortunate event now looks like small beer next to the arrival of ABN Amro’s trucks.

Are these impounded works now destined for the auction block like those salvaged from doomed US investment bank Lehman Brothers?

This story takes on an altogether different significance in the light of the recent remarkable growth of private museums. As more and more traditional public museums look to deaccessioning as a means of bolstering acquisition funds or reducing storage costs (or indeed to plug gaps in their operating budgets), so benefactors are beginning to shy away from bequeathing works for fear that they may not be held in perpetuity. Many are looking instead to founding their own private museums.

The fate of the Scheringa Museum suggests that even the most well-endowed foundation is vulnerable in these uncertain times.

Scheringa Museum for Realist Art raided by bailiffs

It looks for all the world like a nocturnal art heist, and I suppose in some respects that is what it is. But when a bunch of heavies arrived in a truck this week to empty Holland's Scheringa Museum of Realist Art of its entire collection, it offered further evidence of the increasingly intimate relationship between art and capital and the catastrophic consequences when the relationship founders.

The Museum's demise is directly linked to the collapse of the Dutch DSB Bank owned by the Museum's founder and owner, Dirk Scheringa. The bank suffered a Northern Rock-style run over recent days, effectively forcing it into liquidation by its creditors, Dutch bank ABN Amro (whose removal men were at least considerate enough to use bubble wrap to protect the exhibits they impounded).

This torrid tale might be read as an unwelcome foretelling of how the art market could unfold in the coming few years. For all the upbeat messages spun out of the Frieze Fair this past week by its media owners, the art market might yet suffer from a 'double-dip' recession. The part played by debt funds and the financial sector's other dark materials is already being dramatically played out in Scheringa.

Many believed the Scheringa Museum voor Realisme was independent of the bank, securely funded and firewalled by its 'Foundation' status. In fact, its collection was standing as security for a Euro32 million loan.

More on this in the next few days....

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The New Art Market begins to take shape

We're nearing the end of Frieze week and the temperature seems to have risen slightly on the international art thermometer. Is the art market finally de-frosting after a year in the ice box?

As usual, the press has been somewhat preoccupied with the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow, David Furnish and their ilk at Frieze Fair's champagne private bash, but unless these celebrities are buying their Martin Kippenbergers and Peter Doigs in the full glare of the media, we need more than a bit of idle star-watching to gauge the progress of recovery.

Earlier in the week, I attended an Art Markets Symposium in South Kensington organised by Deloitte's Luxembourg office. This was another of those occasions when the world's leading art investment fund managers assemble to exchange Delphic anecdotes about 'volatility projections', 'eclectic asset allocations' and 'correlation analyses' while I sketched a passable version of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus on the back of my conference pack.

Many art market watchers believe the art market bubble that finally burst at the end of last year had been inflated over the previous few years by the presence in the market of speculators from the financial sector. These barbarians, the theory goes, had pitched their tents in the last great unregulated market (or what one fund manager at this week's conference pithily described as "a completely unconstrained, non-benchmarked space"), before embarking on an orgy of arbitrage and unabashed 'flipping'.

Some would have us believe that the 'correction' we're now witnessing has brought a return to some Edenic place from which the 'flippers' have finally been expelled. Those buying art in the current climate are buying it for the love of art, not because they think they can make money on it. New York dealer Marianne Boesky told Bloomberg this week that "Last year was so rough at Frieze," but this year, "It's real. There's no hype or depression. We’re now selling to people who just love art."

Surely if it were only "art lovers" doing all the buying there would be no art market. And weren't the dealers who are now luxuriating in 'the real' only too happy to sell to the hordes of barbarian speculators during the years of milk and honey from 2003-2008? Yes, they were.

With Goldman Sachs preparing to pay out $5.35 billion to its staff in quarterly pay and bonuses following a spike in profits, there is every chance that the 5,500 Goldman Sachs employees based in London might just decide to channel some of that wealth towards art. Here we go again, is the phrase that immediately springs to mind.

If you thought the last art bubble was bad (incidentally, the Mei-Moses art index defines a bubble as a trend of 30% growth per annum for five years), the Deloitte conference offered plenty of signs that the international art market may already have entered another phase of growth. This time it may be driven by a different range of derivatives and similarly exotic instruments aiming to capitalize on the market's traditional lack of liquidity. So while dealers over at Frieze were celebrating the return of the real, elsewhere plans were already afoot to construct the next virtual market. Once again it will be a market powered in no small measure by debt funds and hedge funds.

Another tent-pole trend emerging from the Deloitte conference was the emergence of a new breed of 'eclectic funds' that seek to spread risk across a broader range of what are now commonly termed "emotional assets". So, diamonds, stamps, coins, watches, and so on, will increasingly be included in investment portfolios along with (or indeed perhaps instead of) fine art. According to Bernard Duffy of Emotional Assets Management & Research (EAMR), recent studies have demonstrated that by diversifying into a broader range of 'collectibles', volatility profiles can be projected more efficiently and returns predicted with greater accuracy.

Meanwhile, one trend that is proving somewhat tougher to predict is the future of the auction houses, particularly as buyers and sellers seek increased privacy in their transactions and as the global art market continues its seemingly inexorable shift from West to East.

The art market's traditional need for discretion and the low cost of private transactions (compared with the terrifying cost of selling via the rostrum) has already triggered an exponential growth in the number and value of private sales conducted by the auction houses. Christie's executed £133.1 million ($217 million) in private sales in the first half of 2009, while Sotheby's transacted $1.5 billion (£917 million) in private sales over the last three years, according to a Bloomberg report.

So, while I wasn't actively scouting around for a visual metaphor to illustrate these musings, Frieze fair provided one.

As I exited the big tent on Thursday, I spotted a video work by Christian Jankowski entitled Strip The Auctioneer (right). This involved an elegantly dressed auctioneer selling his own clothes, item by item, at a Christie's public auction. The sale actually took place at Christie's Amsterdam in June, but I'm disappointed to have to report that the auctioneer failed to strip fully naked, apparently stopping after he'd taken off his trousers.

Whether this failure to get all of his kit off represents grounds for an appeal under the Trade Descriptions Act is a moot point, but I couldn't help wondering whether the auctioneer might have gone a bit further had he been selling via a private transaction. The last object he sold was his hammer. If that's not symbolic, what is?

'No Love Lost' between Hirst and his critics

I was at an art investment conference yesterday at which one of the delegates shared an amusing and illuminating story about the artist Damien Hirst. It concerned a collector who had purchased one of Hirst's butterfly paintings for a large amount of money (it would have been between £500,000-£700,000). Some time later he was perturbed to see that several of the butterflies had fallen off the canvas on which Hirst (or more likely one of his army of assistants) had suspended them.

Clearly aware that he was in possession of something with a very limited shelf life, the collector promptly went out and found a few replacement butterflies and attached them to the spaces vacated by their predecessors before entering the work into auction. The bidding started high — £600,000 (no bids), £500,000 (no bids), 300,000, 200,000, and so on, before being knocked down for some paltry sum. It was said that Hirst bought the work, repaired it himself (or more likely got one of his army of assistants to repair it for him) and then re-sold it for somewhere rather closer to its original price.

Whether or not this story is true, it does illustrate something about the Hirst mythology — that given that he doesn't actually make the works, he is now recognized primarily as a businessman (it's no surprise that this anecdote was told by an art asset manager at an art investment conference).

But perhaps that is what Hirst will now be restricted to doing — repairing the mixed media and collage-based works for which he has become famous and which he recently declared he had finished making altogether in favour of a return to painting (see my preview of his current Wallace Collection show here).

It seems that Hirst, ever the clever reader of the market and his critics, might have expected the merciless critical deconstruction that his paintings have received from the art press. The title of his Wallace Collection show — No Love Lost — may have been a subtle signal that if the critics ravaged him, there would be no love lost between him and them.

It's easy to take a pop at the guy. He's the richest artist that ever walked the planet and the critics and commentators just can't forgive him for clearing £100 million at Sotheby's in a single auction on the very day that Lehman Brothers evaporated. It may be true that he can't paint. It raises the interesting question: "What will he do next?"

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The critics get the knives out:
It couldn't get worse for Damien Hirst (Telegraph)

Are Hirst's paintings any good? No, they're not worth looking at (The Independent)

Damien Hirst's paintings are deadly dull (The Guardian)

Clement Price-Thomas: 'The Guide'

Clement Price-Thomas's The Guide, below, has just won the Installation, Sculpture and Performance Prize on the Premio Celeste art website.

The Guide from Clement Price - Thomas on Vimeo.

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Auction houses become private dealers as power shifts from seller to buyer

The steady transformation of the big international fine art auction houses into private dealerships continues apace. The process has been going on for some time with the acquisition by auction houses of leading dealerships in the fields of Old Masters and Contemporary Art. But the fall of Lehman Brothers last year has punched a hole the size of the Grand Canyon into vendor consignments, forcing the auctioneers into conducting more and more private transactions. How this will affect the future of art price databases, which rely on the steady availability of public auction prices?

This morning, Bloomberg calculates that the forthcoming London contemporary art auctions, to be held by Christie's and Phillips de Pury during the week of the Frieze fair, are estimated to realise £20.8 million ($33.1 million). That contrasts with the equivalent sales last year, which carried a low estimate of £107 million, in other words around 80% down.

But interestingly, Bloomberg also reports that private sales transacted by Christie's outstripped its auction sales in the first half of 2009. "Christie’s had £133.1 million in private sales in the first half of 2009," writes Bloomberg's Scott Reyburn.

An artist friend asked me recently why Christie's had bought the London dealership Haunch of Venison. There's the answer. Foreseeing the imminent decline of the public auction market and knowing the extent to which buyers and sellers privilege discretion over transparency, the auction houses have steadily strengthened their foothold in the lucrative private sales arena. The risks of consigning works to public auction have multiplied in just a matter of months. The discreet private alternative starts to look very attractive.

Art market analysts have been predicting the seismic shift of power from seller to buyer for some time. It will be interesting to see how it shakes down during Frieze week and beyond.

The days when one could look to the auction arena for a relatively reliable indication of market activity are drawing to a close. What this says about the future of art price databases — hitherto the main source of data for market analysts — is another matter.

Market transparency recedes even further into the distant horizon. Does that matter?

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Image above:
Li Songsong (b. 1973) 
Cuban Sugar (2006)
To be offered by Christie's in London on 16th October 2009
Image: Christie's

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The Parthenon Marbles: refuting the arguments

My friend Kwame Opoku writes to tell me that Julien Anfruns, Director-General of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), recently told the Spanish journal La Nueva España that the Parthenon Marbles held by the British Museum should remain in London. This has understandably upset those who expect impartiality from ICOM and its officers over matters of delicate cultural diplomacy.

It seems that Anfruns believes that had Elgin not hacked the Marbles from the Parthenon, there would be no Parthenon Marbles left for any of us to enjoy. "Had the transfer never happened," Anfruns is quoted as saying, "who knows if we would be able to see these pieces today at all." Transfer. I like that.

This is patent nonsense, of course, and prompts me into a summary refutation of Anfruns's observation and the other spurious arguments frequently put forward to keep the Marbles in London.

Lord Elgin "rescued" the Marbles by removing them to safety in Britain
In fact, the Marbles that Lord Elgin did not bring back to Britain and which remained in Athens, survived remarkably well and have recently benefited from responsible cleaning by Greek conservators using state of the art laser technology. In contrast, the Marbles retained by the British Museum were scrubbed with wire brushes in the 1930s by British Museum staff in a misguided attempt to make them whiter.

Lord Elgin "legally" acquired the Marbles and Britain subsequently "legally" acquired them from him for the British Museum
In the absence of unequivocal documentary proof of the actual circumstances under which Lord Elgin removed the Marbles, the legality of Britain's acquisition of them will always be in doubt. More importantly, the fact that permission to remove them was granted not by the Greeks but by the Ottoman forces occupying Greece at that time undermines the legitimacy of Elgin's actions and thus by extension Britain's ownership.

Lord Elgin's removal of the Marbles was archaeologically motivated
Lord Elgin's expressed intention was always to transport the Marbles to his family pile in Scotland where they would be displayed as trophies in the tradition established by aristocratic collectors returning from the Grand Tour. Nobody with genuine archaeological interest in ancient Greek sculpture would ever have countenanced the disfiguring of such a beautiful and important ancient monument in the way Lord Elgin did. For archaeologists, an object's original context is paramount.

The Greeks are unable to look after the Parthenon Marbles properly
The New Acropolis Museum in Athens is a world-class museum with first-rate conservation and curatorial expertise. It is the most appropriate place in the world in which to display the Parthenon Marbles. Its proximity to the ancient monument would return to them some measure of their architectural significance. While they remain in London, this aspect of their importance is steadily being erased from the cultural memory.

It is impossible to restore the Parthenon and thus the aspiration towards 'reunification' is a false one
Restoration of the structural fabric of Parthenon temple continues apace. However, the aspiration has never been to return the frieze, pediment and metopes to the original building but rather to reunify them within the New Acropolis Museum where they can be properly appreciated and understood, and preserved for posterity.

The Marbles are better off in London where they can be seen in the context of other world cultures
Research on museum visitors has concluded that the average visitor does not make meaningful connections between the randomly acquired objects held and displayed by encyclopedic museums. Indeed, given the choice between viewing the Parthenon Marbles within the artificial contexts applied to them by British Museum curators and experiencing them in the city of Athens from which they originate, polls demonstrate that the majority of the public would prefer to see them returned to Athens.

The Marbles belong to "the world", to all of us, and should therefore be left where "everyone" can enjoy them
Now that Athens has a world-class, state-of-the-art museum in which to house the Marbles, there is no longer any justification for assuming that London is the best place for the people of the world to enjoy them. Since its opening, the New Acropolis Museum has enjoyed huge visitor numbers. It is therefore reasonable to assume that visitor numbers would increase still further were the Parthenon Marbles to be reunited in the New Acropolis Museum.

If the British Museum agreed to return the Marbles to Athens, it would set a dangerous precedent that would "open the floodgates", leading to the denuding of the world's encyclopedic museums
For European and North American museums to suggest that they would be denuded is tantamount to admitting that the majority of their collections were dubiously acquired, which is not the case. It is therefore nonsense to suggest that museums would be denuded. Every request for repatriation should be treated on its own merits. The great encyclopedic or 'universal' museums in London, Paris, Berlin, New York and elsewhere are all subject to the laws laid down within internationally agreed legal instruments such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the safeguarding of cultural property. Refusing to return the Marbles sends the wrong message at a time when a more ethical approach is required over disputed cultural objects.

The Marbles are too important a part of the British Museum collection to allow them to be given up
The most important part of the British Museum's work in the future will be the fostering of creative cultural partnerships with other nations. These can lead to groundbreaking exhibitions such as the Terracotta Army from China and Moctezuma from Mexico. Returning the Parthenon Marbles would open a new chapter in cooperative relations with Greece and enable visitors to the British Museum to see new objects loaned by Greek museums. Refusal to return the Marbles is hampering this process. The Parthenon Marbles display in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum could be reconfigured using high-quality casts. The decision to return the Marbles to Athens would be seen as the British Museum leading the way in enlightened cultural diplomacy, the benefits of which would be diverse, long-term, and far-reaching.

The Marbles can only be "loaned" to Athens if the Greeks agree to concede Britain's legal ownership of the sculptures
Attaching such a precondition to a dispute over cultural property has been widely viewed as insulting and condescending and reminiscent of colonialist approaches to international relations. Seemingly intractable cultural disputes require both parties to adopt a spirit of open-minded generosity and to enter into discussions on equal terms and with no preconditions.

"The Elgin Marbles are no longer part of the story of the Parthenon. They are now part of another story." (Neil MacGregor, Director, British Museum)
It is not the role of museums to rewrite history to further their own nationalistic ends. As their correct name makes clear, the Parthenon Marbles are, and will always be, integral to the story of the Parthenon, one of the finest cultural achievements bequeathed to us by the ancient Greeks.

Have I missed anything? Ah, yes, the sun shines more frequently in Athens. Case closed.

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Rare Danish watercolour found sleeping in Yorkshire

They're called 'sleepers' — auction lots whose true value is unrecognized by the auctioneer until the hammer falls.

On such occasions it only takes two knowledgeable dealers or collectors for the bidding to take off, leaving a derisory estimate in a cloud of dust. So perhaps the real sleepers are the auctioneers who only wake up when the item they've failed to recognize suddenly breaks cover and fetches an unexpectedly high price. This month some of the loudest snoring came from West Yorkshire, although the dozy auctioneers, Hartleys of Ilkley, will doubtless claim that it wasn't a sleeper as they knew all along what it was and what it was worth. Which merely confirms that pre-sale estimates are meaningless.

Among the pictures offered at their 9th September auction was the original watercolour illustration dated 1913 (above left). Entitled Knight Olaf, it shows a forest with a gaunt-looking medieval knight astride a white steed being welcomed by a frieze of ethereal female nudes doubling as swirling mist. Clearly influenced by fin-de-siècle artists such as Jan Toorop and Aubrey Beardsley, it also has affinities with the work of childrens' book illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, and with the 'Fairyland' designs by Daisy Makeig Jones for Royal Worcester ceramics.


The artist was the Danish illustrator Kay Rasmus Nielsen (1886-1957) (right) who, like Rackham, specialized in illustrating fairy tales and legends by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Charles Perrault, and others.

After training in Paris, where he absorbed the prevailing Symbolist and Art Nouveau styles of the European avant garde, Nielsen moved to London in 1911. There he established a successful career as a children's book illustrator. In 1939, he settled in southern California and the following year was commissioned by Walt Disney to design scenes for his 1940 film, Fantasia.

The illustration that turned up in Yorkshire was signed and dated 1913, making it an early work, executed when Nielsen was just 27 and beginning to pick up his first commissions from London publishers Hodder and Stoughton. It bore a label on the verso for the Leicester Galleries, the internationally renowned London dealers in avant garde art.

The Knight Olaf was entered for sale by a private vendor from Halifax whose family acquired it after the war when they bought a large Cheshire property that had been decommissioned by the army. The illustration was acquired along with the rest of the house contents and was for many years assumed to be a print. Even in 1945 it may have been worth more than the house.

There is no shortage of auction price databases on the internet that would have revealed the keen international demand for original illustrations by Nielsen, but it seems Hartleys didn't consult them. Only last year, Christie's South Kensington sold A Huntsman Vanquishes The Seven-Headed Dragon (left) for £23,273 ($67,500), by no means an unusual price for Nielsen's work.

How, then, did Hartleys arrive at an estimate of just £1500-2500 for such a hugely decorative, original, early work, signed and dated, in excellent condition, and in its original frame? The trade press described the estimate as "cautious". Pointless would be more accurate.

In the event, the hammer fell at £36,000 offered by an American bidder. It's the sort of picture that would probably have interested the Museum of American Illustration in Rhode Island, to say nothing of the wealthy private collectors of Nielsen's work who'd be willing to stretch themselves for outstanding early examples.

The buyer's premium alone on the hammer price amounts to £5400, to say nothing of the vendor commission.

Nice work, if you can get it. Even better if you can do it in your sleep.

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CultureLabel.com: An old idea, freshly minted

Some of the most interesting e-commerce ventures currently emerging in the culture sector are arriving to the sort of media fanfare usually reserved for truly new and original ideas. But how innovative are these ventures?

Take, for example, CultureLabel.com, a new website that aggregates designer objects, limited edition prints, multiples and other cultural merchandise from a host of UK museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, making them available via an online shopping basket, à la Amazon.

The site is the brainchild of a group of young marketing wizards and brand-savvy entrepreneurs and is headed up by David Gilbert, a trustee and chair of the Contemporary Arts Society, and a board director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Arts Council.

Gilbert, (right) and his team believe their online retail culture store can create an additional 30 percent revenue for cash-strapped museums and galleries.

The 60-odd partners already signed up include key national museums and galleries such as Tate, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy, plus the National Trust and English Heritage. Then there's all those contemporary galleries like the Baltic in Gateshead and doubtless the Arts Council's 'string of pearls' will follow — Towner in Eastbourne, the De La Warr in Bexhill, Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire.

It's not enough to open a fancy David Chipperfield-designed museum; these shiny new white cubes need to generate revenues too. As David Gilbert himself has said, "It’s important to understand that you don’t have to rely on public funding for growth." That has been true for decades, but every now and again it's important to state the bleeding obvious.

Culture Label is a brilliant thing and very welcome, but its core idea isn't as innovative and original as it might seem.

Back in 2000, Philadelphia-based entrepreneur Richard B. Price was stacking up the air-miles shuttling around the world trying to generate capital funding for the MuseumNetwork.com.

Aware of the revenue crisis in the museum sector (a crisis that even now, ten years on, is only deepening) I felt certain Price would succeed in winning the required investment for his innovative online museum hub. However, like many other great business ideas that emerged prior to the dotcom slide, MuseumNetwork proved to be ahead of its time. Museums (many at that time not even online), just didn't get it. Cultural entrepreneurism was in its infancy too.

But since then, online retail has developed in leaps and bounds, giving birth to a global army of culture shoppers. And museums have started to wake up to those opportunities.

Part of the MuseumNetwork plan was to aggregate museum merchandise on a single website to offer global access to cultural products and thereby create new revenue streams for museums. But its business plan comprised a whole lot more besides a big online culture shop. The core idea was to create the conditions and systems that would enable museums to share marketing and other administrative costs and benefit from economies of scale. This would still be a welcome thing were it to happen. Ultimately it would also have created an exchange forum for deaccessioning, which continues to test the ingenuity and ethical charters of museums across Europe and North America.

In the event, diversity of ambition may have been MuseumNetwork's Achilles heel, just as CultureLabel's niche focus is its main strength. Here, individual museum brands are subsumed into an overarching Amazonian retail environment where cultural 'products' speak for themselves rather than for the institution with which they may have been originally associated. In other words, what might have looked like a piece of local kitsch when encountered in the real-world museum shop, could take on a fresh significance in this easy-click retail space alongside other designed objects of desire.

CultureLabel is basically the high-fallutin' cultural equivalent of 'I Want One Of Those.com'. But what's wrong with that? If it puts pounds in museums' pockets and alleviates the strain on operating budgets and thereby helps them stay open, then all well and good.

Just don't tell me it's a new idea.

Van Gogh: ear we go again...

I was amused to read Ann Landi's interesting bibliographical review on ARTnews online of the various mythologies that have grown up around van Gogh's ear over the decades (yes, that's it on the left).

Among the texts they refer to is German writer and van Gogh scholar Stefan Koldehoff's book Van Gogh: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Van Gogh: Myth and Reality, DuMont 2003), which explored the circumstances of the Dutch painter's lobe-otomy (ouch!).

During his research, Koldehoff "found not even the smallest piece of truth" for the 2001 thesis expounded by Hamburg-based scholars Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans (Van Goghs Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens (Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, Osburg) in which they venture that Vincent lost his ear during a sword fight with Gauguin during their tumultuous time sharing a house in Provence.

Be that as it may, what interested me most about the ARTnews piece was Koldehoff's reference to a satirical story I penned in 2003 (which he also discussed in his book (right) and which, incidentally, can still be read online here).

Koldehoff told ARTnews, "In 2003, on the 150th anniversary of van Gogh’s birth, a British colleague [he meant Percy Flarge] put on his Web site a photo of a glass [above left] supposedly containing the artist’s ear," claiming it had been found recently in southern France and that there was now a dispute between the Netherlands and France as to where it should go as a national treasure. "Of course it was an ironic comment on the big brouhaha over the anniversary, but several serious news agencies and newspapers printed it as fact."

I only bring this up in the hope that Stefan Koldehoff can enlighten me as to which serious news agencies and newspapers fell for that story. Or is he, perhaps, confusing it with the Belgian broadsheet De Morgen's credulous re-publishing of my satirical Parthenon Marbles article which claimed that the Marbles were not, in fact, made by a Greek but by an Englishman who changed his name to Pheidias. Just for the record, that news item and The Guardian's follow-up can also still be read online here.

I mention this not merely to drive traffic to that humble piece of internet real estate where the flag of art satire still flutters in the gentle breeze, but also to ensure that the British Museum's unethical stance over the Parthenon Marbles doesn't entirely slip from the agenda now that the New Acropolis Museum is open and drawing huge visitor numbers.


Flarge

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