tomflynn

Greek Culture Minister rushes to deny Acropolis rental rumours

2012-01-19T05:34:00.000-08:00

The source of the almost instantly viral rumour that the Greeks were considering renting out the Acropolis and other archaeological sites to help pay off the country's sovereign debt seems to have been a Conservative former Greek Minister — Gerasimos Giakoumatos.

‎"It's better to rent the Acropolis to private companies than to cut wages and pensions," Giakoumatos told the press. "Rent the Parthenon, the Delphi, the Temple of Apollo, Knossos and let the money flow into the public funds.” That recommendation, which had cultural heritage experts choking into their cornflakes, was endorsed by another Greek MP, Nea Dimokratia.

As Ton Cremers has just reported, Greek Minister of Culture and Tourism, Pavlos Yeroulanos, quickly took to his Twitter account to dispel claims that the Greek Government was considering such a course of action (@P_Yeroulanos).

Shame, as I was looking forward to renting the Temple of Hera at Olympia (above left) for a nice summer holiday with the kids. No roof or pool, but nice views of the surrounding countryside...

Acropolis for rent: surely Hellas is insulted

2012-01-19T02:29:00.000-08:00

Greece is to make its archaeological sites available for rental by commercial concerns, according to recent reports, seemingly in a desperate effort to help shore up the nation's disastrous debt burden.

So, Pericles's "everlasting glory" has come to this. For generations, Greece's cultural heritage monuments were regarded as beyond the reach of the dead arm of corporate interests, but the global debt crisis has changed all that. Now it seems almost anyone will be able to rent the country's archaeological sites for use as film sets, or for advertising and other commercial purposes. The notion that this could have any measurable impact on Greece's seemingly insuperable sovereign debt burden is risible and smacks of desperation.

As if it were not bad enough for Greece to have to watch its own Parthenon Marbles generating vast amounts of tourist revenue for the British Museum, it is now forced to prostitute its ancient birthright to commercial interests in order to offset the misery caused by corporate banking greed. (Has there ever been a more auspicious moment for Britain to return the Marbles to Greece? It would be a humanitarian gesture of immeasurable symbolic impact that could only lift the spirits of a deeply demoralized nation and doubtless also help it generate vital revenue.)

Needless to say, the Greek government's decision to rent out the nation's cultural sites has been greeted with widespread vocal opposition from cultural heritage groups crying "Sacrilege!" One can't help thinking back to the understandable snorts of moral outrage elicited by the use of corporate advertising hoardings on Venice's ancient buildings a few years ago.

Ton Cremers of the Museum Security Network used his Facebook page to suggest that the British Museum should begin paying Greece 'back-rental' on the Parthenon Marbles looted by Lord Elgin. This drew a snort of moral outrage from the Honourable Anna Somers Cocks, Editor-at-Large of The Art Newspaper, who responded thus: "Hey, anachronistic! they were acquired with the written permission of the Ottoman governor of Athens, the only legal authority there at the time."

Don't be fooled by the streetwise "Hey!" that prefixes that outburst (her tune might have changed had it been her beloved Venice pillaged by the crapulous Lord Elgin). If you're looking for a definition of the term 'anachronistic', look no further than the Establishment's Facebook page.

Greece, think again...for all our sakes. It's bad enough that the Ottoman Turks conspired with a syphilitic Scottish aristocrat to desecrate the Parthenon. Don't let corporate interests add insult to injury.

Message to the British Museum: Do the right thing. Send the Marbles back to Athens.

Council negligence invites Hepworth sculpture theft

2012-01-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

A short stroll this afternoon around Dulwich Park, from where Barbara Hepworth's sculpture was recently stolen, revealed another likely reason why the scrap metal thieves found it so easy to gain entrance and remove the work without detection or interruption.

The park's Tudorbethan gatehouse (left) — which at one time would have been occupied by a park-keeper or groundsman — is now unoccupied and boarded up, removing a critical level of security and making it much easier to break through the adjacent park gates without being noticed. Once inside, it was not difficult for the thieves to remove the work from its base since the sculpture is located fifty yards from the gates, just off the main public path and thus screened from view. This surely constitutes a level of negligence on the part of the local council who administer the park.

The two videos below, which I filmed earlier today, give a better idea of the original location of the work beside the lake. In the first video a woman and her two young daughters lament the passing of a work that the girls had climbed upon since they were very small.

Below the videos is a link to the e-petition lobbying for a cashless scrap metal trade. Please take a minute to sign it.

The sculpture's original location:

And another view of its surrounding parkland:

e-petition
Cashless Scrap Metal Trade - Amendment to Scrap Metal Merchants Act 1964

Responsible department: Home Office

Due to a significant rise in value, metal has become a much sought after commodity. This increased demand has resulted in a sharp rise in metal theft nationally. Metal fencing, gates, manhole covers and other metallic items are stolen on a regular basis. Property is raided for lead, copper and cabling. War memorials and statues have been taken. Overhead power lines are stolen at serious risk to personal safety with huge costs for replacement and major inconvenience to the public. Historically the scrap metal trade has been a cash in hand industry. This creates difficulties as there is no audit trail, making identification of individuals who may be trading stolen metal or who may be committing tax or benefits fraud, a difficult proposition. An amendment to the Scrap Metal Merchants Act 1964 to prohibit cash transactions would make payment by cheque or directly into a bank account mandatory and would be a significant component in reducing metal theft.

Sign the petition here

Hirst/Hockney/Rubens: Spot the Difference

2012-01-04T03:10:00.000-08:00

David Hockney has joined a long list of far less illustrious figures criticizing Damien Hirst's 'factory' approach to making art. It began with a veiled reference to Hirst (and by extension Jeff Koons and a host of other contemporary art 'CEO's' for that matter) in the poster campaign for Hockney's forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition — "All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally."

Pressed by the Radio Times for clarification of whether this was a sly dig at Hirst, Hockney replied that the prevailing approach to art making promoted by today's art schools and adopted by Hirst et al was "a little insulting to craftsmen."

This inevitably invited the predictable gale of references to Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt, all of whom used assistants. In fact, the history of art is replete with instances in which an artist's success has prompted the recruitment of assistants to help meet the demand of a growing number of collectors.

But what these knee-jerk comparisons between Hirst and Rubens always leave out is that many of the collectors who sought to acquire a work by Rubens direct from the artist stipulated that the work be made entirely by him and not by his assistants. To some clients, not even those pictures to which the artist himself applied the finishing touch were acceptable.

Henry Danvers (1573-1643), art adviser to Charles I, wrote to his colleagues recommending Rubens for a royal portrait commission, but made clear that, "In every painter's opinion he hath sent hither a piece scarce touched by his own hand," and demanded that Rubens paint another "to redeem his reputation in this house." Rubens, in response, promised "a large picture entirely by my own hand." (Jerry Brotton, The Sale of the Late King's Goods, Pan, 2006, p75).

Similar skepticism has long surrounded the work of Rembrandt for similar reasons. In the 1950s, David Roell, director of the Rijksmuseum, wisely declined an offer from Duveen Brothers in New York to buy a Portrait of Hendrickje Stoeffels, attributed to Rembrandt (right), stating that he did not "feel the inner conviction that it is entirely by the hand of Rembrandt." (Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, University of Caifornia Press, 1998, p43). In the event the picture was sold in 1957 (as a Rembrandt) to Norton Simon for $133,500. Simon's wife Lucille later inherited it as part of their divorce settlement, but it was eventually sold at Christie's in New York in 2002 as "Studio of Rembrandt" for $152,500.

Such connoisseurial ponderings are unlikely ever to surround the work of Hirst or Koons since neither of them are artists in the sense that Rubens or Rembrandt were. Hirst and Koons are manufacturers and their output ought to be considered as 'products' rather than as works of art. The fact that they are not is testament to the impoverished critical judgement underpinning the contemporary art market. This is essentially what Hockney was referring to when he said "...you can teach the craft; it's the poetry you can't teach."

This also helps explain Hirst's justification for employing other people to execute his spot paintings — "I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it," he was quoted as saying.

That blunt statement implies a mean-spirited disdain for the art market and the credulous millionaires whose collective aesthetic myopia has made him rich as Croesus. In other words, they got the 'art' they deserved. The fact that his products lack poetry and indeed even craft (Hirst's butterfly pictures tend to fall to bits) — is confirmation of the gaping chasm separating Hirst — and for that matter Koons, Murakami and the rest of that warehouse generation — from Rubens, Rembrandt, and yes, despite his ludicrous recent landscapes, Hockney himself.

The theft of public sculpture has got to stop

2011-12-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago a gang of scumbag opportunists broke through the gates of Dulwich Park, just five minutes from where I live in South London, and stole an important work of outdoor sculpture — Two Forms (Divided Circle) of 1970 (left) — by the great British modernist artist Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975). A popular local landmark, the 7ft high sculpture had stood beside the lake undisturbed for the past forty years, just a stone's throw from Dulwich Picture Gallery opposite.

Art theft is all too familiar in Dulwich. Dulwich Picture Gallery is Britain's oldest public art gallery and has been targeted by thieves on more than one occasion. In 1966, Michael Hall, an unemployed ambulance driver, drilled a hole in a door and made off with three Rembrandts, three works by Rubens, and paintings by Adam Elsheimer and Gerard Dou. Happily the pictures were recovered a short time later, some of them discovered wrapped in newspaper under a bush in Rookery Park, Streatham, another popular pleasure spot.

In market value terms, Barbara Hepworth's bronze cannot compare with Rembrandt's Girl at a Window, but that is hardly the issue. Its real value is in the pleasure it gives to countless thousands of strolling dog-walkers, joggers and families on their Sunday outing. Its scrap value may be fairly significant to the despicable thugs who stole it, but as an important work of public sculpture by one of Britain's preeminent modernist artists it is irreplaceable and in that sense, priceless. Why, then, have local authorities offered just £1000 for information leading to its recovery? How brainless is that?

Hepworth's Two Forms can now be added to the melancholy roll-call of public sculpture stolen as a result of soaring scrap metal prices. The list is beginning to read like the index of a book on British sculpture as works by Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore, and William Goscombe-John — to name just a few — have disappeared from public locations in recent years, never to be seen again.

This is not just another scrap metal problem. Granted, we're not talking about overhead cabling from a railway line, the theft of which can endanger human life. But the theft of sculpture can have a profound effect on local communities. A crudely truncated stump is now all that's left of Hepworth's elegant abstract form — another ghastly reminder of the philistinism spawned by the economic downturn.

Public sculpture theft is now out of control and something has to be done before all our parks and public spaces are desecrated in this way. I have no remedy for this problem, but if I were a chief at the Met I'd sure as hell light some fires under a few people. At present, the web pages devoted to metal theft at the Centre for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) make almost no reference to art or sculpture theft save to point out how inadequate security encourages thefts. It's time someone at the Met gave POP a new department — POP (ART).

We may not know who stole the Hepworth, but whoever they are will have set up a yard willing to melt it down. Those locations and the people who run them should also be known to police.

The Dulwich theft is worrying for another reason. The park was supposed to be secure. The gates (right) are locked every night, so the thieves had to break in and drive a van through the park in order to remove the work. What are the insurance implications of this? How many other parks will now be looking at what they believed were reasonable security measures and thinking again? If a set of ten-foot high iron gates aren't enough to keep out these vermin, what is?

I have a lovely little watercolour (left) of Barbara Hepworth's Single Form of 1961-62, which stands beside the lake in Battersea Park. Hepworth made the sculpture as a memorial to her friend, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who died in an air crash in Africa in 1961. Like the Dulwich work, Single Form amplifies the natural rhythms of the lake and surrounding park, subtly enhancing the experience of moving through the landscape. My watercolour — which I bought direct from an artist working at the Watts Gallery in Compton a few years ago — shows the park under snow when the sculpture takes on a different ambience.

Single Form is in good company at Battersea, sharing the park with Henry Moore's Three Standing Figures and Eric Kennington's dignified war memorial to the 24th Division that served at the Western Front. Happily the Moore and the Kennington are both in stone and so — for the time being at least — are relatively safe. The Hepworth should now be put under closer watch.

Farewell, Hitch

2011-12-16T04:39:00.000-08:00

I've never had heroes or idols, but Christopher Hitchens was one of the few people in the world I truly admired. Not merely on account of his muscular, persuasive support of the campaign to reunite the Parthenon Marbles in Athens, but for his glittering, coruscating turns of phrase, his resolute purpose, staggering erudition, willingness to change his mind as the facts changed, and his merciless demolition of the crapulous pygmy yes-men who populate even the highest stations of public office.

Oh to have encountered him at the bar...

OK, Cameron. If you're tough enough, now put a stake through the heart of Droit de Suite

2011-12-09T01:42:00.000-08:00

It's ironic that the central plank of David Cameron's objection to entry into the new inner circle of European nations now taking shape in Brussels is that it would mean greater financial regulation for all member states. He is now being widely applauded in his own party for defending the very institutions — banks, hedge funds and other speculators — that were largely responsible for the near global financial meltdown.

His decision is perhaps justifiable given that financial services are about all Britain has to offer the world since the decline of its manufacturing base. But if the markets are the main focus of his heroic, General Custer-like stand against European bureaucracy, he should also say "Non!" to the dismal Brussels-born mechanism that has no doubt contributed to the steady decline of London's preeminent status as a centre of the global art trade. I'm referring, of course, to Droit de Suite, or the Artists' Re-Sale Rights Levy.

It may be true that China's inexorable advance to become the world's largest art market (now even bigger than America, according to most econometric analyses) was inevitable given all the other factors at play in its madly accelerating economy.

But unless Britain wants to slide even further into art market irrelevance, as France is in grave danger of doing, Cameron must do all in his power to make London the most attractive place to trade in art. The Brussels-imposed levy known in Europe as Droit de Suite, or the Artists' Re-sale Rights Levy — which grants the artist a small percentage share every time one of his or her works is re-sold on the secondary market — was widely opposed by the UK art trade, and for good reason. It has imposed a stultifying layer of costly administration on every secondary market transaction that qualifies for the levy. Moreover, after 2012 (when its reach is extended to cover transactions for up to 70 years after the artist's death, payable to the artist's heirs) it will drive yet another nail into the coffin of the British art trade.

Contrary to pro-levy propaganda circulated by the Design and Artists' Copyright Society Limited (DACS), and other levy-collecting bodies, it does NOT benefit artists to the extent they continue to maintain. Above all, after the 2012 extension it could well drive art transactions towards those markets where it does not apply (America and China, to name just two). To extend it at a moment when London is already surrendering art market prominence to China is utter madness.

You may be morally against the unconscionable sums that have been made (and are still being made) by those individuals who have benefited from the fiscal deregulation of recent years. But there is no denying that the art market benefits from wealth generation as investors see it as an attractive place to park surplus capital. Britain needs to nourish one of the strongest markets we have left.

It may well be that protecting the City is critical to Britain's future. But Cameron must now go further. He has already said "Nein!" to surrendering more sovereignty to European technocrats. Now he must add "Non!" to Droit de Suite.

Saint Charles Saatchi blasts "vulgar, masturbatory, art-buying Eurotrash"

2011-12-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

In 1971, the American artist Vito Acconci secreted himself under the floor of New York's Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated while broadcasting his sexual fantasies through a loudspeaker audible to the gallery visitors above.

This er, seminal performance piece was not, however, what 'super-collector' Charles Saatchi was referring to in today's Guardian when he blasted the denizens of today's art world as "masturbatory", although as Acconci's performance piece makes clear, onanism has long been a feature of the art world.

Saatchi doesn't often address the media, generally preferring to keep his opinions to himself. Something of an art vampire, he is rarely glimpsed, only venturing out to feed on the freshest young contemporary talent for his Chelsea gallery.

I was therefore surprised, on emerging from the White Cube stand at the Frieze fair a few weeks ago, to spot the curmudgeonly old collector strolling towards me (above left), his features cast in a rictus of disgust, presumably at the acres of expensive tat that surrounded him. But given his usual reticence, it was even more surprising to see that look of disgust translated into an article for The Guardian, in which he rails at the "Eurotrashy, Hedgefundy, Hamptonites," and the "trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs…nestling together in their super yachts" at this year's Venice biennale.

He is right, of course. Loud money is everywhere in the art world. The big media draw at this year's Frieze fair was a super yacht and matching Riva power boat (right) by Italian company CRN, both of which had been blessed by German artist Christian Jankowski to become something more than mere maritime vessels…or so they would have you believe.

Luca Boldini, CRN's marketing director, told me, with an alarming lack of irony, "This is very much in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and the idea of the Readymade. I am very confident that we will sell it. If we do, it will send a great wave around the world that will confirm the value of the project." It didn't sell. It sank like a rusty rowing boat in a force ten gale of mocking laughter. It's amazing that the Frieze curators give tent-room to this stuff.

Such crass stunts surely endorse Saatchi's central point, which is that the art world is overrun by witless opportunists with no taste and too much money. He suggests that "the success of the uber art dealers is based upon the mystical power that art now holds over the super-rich." But 'twas ever thus.

You could probably track this trend back to the period of rising post-war affluence when Greek shipping magnates like Stavros Niarchos and Basil Goulandris — the oligarchs of their time, thanks largely to the Suez Crisis which made their shipping businesses so profitable — were paying top dollar for Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to stick on the walls of their many mansions. At the Biddle sale in Paris in 1957, Basil Goulandris bought Gauguin’s Still Life with Apples for $297,142 (buying power equivalent to $2.3m today), at which point “...the entire audience rose and burst into applause,” reported the New York Times.

Art has always been about conspicuous consumption (Veblen coined the term as far back as 1897), but it was really the Cognacq, Lurcy, Weinberg and Goldschmidt sales of the 1950s that marked the moment when the newly wealthy really discovered what Saatchi dismisses as the "pleasure to be found in having their lovely friends measure the weight of their baubles." (At least a Gauguin was a bauble worth measuring, unlike the dismal rubbish commanding top prices in the market today.)

Saatchi clearly has a problem with the oligarchs (one assumes he means Russian oligarchs) and on that point he's right on the money. Anyone who has bothered to read the recent history of Russia's power struggles and the turmoil in its economy will know that the Russian people were robbed blind by a few ruthless individuals in the early 1990s (Londongrad by Mark Holingsworth and Stewart Lansley is a good place to start.)

Recent BBC Radio 4 reports have focused attention on the corruption in Moscow's civic government and one can only wonder how far its tentacles spread. How much dirty money is being channelled into art? One sensed a good deal of it washing around Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonhams this week as all three houses dispersed Russian art to rooms full of what looked like paddle-waving gangsters with their anorexic girlfriends in tow.

The 'art world' has never been a particularly pleasant place in which to do business, but whether it's as bad as Saatchi maintains depends on your moral bias…or your taste (or lack of it).

Then again, Saatchi himself has hardly been an unequivocal force for good. Ask those artists whose paintings he bought back in the 1980s before unceremoniously dumping them a short while later. I've spoken to one or two who still can't bury the hatchet. Back then his approach to art was widely perceived as just as crude and philistine as the crapulous oligarchs and other freeloaders he's gunning for today.

Plus ça change...

Rhino horn: myth and legend

2011-11-18T02:46:00.000-08:00

Another day, another rhinoceros horn stolen from another museum. Not a beautifully carved Qing Dynasty rhino horn libation cup, but just the plain old horn. Why? — to capitalise on the anachronistic folkloric belief that powdered rhino horn has medicinal qualities. It doesn't. It's a bit of a dead animal. And the sooner they all disappear from Western museums the better.

Of course, the real problem is not rhino horn thefts from museums. It's rhinos being slaughtered for their horns.

The media reporting of rhino thefts doesn't help. This problem is not unlike the Dr No mythology that lingers around art theft. Rhino horn is not in common use as an aphrodisiac in Asia, although a few members of the wealthy business élite continue to see it as an exotic alternative to Viagra. That is doubtless more to do with the fact that it's expensive…and thus fashionable.

Rhino horn is, however, a treasured ingredient in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in which it is used to reduce fever. But as most of us know, TCM is medieval bunkum. Rhino horn is made of keratin, which is the same as human hair or fingernails. Ever tried eating your own hair to reduce a fever? No, of course not.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the mounted rhino horn may have justified its inclusion in the Wunderkammern, or Cabinets of Curiosity assembled by most self-respecting European princes. Originating as it did from the fearsome, armour-plated beast drawn so exquisitely by Albrecht Dürer (above left), one can easily see how, during the superstitious pre-Enlightenment culture of seventeenth century Europe, the rhino's horn would exert a similar fascination to the myriad other wondrous things in the princely cabinet — the teeth of a mermaid, or blood said to have rained on the Isle of Wight. In the eighteenth century, those weird collections became the 'Universal' or 'Encyclopedic Museums' we have today.

However, as the directors of these museums continue to remind us, we are still living through the Enlightenment (I know, just look around you — it's a laughable notion, isn't it?). The Age of Enlightenment was supposed to have swept away medieval superstition and replaced it with rational thought. What's rational about a mouldy old rhino horn nailed to a mahogany shield in a tiny provincial museum in Surrey? Or anywhere else for that matter.

Precisely what educational significance can a mounted rhino horn have for the gentle denizens of Haslemere in Surrey, or Ipswich? Don't they get David Attenborough documentaries down there? National Geographic? The Discovery Channel? The internet? Perhaps not.

I can see them now, weeping into their Waitrose shopping trolleys at the cruel theft of the beloved rhino horn from their local museum. Meanwhile, somewhere in the basement restaurant of a brand new poured concrete metropolis in mainland China a group of priapic, freshly-minted billionaires stir the Haslemere Horn into their rice wine as the karaoke machine belts out James Brown's It's a man's World.

Rhino horn, powdered down by TCM practitioners for its medicinal properties (twice the value of gold in that market); public bronze sculpture melted down for its scrap metal content; Qing Dynasty porcelain vases making unconscionable sums at UK auctions — the Asian tiger is on the rampage, energised by a bizarre mixture of medieval superstition and ever-accelerating modernity.

Around the horn...
Rosie the rhino's horn stolen from Ipswich Museum

Irish rhino horn racket uncovered

Rhino horns put Europe's museums on thieves' must-visit list

Rhino horns stolen from museums in Italy and Germany

Rhino Conservation.org

It doesn't matter how long ago it was stolen, French museum property is "inalienable"

2011-11-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

"[B]ased on our legal knowledge (and well founded), the [Nicolas Tournier painting of The Carrying of the Cross] is indeed, in principle, the property of the Musée des Augustins. Works in French public collections are inalienable and imprescriptible, a fact we have always fought for here. This means that an object which enters a museum cannot be taken away, in any way, forever in time, which implies that although it may have disappeared for almost two hundred years, it will always belong to the establishment."

- The Art Tribune, commenting on the case of the disputed Baroque painting by Nicolas Tournier which is pitting London dealer Mark Weiss against the French Ministry of Culture.

If it is indeed true that works in French public collections are not subject to conventional statutes of limitations (and if found in the trade cannot therefore be legally transacted) then this increases the need to incorporate data about missing museum objects into due diligence databases. If the French Ministry of Culture places no time limitations on objects missing from its museums, then due diligence providers should do likewise.

Art Loss Register defends its Due Diligence vetting at TEFAF

2011-11-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

The Art Loss Register, responsible for the annual Due Diligence vetting of the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, has responded rapidly to a suggestion that its vetting processes might have been at fault after a Nicolas Tournier painting (left), sold on two occasions at the fair in 2010 and 2011, was later revealed to have gone missing from a French museum in the early nineteenth century.

As the newswires reported yesterday (and which I blogged here), French state authorities claim that the painting of Christ carrying the Cross by Nicolas Tournier went missing from the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse in 1818. It subsequently entered a private collection in Florence, Italy. When the picture turned up on the stand of London Old Master dealer Weiss at the recent Paris Tableau art fair, the French government immediately stepped in to try and confiscate the picture. It was reported that an export block would be placed on it.

It was also reported that Weiss had bought the picture from French dealer Didier Aaron at TEFAF Maastricht in 2010 and then offered it on their own stand at TEFAF in 2011.

I'm told the Art Loss Register has now written to Messrs Weiss and Aaron to reassure them that the picture was checked by their staff on both occasions, neither of which revealed any problems with its provenance. At present, the ALR's records do not extend back as far as 1818.

This would seem to indicate that some improvement in communications is required between agencies like the ALR and those state bodies who see a duty to intervene when problematic pictures appear at art fairs in their jurisdiction. It is embarrassing for the dealers and it is embarrassing for the ALR which, on this occasion, seems to have done what it was required to do.

How far back should stolen art databases go? The Tournier picture may have been stolen way back in the mists of the early nineteenth century (there is evidently still some doubt about whether it was actually stolen from the Toulouse museum or removed for some other unknown reason) and a statute of limitations may have expired long ago; but the theft remains part of the picture's provenance. Information on the 1818 theft ought to be included in the painting's historical profile. That data can only be acquired and incorporated if data companies work proactively with state departments to blend all the known data. That might be a step towards an even more comprehensive process of Due Diligence.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Stolen painting offered twice at TEFAF Maastricht — in 2010, and again in 2011

2011-11-08T02:42:00.000-08:00

We have only just waved a cheery farewell and happy holidays to hirsute hippy art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi as he disappeared, grinning like a Cheshire cat, into the all-too brief and cosy embrace of the German penal system. It's tempting on such occasions (art thefts fall into the same category here) to simply sigh and intone the now familiar phrase: "Who cares? It's only art."

Well, you'd care if you were London dealer Mark Weiss, who finds himself carrying the cross in a $550,000 title dispute after offering a work that had been stolen during the early nineteenth century. That fact failed to emerge despite two appearances at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht in 2010 and 2011.

The Jermyn Street Old Master dealer was an exhibitor at the recent Paris Tableau art fair where he was showing a work by the French Baroque painter Nicolas Tournier (c.1590-1639) — a typically Caravaggiste rendering of Christ stumbling with the Cross (above left).

Tout à coup, the French state intervened, laying claim to the painting on the grounds that it had been stolen from the Augustins Museum in Toulouse as far back as 1818. That's just a few years after Lord Elgin brought the Parthenon Marbles back to England, another misappropriated work of art that continues to generate controversy.

On the surface at least, it would seem that the Weiss Gallery had nothing to hide. Their given provenance even includes reference to the picture's sojourn at the Augustins Museum. But evidently the archival records they consulted didn't include the fact that the painting had been stolen. Or perhaps Weiss felt that a statute of limitations would kick in. The theft was, after all, almost 200 years ago — a time-lag that seems to protect any number of other illicit artworks on the global hot list.

It also seems that the picture was for a time with French dealer Didier Aaron & Cie., who sold the painting to Weiss at TEFAF in Maastricht in 2010 for €400,000 ($550,000). According to the French paper Libération Weiss re-offered it at TEFAF in 2011, now priced at €675,000.

All of this raises a number of questions. The first and most obvious one is why Didier Aaron, a respected and responsible member of the Paris Old Masters trade, failed to discover during its provenance research into the painting that it had been stolen from a French museum in 1818. Nor did that information emerge during Weiss's own research, if any was conducted.

Secondly, why did the French state not intervene when Didier Aaron advertised the picture at the world's most prestigious and high-profile Old Master art fair in Maastricht in 2010? Or again in 2011 when Weiss showed it?

Thirdly, why was the painting not detected during Due Diligence vetting at the European Fine Art Fair on either occasion? If the Due Diligence mechanisms at Maastricht don't embrace the international stolen art records that now seem to have revealed the Tournier as problematic, then the art trade is more vulnerable than we thought.

It would be interesting to know whether the picture's uncertain title status was discovered at the Paris Tableau fair as a result of the fair's Due Diligence vetting or through more anecdotal circumstances. Either way, Weiss now seem to find themselves on the wrong end of a title dispute that ought to have been picked up much earlier in the supply chain.

What happens to Weiss's investment in the painting? Will the French state (which has placed an export bar on the work) compensate them? Was Didier Aaron negligent in failing to investigate the Augustins theft and its potential impact on a future owner of the picture? What are the implications of Maastricht being branded as a place where stolen works of art are traded?

It's understandable that the painting could languish undetected in a wealthy Florentine private collection for almost 200 years following its original theft. But if there was something wrong with its provenance, as now seems to be the case, one would reasonably expect it to have been detected at Maastricht in 2010 and/or 2011 or during Didier Aaron's researches.

This sounds like yet an another compelling argument for better integration of international stolen art databases, but who is pushing for that?

Then again, who cares? It's only art.

More 'loot' from the Beijing Summer Palace at Salisbury auction in November

2011-10-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

Not my word, but that of the man who looted it.

The fine and rare Chinese Qing dynasty Imperial gilt metal box (shown left), appearing at Woolley & Wallis's November 16 sale of Asian Art, bears an inscription — "Loot from the Summer Palace, Pekin, Oct. 1860. Capt. James Gunter, King's Dragoon Guards."

Rarely does colonial booty declare itself with such proud candour. The box is estimated to make £50,000-80,000 and is just one of half a dozen lots at this Part I sale that requires prospective bidders to register and provide financial guarantees and deposits prior to the sale. (There is still some caution in auction circles despite rumours that Bainbridge's Qing vase account has finally been settled).

Another item likely to get Asian pulses racing is a rare Chinese celadon jade seal of the Empress Xiaoyiren (right) which is estimated to fetch £500,000-800,000, but how does one estimate such a thing?

For the time being Chinese mainland collectors remain preoccupied with securing from Western collections examples of Imperial jades and porcelains, some of which were legitimately acquired during the eighteenth century, but many of which (like the box referred to above) were looted during the era of colonial confrontation.

By contrast, Chinese dealers and collectors have yet to catch on to mark and period Export Porcelain — those wares made and decorated specifically for export to Europe and elsewhere.

However, it is a widely held belief in the relevant European and North American trade and collecting communities that this will eventually change. It is not a matter of if, but when the Chinese will recognise export wares — but that 'when' could turn out to be sooner than many expect. And it may be when the store of imperial objects from European collections dries up.

Recent auctions in the UK — even those held in the British provinces — have demonstrated the lengths to which Chinese dealers and collectors will travel — and indeed how high they are prepared to bid — to secure imperial wares. Their buying power has now reached a level at which few Western dealers can compete, as the recent May sales of Asian Art at Duke's in Dorchester and Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury made clear.

Equally notable is the quantity of such material now being secured by provincial firms. Not so very long ago, most significant consignments of real quality would have been destined for London hammers. Yet firms like Duke's and Woolley & Wallis have demonstrated that they can offer as efficient and expert a service as their London counterparts and often at more competitive rates.

The next opportunity to test the market — and the to gauge the extent to which the Chinese and other Asian buyers remain active bidders for such material — comes in mid-November when Woolley & Wallis mount three sales. On 15 November they will offer around 360 lots of Yixing Zisha wares, including items from the Arthur J. Harris collection of Yixing teapots. This was doubtless prompted by the success of Woolley & Wallis's last Asian Art sale back on 18 May this year when a small selection of the distinctive and characterful Yixing red stoneware teapots from the Arthur J. Harris Collection performed encouragingly well.

The example illustrated (left), estimated at £1,200-1,800, fetched £105,000, one of a host of examples that roundly demolished its pre-sale forecast.

These little stoneware teapots are not just beautiful and historically interesting works of art. Woolley & Wallis inform us that the Yixing unglazed stoneware actually enhances the taste and olfactory pleasures of the tea brewed within. In fact many believe one should never wash a Yixing teapot but simply rinse it. We're led to believe that over time the red ware body absorbs so much of the tea's natural character that one can even brew a pot of tea without using any tea leaves. I'm not sure the Irish would buy that.

In economic terms, it goes without saying that Yixing wares have proved a superb investment for collectors like Arthur Harris, but anyone who has assembled a quality collection of Kangxi or Qianlong mark and period export porcelain is also likely to be quids in when the Chinese eventually come round to understanding it.

It is perhaps a measure of its basic rarity that there are no significant export wares included in Woolley & Wallis's Asian Art Part 1 sale on 16 November (nor indeed in Part II on 17 November). Imperial wares, on the other hand, are plentiful. It will be interesting to see how many Asian buyers are present on sale day.

From Little Apples...

2011-10-06T01:34:00.000-07:00

For a while I'd considered dumping my old Macintosh Classic, but not any more.

1986...and it still works.

Thank you, Steve.

(Image taken on an iPad 2)

Unprovenanced Arts of the Islamic World under London hammers

2011-10-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

It may be just a coincidence; it may be another consequence of the growth of the Middle East as yet another 'emerging market', but one could not help wondering at the sheer quantity of unprovenanced material under the hammer at Sotheby's sale this morning of 'Arts of The Islamic World'.

Admittedly, the reports of looted museum collections in Libya and elsewhere — which have been appearing with increasing frequency on the Museum Security Network in recent weeks — remain largely uncorroborated.

As with the Iraqi cultural heritage crisis, and indeed the plight of heritage sites in strife-torn Georgia in 2008 (which I reported on here), the 'fog of war' makes a proper assessment of the situation very difficult. Yet that seems an even more compelling reason why the major international auction houses ought to be exercising greater caution and responsibility towards cultural heritage on the open market.

Given the recent turmoil in the Maghreb it's extraordinary that the London auction houses are still blithely packing their catalogues with hundreds of lots of highly portable unprovenanced material. But then who is going to stop them?

Although most of the lots at Sotheby's evening sale on October 4 were predominantly sourced from the documented Harvey Plotnick Collection (and a few lots from that old favourite — the "European Private Collection"), the vast bulk of the 350 lots dispersed at this morning's day sale entered the catalogue entirely without provenance.

We know that Saif Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator's LSE-educated son, had bought a great deal of the material contained in his Islamic Museum in Shari’ Sidi Khaliffa at Sotheby's Islamic sales in recent years. Some reports maintain that the Libyan Islamic Museum has been looted by rebels. Officials inside the country insist that the looting in Libya is not as bad as the media have suggested. (They said that about Iraq, too).

Sotheby's saleroom was packed this morning with Middle Eastern gentlemen huddling, conferring, marking their catalogues, battling with the telephone and internet bidders. One man in the room was particularly active, buying across the price range from a few thousand up to hundreds of thousands of pounds per lot. Afterwards I approached him to ask whether he was buying for himself or for an institution. He was very forthcoming. "I am a private collector, buying for myself," he said, "but I am planning to build a museum in Turkey."

How ironic that Western nations, hamstrung by cultural heritage laws and provenance restrictions, can no longer add to their museum collections via the open market, while Western auction houses continue, unchecked, to supply the new museums of emerging nations with unprovenanced objects. Am I missing something here? I don't think so.

Sale commissions and recovery fees: how much is too much?

2011-09-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

I am reliably informed by my well-placed spies in London and China that the Qing Dynasty porcelain vase bought by a Chinese bidder at Bainbridge's Auction Galleries in the London borough of Ruislip almost exactly twelve months ago (left), has finally been paid for. Many people in the art market (and indeed the mainstream media) had begun to doubt whether the £51.6 million bill for 'The Ruislip Vase', as it has become known, would ever be settled.

The delay in resolving that seemingly epochal transaction prompted a number of European auction houses to initiate new regulations at their sales of Asian art, requesting Asian bidders to pay a deposit prior to the sale. Whether those requirements will now be relaxed in the light of the apparent settlement of the Ruislip account remains to be seen.

The sticking point for the Chinese buyer who bought the vase at Bainbridge's was the auctioneer's commission. The hammer fell at £43 million but once the commission and VAT had been added, the bill soared to £51.6 million. On paper at least, that staggering buyer's premium (which includes VAT) made the auctioneer Peter Bainbridge an instant millionaire. But it now seems that the Chinese buyer only agreed to settle the account after re-negotiating the auctioneer's fees.

The hammer price for the vase was extraordinary in itself, but arguably even more bizarre is the idea that an auctioneer can suddenly find himself almost £10 million richer simply on account of having been fortunate enough to receive instructions to wield the gavel for an object about which he knows next to nothing. Nice work if you can get it, but how fair and reasonable is that?

There are no rules and regulations on auction fees, nor indeed on an art dealer's commission. It is widely known that dealers in contemporary art generally take up to 50% of the sale price of works they sell on the primary market, with the other 50% going to the artist. These percentages may change in favour of the artist as his or her reputation grows. That traditional arrangement — often open to negotiation — is regarded as broadly fair given the risk the dealer takes to promote the artist — the cost overheads of running a bricks and mortar gallery, catalogue publishing, and so on. But it has also encouraged some artists — Damien Hirst perhaps most famously — to demand a larger slice of the cake once fame and celebrity has properly kicked in.

The academic Olav Velthuis, who conducted extensive research on the the economic and social structures of the art market (Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art), found that some dealers considered their own 50% cut to be too much once an artist had reached a certain price point. From that moment it suddenly seemed disproportionate — and unfair to the artist — for the dealer to be taking such a large percentage of the transaction.

Today, vendors consigning high-value goods to auction can often negotiate the auctioneer's sales commission right down, sometimes playing one auction house off against another to do so. Auctioneers are prepared to cooperate because they know they will gain on the buyer side through the premium set out in the conditions of sale, and which is generally non-negotiable.

And yet, in the case of the Ruislip vase, the Chinese buyer has indeed finally succeeded in negotiating a more favourable premium. Presumably Bainbridge's were only too willing to cooperate given the alternative of continued delays and perhaps even the possibility of not being paid at all (the spectre of the Yves St. Laurent/Pierre Bergé Chinese rat and rabbit still haunts the market).

As prices continue to rise, are we likely to see more of this kind of thing? Will auctioneers come under increasing pressure to put a cap on their buyer's premium? Somehow £10 million seems an unreasonable amount to levy for a few minutes work. And so it has indeed proved.

From here, the next logical question concerns the not unrelated issue of recovery fees for stolen or looted art. Can anyone explain why it cost Michael Bakwin $3.1 million to get his stolen pictures back (including his Cézanne, shown right)? Exactly what is the cost breakdown behind that sum? Understandably, Bakwin is suing for recovery of those costs. But is he suing the right people?

When it comes to recovery fees and commissions, how much is too much?

Art Loss Register chairman speaks out on those who would try to benefit from stolen art

2011-09-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

"Anyone, including lawyers, who thinks that they can obtain rewards for the return of stolen art without providing full information on who had them and why, should be prosecuted." — Julian Radcliffe, ALR Chairman, quoted in Antiques and the Arts Weekly, 2 September 2011. (my emphases)

You heard that right..."Anyone".

Culture of silence and intimidation surrounds Degas sculpture trade

2011-08-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

A fascinating piece by Bloomberg's William D. Cohan yesterday (here) throws light on the disturbing industry of questionable Degas bronze casting that has become a multi-million dollar business for those involved.

Tellingly, it seems to have been a couple of rich collectors who allegedly kick-started what looks increasingly like a wholesale cashing-in on the Degas legacy after "discovering" a cache of plasters purportedly by the French artist in a Parisian storeroom in 2001. For the original source of this story, see Judd Tully's piece for Art Info and Art + Auction here.

Nothing could be more illustrative of the extent to which money is dislodging traditional connoisseurial expertise in today's art market than the news that a rich collector and his wife have been allowed to ascribe a cache of previously unknown plasters to Degas — one of the most academically problematic "sculptors" of the modern period — without the involvement of recognised Degas experts and scholars. Indeed, according to Cohan, Degas scholarship has suddenly descended into Trappist silence.

At the heart of this story is an issue that warrants further scrutiny — namely the willingness of the Degas heirs to rubber-stamp the suspect process of authentication in return for a share of the proceeds.

But Cohan's piece is really about the omertà that has descended among museum directors and Degas scholars who, despite deep reservations about the authenticity of the plasters from which the new bronzes have been cast, are reluctant to express their doubts to journalists for fear of being sued. Here is yet another eloquent symbol of the power of money to corrupt due process in the art market.

Sadly, it is by no means unusual for an artist's hears to authorise posthumous bronze casting. But is it right to do so, just because the artist in question left no explicit prohibition on such activities? As Cohan notes, Degas had his own reservations about it:

"Before his death in 1917, he repeatedly expressed concern that charlatans might highjack his legacy by casting his sculptures in bronze and selling them to collectors, and is said to have told his fellow painter Georges Rouault, 'What I fear most is not dust but the hand of man.'"

That hand, it seems, is proving more grasping than even Degas might have imagined. Nor is the dead hand of acquisitive opportunism by any means unusual in the sculpture realm.

Not long ago, at the opening of an exhibition of recent casts of works by an important late British sculptor, one prominent UK museum curator confided to me his serious reservations about whether these "new" works ought to have been made at all, particularly when many of them had been cast from models that were never intended for translation into bronze. But it's one thing to murmur such concerns sotto voce over a glass of cheap white wine at a private view and quite another to express them on the record for publication.

As for the ability of expensive lawyers to foreclose disputes before they can be properly explored, this too is becoming almost endemic in the art market. Last year, we heard how Joe Simon-Whelan had to retreat from his dispute with the Andy Warhol Foundation after being engulfed by a tsunami of legal costs. In an email to Bloomberg, he said, "I am deeply saddened that I was unable to reveal the truth in court, but when faced with threats of bankruptcy, continuing personal attacks and counterclaims, I realized I no longer stood a chance of proceeding further."

It's coming to something when disputes might be resolved the wrong way just to avoid onerous legal costs, but when differences of opinion don't even make it to the level of open public discussion, that is a lot more worrying. One of the Degas scholars Cohan spoke to expressed hope for a "litigation-free zone" in which to air the issues properly and without redress, a notion promptly scorned by Delaware law professor, Ann Althouse.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a similarly glaring mismatch between corporate muscle and the broader public good is playing out in the realm of public sculpture. A case currently developing in California is pitting the intimidating financial reach of an oligarch against not only an artist, but against a local arts-commissioning authority cowed by the threat of lawsuits. Watch this space.

As threats and personal attacks rain down from wealthy, bullying collectors and foundations, the experts scuttle for cover, lips firmly sealed. Whither the artist's rights?

Fake Art in Public Places

2011-08-12T03:17:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote an article for The Art Newspaper (here) on what appears to be an industry of sculpture-faking which has emerged as a result of the Art in Public Places scheme in California.

Many of the works in question — unauthorised copies (left) by Chinese craftsmen of an original 1992 work by the Californian sculptors Don Wakefield and Chick Glickman — are situated in the grounds of the Olen Property Corporation's buildings in Newport Beach and Brea, California and have benefited from the Art in Public Places policy used in many US cities. This is how the Public Art scheme works:

Under the current Art in Public Places Policy, developments with a total building valuation of 1.5 million dollars ($1,500,000) or more are required to integrate publicly visible sculptures into their development projects. The artwork is regarded as an on-site amenity, a fixed asset on the property.

Developers are responsible for selecting an artist, commissioning the artwork, and maintaining the artwork. Each developer submits their proposed artwork for review by the Art in Public Places Advisory Committee, which reviews the artwork application based upon policy-defined criteria, such as the artist’s qualifications and the durability of materials. The developer is required to put one per cent of the total development budget towards the art.

The Olen Corporation is owned by the Florida-based billionaire property developer and convicted tax felon Igor Olenicoff who has real estate holdings in California, Arizona and Florida. He acquired the 'fake' sculptures in China during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and subsequently instructed the craftsmen there to adapt one of them from Wakefield's original design (image right shows Don Wakefield making the original work in a photograph date-marked 18 June 1992). The copies are now distributed around Olenicoff's corporate properties in Newport Beach and surrounding areas, including the City of Brea.

In the first instance, if these works are indeed unauthorised copies — and all the available evidence seems to suggest that they are — and if a craftsman (Chinese or otherwise) has been prepared to adapt the work of another artist without that artist's consent, this would likely constitute a breach of copyright under the Fair Use application. This would represent a breach of Mr Wakefield's moral rights as an artist which would have serious legal implications.

More importantly, the City of Brea seems to be failing to collect the comprehensive information on the artist, which is required under the regulations of the Art in Public Places scheme. Olenicoff has also declined to reveal the identity of the Chinese craftsmen. If the City of Brea is failing to collect the necessary information from the developer, it is, by default, encouraging the abuse of the scheme, in this case by allowing developers to use Chinese craftsmen to copy works at a fraction of the cost of the original. Whether this is a way for corporate developers to save money remains unclear, but it is in everyone's interest to ensure that the rights of artists are not abused by corporations.

I approached a Beijing-based stone-carving company and requested an estimate to make a single copy of Don Wakefield's 1992 sculpture based on a photograph. I was quoted $1,250, with the price dropping to $950 per unit for three. According to Wakefield, to make an original, unique work today of the kind he and Glickman made in 1992 would cost around $35,000. As they say in the States, do the math.

There is also the critical issue of how many other works might have been copied from original sculptures by other artists without their original creator's consent. The City of Brea appears to be turning a blind eye to this by not demanding comprehensive biographical information about the artists whose work is used in the Art In Public Places scheme. I have requested clarification of this from the City of Brea and from the Public Art authorities in Newport Beach, but have received no response.

We need to know the exact source of the sculptures acquired by Olen Corp. and the identity of the craftsman from whom Olenicoff commissioned the copied and adapted works. It would also be interesting to know how many other sculptures from the Chinese source have been used by Olen Corporation in Newport Beach and Brea. All this information ought to be on file under the Art in Public Places scheme.

Now you see it, now you don't: the mysterious case of the missing blog post

2011-08-05T01:15:00.000-07:00

You know when you've hit a nerve.

I had a call this morning from a highly-placed contact in the London art security community alerting me to the fact that my blog post on the ALR's claim to be the "Rene Russo character" of real-life art crime had been posted on the Museum Security Network Google Group yesterday evening, only to disappear a short time later.

Happily it made it onto the email digest, presumably before the dead hand of persuasion descended.

Plus ça change...

The Art Loss Register: "The Rene Russo character" of real-life art crime? I think not.

2011-08-04T01:33:00.000-07:00

“We’re sort of the Rene Russo character in the real-life Thomas Crown Affair,” Christopher Marinello, Executive Director of The Art Loss Register recently told the New York Observer (here). If it weren't so serious I'd probably have died laughing.

Marinello wants us to believe that the Art Loss Register is the dashing art crime hero fighting the bad guys. But real-life art crime is a lot less glamorous than film fiction and the Art Loss Register is no Hollywood heroine.

If the Art Loss Register wants to boast that it represents the interests of the good guys against the bad guys, as Rene Russo's character did in the 1999 re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair, why did it choose to represent Nevada-based art dealer Jack Solomon in his title dispute against Steven Spielberg over ownership of Norman Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom (right), (and later against Jody Goffman Cutler of the National Museum of American Illustration after she took Spielberg's place in the dispute)?

Marinello has been all over the news wires recently, telling anyone who'll listen that his organisation is a force for good in art disputes. He has just told CBC News (here) that "legitimate dealers will research the authenticity of a piece in a process known as provenance." But should they use the ALR for that research?

Authenticity and provenance are different matters. Provenance checking — confirming an object's ownership history — does not necessarily confirm its authenticity. Such subtleties are lost on those with little or no experience of the art world, but let's not be too pedantic for the moment as there is a broader issue here.

You might ask why a legitimate dealer would use the ALR to check provenance when a short while ago the ALR's own chairman Julian Radcliffe admitted in court to "misleading" a dealer who had made (and paid for) a provenance enquiry over paintings he wished to buy (see links to my earlier posts on this below).

More recently, the Art Loss Register failed to conduct its own "provenance" research into Jack Solomon's previous connections with the Russian Schoolroom painting before representing him in the doomed lawsuit against Mrs Goffman Cutler. Mrs Cutler won the case in April 2010 and the Art Loss Register is now suing its former client, Jack Solomon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing Rene Russo's character doing anything even remotely similar. She went after the bad guys; she didn't represent them.

I may come across as a stuck record on this ALR topic, but there is a serious issue here and it is about the need for organisations involved in title disputes and art theft resolution to demonstrate good judgement. Representing a guy in a title claim when even the most low-level due diligence would have confirmed the folly of such representation is poor judgement. Due diligence checking by the ALR would have demonstrated (as was later confirmed in court) that Mrs Cutler had a superior claim to Russian Schoolroom. Did the ALR, like its erstwhile client Jack Solomon, see a potential pot of gold lurking in the corner of the Russian Schoolroom (“I’m sure in two calls I could turn it over for x million dollars before the sun goes down.” — Solomon quoted in Riverfront Times, 2 March, 2007).

To many people, the ALR comes across as a pioneering crusader for a more ethical art world. Some of us have been working in the art world for decades and have slightly longer memories. The ALR "misled" Michael Marks when Marks sought to make a provenance enquiry; the ALR allegedly "fell out" with Gisela Berman-Fischer over her attempt to win restitution of a Pissarro painting Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (left) taken from her family during the Holocaust (story here); and now it is locked in a sordid lawsuit with Solomon, whose title claim to Russian Schoolroom was baseless and who was found to be "not credible" by a Nevada District Court judge.

The ALR, poorly managed for decades, needs root and branch reform. But does it have the financial resources to undertake that reform and do the big three auction houses and the insurance companies who are its major shareholders have the guts to stand up and demand change?

One thing is for sure, the ALR has a way to go before the world sees it as "the Rene Russo character" of real life art crime.

More of my blog entries on this topic and ALR-related issues:

Nevada judge rules in title dispute over Norman Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom

Unanswered questions in Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom case

Art Loss Register sues Solomon over Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom case

Art recovery: another can of worms prised open (Pissarro Holocaust restitution case)

'Due Diligence' is just a "ruse" (Michael Marks provenance case)

The Art Loss Register: A Correction

When is a ransom not a ransom? Why, when it's "a fee for information leading to recovery", of course!

2011-07-22T02:08:00.000-07:00

One senses that National Portrait Gallery director and former Tate employee Sandy Nairne might have been wiser to leave the case of the stolen Turner paintings alone instead of writing a book about it. The two pictures (left), stolen from the Kunsthalle Schirn in 1994, were eventually recovered in a shady deal engineered by the Tate with a little help from its friends on both sides of the ethical divide.

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak wasn't the only one casting a jaundiced eye over the Tate's deft recovery of the paintings in 2002 when they clipped the ticket on the insurance side and then paid a ransom to Balkan gangsters for recovery of the paintings. Oh, sorry, did I just say "paid a ransom"? I meant to say, "paid a fee for information leading to the recovery of the paintings."

But this is semantics. Everyone knows that a ransom was paid. It's just that neither Sandy Nairne, nor Nicholas Serota, or anyone else involved in the case, could possibly step up and admit that. It would be tantamount to encouraging further art thefts. And yet that's the exact outcome of the whole affair. Gangsters from Oldham to Odessa will have looked at that deal and thought "Yes, art theft DOES pay after all."

To pretend otherwise is not just disingenuous, it's downright stupid. He may have been vilified for it, but at least Henri Nannen had the guts to admit that he'd paid a ransom in 1962 to recover the stolen Riemenschneider Madonna.

Meanwhile, art crime publishing is the gift that keeps on giving, with everyone from former FBI cops to museum directors cashing in on the enduring public fascination with the genre by writing their "memoirs". And yet it's instructive that very few art cops (with the exception, it seems, of Messrs Ellis and Hill) have ever succeeded in recovering any of these really high-profile stolen pictures, while it seems that of those pictures that HAVE been recovered, more than a few (whisper it) were recovered through clandestine payments to the criminals or their representatives.

The brilliant BBC2 investigative documentary about the recovery of the Tate's Turners left some of us in no doubt that the Tate had paid a ransom to Balkan gangsters. Sorry, did I just say "ransom to Balkan gangsters"? What I meant to say was: "fees for information openly paid to shady international lawyers who then passed it to the Balkan gangsters."

Pull the other one; it's got bells on.

Artists and writers against CIA drone strikes

2011-07-18T04:41:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a conference here in the UK that brought together painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, computer animators, cartoonists, art historians, political activists and investigative journalists to explore ways in which the cultural community can help raise awareness of the increasingly frequent use by the CIA of drone strikes in Pakistan.

Many people are still under the illusion that Barack Obama's dislodging of George W. Bush ushered in a more humanitarian approach to American foreign policy — no more invading weaker nations, no more imposing 'democracy', no more militarised regime-change.

Au contraire. While Obama may have eschewed the gung-ho, boots-on-the-ground approach favoured by his White House predecessor, he has instead presided over an exponential increase in the use of covert drone strikes by the CIA.

Drones — unmanned, remote-controlled strike aircraft — are now the favoured means of eliminating Al Qaeda or Taliban militants as part of America's so-called War on Terror. They're operated from a bunker at Creech Air Force Base deep in the Nevada desert, just a few miles from the gaming tables of Las Vegas.

Creech's drone operators (right) go to work in the morning and from the comfort of their armchairs, using a Nintendo-style joystick, direct their deadly payloads across to Waziristan in the north-western territories of Pakistan. Their targets have been pre-identified by CIA-paid spies and informers working undercover on the ground. At the end of their shift, the air force drone-jockeys leave their air-conditioned bunker, pick their kids up from school and head home — just another day at the office.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Waziristan, the remote-controlled drones have delivered clusters of Hellfire missiles with hugely destructive consequences. Evidence gathered by local Pakistani researchers reveals that for every putative militant or extremist killed by the drone missiles, some ten or fifteen innocent men, women and children are killed.

Drones hunt in packs. After they hit a target, often one drone is left behind to hover before striking again when local people come to search for survivors or to retrieve and bury their dead. More often than not, all that remains are unidentified body parts or the odd blood-stained flip-flop.

This indiscriminate killing, occurring beyond sight of the world's media, is serving to radicalize the very people it seeks to 'protect' from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, stirring up anti-American sentiment and effectively acting as a recruiting sergeant for militant forces.

So what can artists and others in the culture sector do? Well, this week sees the opening of 'Gaming in Waziristan', an exhibition at London's Beaconsfield Gallery of photographs by Noor Behram.

Behram has managed to reach the sites of 60 drone strikes, in both North and South Waziristan, in which he estimates more than 600 people were killed (full Guardian story here). The exhibition, which opens on Tuesday, July 19, features pictures from 27 different drone strikes.

As the Guardian reported this morning, Clive Stafford Smith, head of campaigning group, Reprieve, has initiated a lawsuit along with a Pakistani lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, seeking to bring to justice those responsible for civilian deaths from drones.

"I think these pictures are deeply important evidence," Stafford Smith told The Guardian. "They put a human face [on the drone strike campaign] that is in marked contrast to what the US is suggesting its operators in Nevada and elsewhere are doing. They show the reality of ordinary people being killed and losing their homes, not senior al-Qaida members."

Another illustration of how effective artists and designers can be in raising awareness of drone warfare can be seen in The Ethical Governor (below), a caustic parody by the Butler Brothers of a US training film. (With thanks to John Butler):

More on drones:

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Guardian report of Clive Stafford-Smith and Reprieve's legal challenge to the CIA here

The brilliant writing of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad on Al Jazeera here

Artnose story here

EXCLUSIVE — More on the Monet rejected by the Wildenstein Institute

2011-07-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

Following the BBC's investigation into the authenticity of a Claude Monet painting owned by British collector David Joel (which I reported here), more evidence has emerged which endorses the growing consensus that the Wildenstein Institute can no longer be trusted to fulfill its role as the exclusive and official authenticator of Monet's paintings.

Briefly summarised, the BBC documentary entitled Fake or Fortune succeeded in establishing a watertight provenance and an unequivocal attribution for Mr Joel's Monet landscape — Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil (shown above left). The producers of the programme deftly disguised the fact that most of the research leads had been provided by David Joel himself, but I'll come back to that later.

Although the documentary was made last year, it has only just been broadcast. However, shortly after it was completed, the renowned art historian and Impressionist scholar John House, who had contributed to the programme, retired from his long-held post at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. While clearing out his office, Professor House stumbled upon a forgotten Monet obituary dated 1926 from Le Figaro Artistique. The obituary was illustrated with seven of Monet's paintings, including the landscape Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil owned by David Joel.

One of Monet's closest friends was the former French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau (1841-1929), who was present at the artist's death in December 1926, holding his hand and offering reassurance. The image (right) shows the two men on the bridge in Monet's garden at Giverny.

Indeed it was Clémenceau who persuaded Monet to dedicate his epic water lilies project to the French state to celebrate the Armistice of November 1918. As a result, two of the largest water lily paintings are now housed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.

First of all, it is inconceivable that Clémenceau, who had an intimate knowledge of Monet's work, would not have noticed if one of the illustrated paintings in the obituary was a fake. Had that painting been 'wrong' in any way shape or form, it could not have found its way into an authoritative obituary in Le Figaro Artistique without Monet's closest friends and associates noticing and drawing attention to it.

Furthermore, if the Wildenstein Institute is the panoptic and all-encompassing archive it purports to be, then a copy of the Le Figaro Artistique obituary would surely be included in its Monet files.

Why, then, did Daniel Wildenstein consistently reject the painting as not an autograph work by Monet? One explanation is that by dismissing it, the Wildensteins hoped the painting would then find its way onto the market as a lowly copy or rejected work, at which point they would be able to acquire it themselves at a knock-down price, "do the research" on it and conveniently change their mind. Such practices are by no means unusual in the art world.

Knowing that the late Daniel Wildenstein had consistently rejected the picture, Guy Wildenstein could not go back on his father's word for fear of undermining the family's fabled authority in such matters. It is also highly likely that Daniel Wildenstein never actually saw the painting in the flesh.

The picture's original owner, the Francophile Egyptian collector Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Bek (1877-1953) (right), acquired it from the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris (the painting still bears Petit's serrated stock label) and promptly took it back to Cairo where it entered his growing collection of French modernist masterpieces.

When Nasser overthrew the Egyptian monarchy and seized power in 1952, Kahlil fled to Paris. Shortly after arriving, he died of a heart attack, leaving his wife, the French-born Emiline Hector Luce, in straitened financial circumstances. She immediately looked to liquidate her few assets, one of which was the Monet that her husband had brought with him on fleeing Cairo (it had always been one of his favourite paintings). Madame Luce sold the picture to the Galerie André Maurice in Paris, who shortly afterwards sold it to Dudley Tooth during one of the London dealer's frequent buying sprees in the French capital. Tooth brought it back to London, had it restored, and sold it to the concert pianist Sir Clifford Curzon. Thus there were few opportunities for Daniel Wildenstein to have seen the painting.

The Fake or Fortune documentary presented David Joel as a naif who had stumbled upon a masterpiece and needed some expert guidance. In fact, Mr Joel has written a book on Monet at Véthueil, as well as a catalogue raisonné of British 18th-century marine painter Charles Brooking. But for some reason the BBC didn't want us to know this, doubtless because it would have deflected the spurious glow of expertise away from their two star presenters.

As a result, throughout the documentary Mr Joel was shown dutifully traipsing around after Fiona Bruce and London art-sleuth Philip Mould, as they dashed from Lymington to London to Paris to Cairo in an attempt to piece together the provenance of the picture.

The BBC excels at this kind of dissembling, which is designed to show its presenters as heroic sophisticates and everyone else as provincial dimwits. While the producers were careful to ensure that Ms Bruce got a chance to show off her university French, it omitted to mention David Joel's art history credentials or the fact that he has been corresponding for many years with Monet's descendants.

Will David Joel's Monet ever be recognised as the real thing? Not while the Wildenstein Institute are guarding the lily pond.

In the light of the new evidence that has emerged, the BBC should revisit this issue and put a little more effort into exposing the compromised Wildenstein Institute.

The image of Monet's Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil illustrated above is reproduced by kind permission of David Joel. Image copyright David Joel

The Wildenstein era will end, and the art market will benefit

2011-06-21T03:55:00.000-07:00

At last the BBC has made decent programme about the art market. However, the conclusions reached on 'Fake or Fortune' confirm what most of us already knew — that when exposed to a raking light, the art market is a deeply unpleasant place in which to do business.

The programme — still available on the BBC's iPlayer (here) had presenter Fiona Bruce and renowned London-based art sleuth Philip Mould (above left) seeking to authenticate a Monet — Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil — bought for £40,000 some 18 years ago by David Joel, a British man in his eighties. Mr Joel has never been in any doubt that his painting was a signature work by Monet. Trouble is, the mighty Wildensteins disagree.

For forty years the Wildenstein dynasty in Paris has been publishing the five-volume Monet catalogue raisonné, the 'bible' containing all known authenticated works by the artist. No Monet can be sold at a major auction house without being listed in the catalogue.

The problem is that the catalogue is based solely on the opinion of the Wildensteins and, as the programme conclusively demonstrated, that opinion is no longer reliable or trustworthy.

Daniel Wildenstein, who died in 2001, first published the Monet catalogue in 1974. On his death, Daniel's son Guy Wildenstein inherited the privilege of being the sole arbiter of authenticity where Monets are concerned. But as this programme revealed, the house of Wildenstein is the art world equivalent of the Augean stables. It's high time the international art market re-routed the rivers of authentication to bypass the Wildenstein mafia and their vested interests.

In the programme, Bruce and Mould ventured on a long and exhaustive quest that embraced cutting-edge technological analysis into the painting's physical structure, deep archival research into the picture's provenance, and all-embracing consultation with the world's leading Monet scholars.

The result was as close to a cast-iron, bullet-proof, water-tight attribution to Monet as one could ever hope to get. Yet still it was not enough to convince the Wildensteins who would not even deign to meet Mould and Bruce. Instead they demanded that the painting and the dossier of evidence be left at their fortress-like headquarters in Paris where they would look at it in their own good time.

A few days later, the Wildenstein committee finally pronounced — "No," was their patrician verdict on the picture's authenticity — thereby confirming how hopelessly compromised the Wildenstein edifice has become.

For the past 18 years, the late Daniel Wildenstein has consistently rejected David Joel's painting, although at no point during that time had the painting been treated to the deep forensic analysis brought to bear on it today. Thus, when presented with the compelling evidence of its authenticity, Daniel's son Guy was stuck between a rock and hard place.

To accept the painting as an authentic work would have been tantamount to undermining his father's fabled authority. This may explain why he and his committee failed properly to inspect the dossier of evidence, instead rejecting it out of hand. By doing so, he has exposed the Wildenstein authentication process as a creaking edifice teetering on the point of collapse. What we are hearing is the death knell of an art market era once dominated by George Wildenstein (right) whose opinion on a work of art was the word of God. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, or, as the saying goes, a fish rots from the head.

The Wildenstein family is currently under investigation for alleged "concealment of theft" of millions of pounds worth of paintings entrusted to Daniel Wildenstein by Anne-Marie Rouart, a descendant of Manet. A further allegation of "theft and concealment" has been made by the heirs of Joseph Reinach who had many works stolen by the Nazis. Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph reports that the Wildenstein family faces allegations of having failed to declare the true extent of their estate for tax purposes.

The Wildensteins may have momentarily obstructed the progress of David Joel's Monet landscape, but it is only a matter of time before they and their ilk are swept aside by the forces of technology. Digital databases are already making provenance research more open and accessible. High-resolution Lumière cameras (240 million pixels), plus infra-red, ultra-violet and multi-spectral scanning, are steadily providing means of authenticating works of art that could undermine the exclusive privilege traditionally enjoyed by the connoisseur's eye. What is needed now is for the broader art market to build an ethical consensus and topple the Wildensteins from their lofty perch.

The Wildenstein era is almost over. Amen to that.

Poulain's prize-winning penguin picture pips professional painters

2011-06-12T01:33:00.000-07:00

Leila Poulain, 7, seen here holding a picture of a penguin she painted, has just won a prize in a competition for artists run by the Saatchi Gallery. But it was all a mistake, according to her mum, Rebekah.

Rebekah Poulain told The Sun that she meant to download an image of her daughter's penguin painting to a folder on her computer, but "accidentally" uploaded it into a competition run by the Saatchi Gallery. It won a prize.

That's so easy to do. I once tried to download one of my son's pictures to my computer, but then — Woops! — he won the Turner Prize!

"It seems it happened because I'm an idiot," said Rebekah Poulain.

No, Rebekah, it happened because whoever judged the Saatchi prize was wearing a blindfold at the time. Or because the competition was judged by a short-sighted hamster in dark glasses.

I'm sure Leila is a very clever girl. Like most 7-year olds, she likes to paint, and she has painted a very nice penguin. But that's all it is — a typical child's painting of a penguin, which has no particular aesthetic merit that sets it apart from the countless thousands of other paintings of penguins by 7-year olds all over the world.

If you're seeking evidence of the impoverished aesthetic judgment driving the contemporary art scene, look no further.

Leila's penguin will now hang in the Saatchi Gallery. As for the judges, hanging's too good for them.

How reunifying cultural objects can foster deeper diplomatic relations

2011-05-31T01:11:00.000-07:00

The British Museum may want to take a closer look at the case of the famous 14th century Chinese hand scroll painting, Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains, (left) the two long-separated sections of which are about to be reunited for the first time in 360 years, thereby promising an improvement in the troubled relations between China and its neighbour Taiwan.

The scroll, by the Yuan master painter Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), was divided into two sections around 300 years ago after its owner's daughter saved it from the furnace to which it was to be consigned on the collector's death. One of the most famous paintings in Chinese art, the scroll became part of the Qing imperial collections in the 18th century and in 1931 was among 650,000 treasures moved to Taiwan during the Chinese civil war. (For the importance of Huang's scroll in the development of Chinese art, see Craig Clunas, Art in China, [Oxford, 1997, pp150-152]).

As The Independent has just reported, for decades the scroll has been divided, some parts residing in the Palace Museum in Taipei, the remainder being held in the Zhejiang Provincial Museum on the Chinese mainland.

The scroll is clearly a piece of Chinese cultural heritage, but in their beneficence the Chinese have elected to send the section held in Zhejiang Province to Taipei, evidently recognizing the extent to which seemingly small cultural gestures can have broader diplomatic benefits.

There's an obvious parallel here with the Parthenon Marbles whose components are divided between the British Museum and the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. They too are a 'scroll' of sorts, a temporal narrative that unfolds through the length of the frieze, a narrative crudely interrupted by Lord Elgin's vandalism, but which could easily be reunited.

Greece is currently suffering at the sharp end of the global economic meltdown. Were the British Museum to take a lesson from China and the Yuan scroll and reunify the Marbles in Athens, it could resonate way beyond the closeted world of museums. Reunifying the Parthenon Marbles would help rebuild Greek self-confidence and revivify its sense of national pride during troubled times.

"Don't put too much political meaning" on sales of looted cultural heritage, cautions Asian art dealer

2011-05-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

A Taiwanese dealer today cautioned against reading too much political meaning into dispersals of Chinese cultural objects originally looted from the Summer Palace in Peking in the 19th century.

Mr Hai-Sheng Chou was speaking after a sale this afternoon at Duke's in the West Country town of Dorchester, UK.

Auctioneers Woolley and Wallis of Salisbury and Duke's in Dorchester (above left) this week held two resoundingly successful sales of Asian art as Chinese bidders arrived in force to contest two important consignments of imperial jade and other Asian works of art.

Woolley & Wallis emerged with the week's top price when a Hong Kong buyer offered £2.1 million (including premium) for a fine and rare Qing Dynasty Imperial white jade teapot and cover (right) that had been conservatively estimated at £200,000-300,000. This was just one of a host of exceptional prices in the Salisbury sale, which also saw a fine Chinese white jade conjoined vase and cover knocked down for £1.02 million (estimate £100,000-200,000) while a fine Qianlong celadon jade mythical animal group, expected to fetch £8,000-12,000, was bid up to a hammer price of £85,000.

The quality of the material on offer at Woolley and Wallis was enough to lure many Asian buyers deep into the English countryside on Wednesday and several of them were also present this afternoon (May 19) at Duke's in Dorchester. I attended that sale and spoke to one or two members of the Asian art trade afterwards.

On paper, Duke's material looked particularly promising, albeit arguably more controversial given that most of the prize lots were consigned by descendants of a Captain Gunter, a member of the King's Dragoon Guards who had been present during the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1860. But clearly such back stories don't trouble Asian buyers; indeed they may even add a certain cachet.

In the event, although most of Duke's premium lots got away, a few of them failed to reach the stratospheric prices that many had been anticipating.

The sale's top lot — an exceptional Chinese white jade cup and saucer taken by Captain Gunter from the Summer Palace in 1860 (left) — more than doubled its upper estimate to bring a hammer price of £430,000. Before the sale many had expected it to bring a million pounds or more.

One specialist Asian dealer afterwards expressed his conviction that cup and saucer were not matched. "While the saucer is of superb quality, the cup is later, perhaps made to replace the original, which might have been broken or lost some time in the eighteenth or nineteenth century," he said.

This is one of the difficulties with Chinese ceramics and works of art. True connoisseurship is now all but non-existent in the London salerooms, which evens the playing-field between London and provincial auction houses who can draft in their expertise. Nor is it by any means unusual even for mainland Chinese specialists to disagree with one another over mark and period.

A Chinese 'clair de lune' double gourd vase bearing a Qianlong seal mark and an old collector's label (right), was a case in point. Some felt it was not period, while others disagreed. In the event a cautious estimate of £5,000-10,000 gave way to a telephone bid of £32,000 (hammer).

As these two sales made clear, a good deal of important Asian material now seems to be consigned to provincial auction houses like Woolley and Wallis and Duke's, both of whom can now offer the sort of expertise and service that was once confined to their London counterparts.

Nor did the 'difficult' provenance impede progress. There was a time not so very long ago when a military social provenance like that of the Gunter material would have been seen as illustrious and prestigious. Today, it may be viewed as controversial by some, but not all Asian dealers and collectors view it as an opportunity to sabotage the art market as the Chinese buyer of Christie's rat and rabbit did back in 2009.

However, aware that Ruislip auctioneers Bainbridge's are still awaiting payment of the inexplicable £53 million offered for a Qing vase at their November 2010 sale, both Woolley and Wallis and Duke's chose to request deposits from bidders intending to contest the "Premium Lots" in each sale.

Taiwanese dealer Hai-Sheng Chou, who secured a number of the fine jade items at both West Country auctions this week, told me after the sale this afternoon that most Asian buyers see these sales not as a way to settle old scores but as a chance to buy high quality material with an imperial provenance at "very reasonable" prices. "Don't put too much political meaning on these sales," he cautioned. "These are just economic opportunities." Mr Chou was among the underbidders on a magnificent yellow jade pendant (left) which had been estimated at £30,000-50,000 but which went on to realise £400,000. "I advised my client to pay no more than £300,000," he said afterwards

What future for families hoping to cash in on the treasures looted by their forebears?

2011-05-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

The spate of recent incidents in which Chinese bidders have failed to pay for works of art bought at auction is forcing UK auctioneers to initiate new registration rules prior to sale, as I reported here a few days ago with regard to the forthcoming sale of Asian art at Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury.

When it transpires that the works in question were originally looted from China, the need for diligence seems even more acute, as evidenced by the forthcoming auction of important Chinese works of art at Duke's in Dorchester on May 19 (catalogue online here).

Duke's sale contains a number of items consigned by descendants of Captain James Gunter who served with the King's Dragoon Guards in China during the Second Opium War in 1860 when the Summer Palace in Peking (Beijing) was looted by British and French forces on the instructions of Lord Elgin.

Whether the freight of exceptionally important treasures Gunter acquired as a result of his imperial adventures will give rise to the sort of controversy that is now a familiar aspect of the art market remains to be seen. One thinks of the storm of protest that greeted the prospective sale at Sotheby's of Benin works of art that were provenanced to a member of the British military involved in the desecration of the Benin kingdom in 1897 (see my blog entry on that case here). In the event, Sotheby's was forced to cancel the sale.

Auction houses are caught between a rock and a hard place over these issues. On the one hand, they are understandably reluctant to decline an invitation to sell a lucrative consignment of exceptionally rare objects. On the other hand, such commercial opportunities now have to be weighed against the potentially damaging PR consequences of selling ideologically contested cultural objects.

Interestingly, although Duke's catalogue includes a portrait of Captain Gunter posing imperiously on a French rococo chair, baton in hand, it studiously avoids referring to the precise circumstances by which the exquisite white jade cups and celadon pendants came into his possession. One white jade cup and saucer (above left) is expected to fetch a quarter of a million pounds. Given the current bullish state of the Chinese art market, that estimate could be rendered meaningless on sale day.

Like Woolley and Wallis, Duke's counterparts down the road in Salisbury, Duke's are requesting that prospective bidders lodge a refundable deposit with the auction house before bidding. Genuine, bona fide Chinese collectors will not be put off by this. But if this sale runs into the sort of difficulties experienced by Bainbridges of Ruislip and Christie's in Paris (whose rat and rabbit sold at the Yves Saint Laurent sale were also looted from the Summer Palace), then we could be witnessing a major upheaval in the market for goods acquired during the age of imperialism. How will this play out in the auction market? Might it divert goods towards other routes to market?

Who knows how many UK family collections contain important works of art looted from China and elsewhere during the nineteenth century? It is problematic enough for museums who are increasingly being challenged over ownership of such objects, but they are not trying to liquidate their assets. Those families, like the owners of the Benin mask, who were hoping to capitalize on the fruits of their ancestors' plundering exploits may have to think again. They thought these objects were part of their family heritage, their birthright. Others would disagree.

Parthenon Marbles inspire kitsch cladding on Olympic dormitories following "clandestine" nocturnal meeting at British Museum

2011-05-10T01:02:00.000-07:00

The Parthenon Marbles, generally referred to as the 'Elgin Marbles' by those proud of Britain's role in the willful desecration of world heritage sites, are to make an appearance during the 2012 Olympic Games in London in the form of kitsch pre-cast concrete cladding on a dormitory block for athletes (left).

The British Museum, which normally devotes its energies to convincing the world of how the Marbles no longer have any architectural significance, has licensed the sculptures to the architectural firm of Niall McLaughlin Associates for use on an athletes' village block for the 2012 London Olympics.

Architect Niall McLaughlin told The Architectural Review, that his decision to 'quote' the Marbles on the athletes' block came after "researching the history and significance of the screen in architecture through the writings of Gottfried Semper and Karl Bötticher."

In the event, the decision to use the Marbles was prompted by "a clandestine conversation with senior curator Ian Jenkins late one night in the British Museum." Why clandestine?

"The last thing I want is for people to think it is to do with representing the origins of the Olympics," said MacLaughlin. Okay. Got it.

God forbid that the Parthenon Marbles in London might be permitted to refer in any way to their Greek origins. After all, they are now what McLaughlin himself aptly describes as "deracinated". (Deracinated, for those without a dictionary to hand, originates from the late 16th century French term 'déraciner' — to tear up by the roots.)

The most interesting and ironic aspect of this news is the British Museum's willingness to make the Marbles available for digital replication for architectural purposes.

As I pointed out in my paper on the Universal Museum, ever since Lord Elgin instructed his goons to tear up the Parthenon frieze by its roots in the early nineteenth century, a central plank of the British Museum's propaganda has been to efface the architectural history of the Marbles:

"As late as 1928, three leading classical archaeologists, John Beazley, Donald Robertson and Bernard Ashmole, had pronounced the Parthenon Marbles as primarily works of art rather than as architectural elements – 'Their former decorative function as architectural ornaments, and their present educational use as illustrations of mythical and historical events in ancient Greece, are by comparison accidental and trivial interests.'”
(Quoted in Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists and Aesthetes, British Museum Press, 1992, p225.)

In case you hadn't noticed, that's the same Ian Jenkins who approved the translation of the Marbles into MDF replicas and thereafter into pre-cast concrete panels.

Early photographs of the romantically-named 'Athletes Village Block N15' (Byron eat your heart out) suggests that their use in Stratford will harmonise perfectly with the British Museum's philistine display in Bloomsbury, which jumbles the Panathenaic frieze in such a way as to make it utterly meaningless.

The Parthenon Marbles belong in Athens. Send them back.

UK auction house demands deposit before accepting bids on "premium" Asian lots

2011-05-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Salisbury-based firm of Woolley and Wallis has become the latest auction house to demand special pre-registration conditions, including a deposit, before accepting bids for "Premium Lots" in its sale of Asian Art scheduled for 18th May.

Thus far there have only been two or three instances in which Chinese buyers have failed to pay for high-priced works of art knocked down to them at European art auctions. But already that represents an uncomfortable trend, forcing auctioneers to install precautionary measures to avoid the embarrassment suffered by Bainbridges of Ruislip and Christie's in Paris.

The inside front page of the catalogue to Woolley and Wallis's May sale of Asian Art states (accentuated in red text):

"Clients who wish to bid on lots 362, 451, 468, 469 and 471 must submit pre-registration applications, with all necessary financial references, guarantees and deposit, to Woolley and Wallis Salisbury Salerooms Ltd. at least three working days in advance of the sale. Woolley and Wallis's decision whether to accept any pre-registration applications shall be final."

The first lot they refer to is a fine 18th/19th century Chinese Imperial celadon jade ruyi sceptre carved with a poem by the Qianlong Emperor and estimated at £60,000-80,000. That's hardly the sort of figure that would normally justify special pre-registration payment conditions. However, as Confucius might have said, these are not normal times.

Ruyi sceptres are quite common at Asian art sales, but the addition of the imperial inscription could set this one apart from other fine examples. One thinks of the Song Dynasty Ru ware bowl in the Percival David Collection at the British Museum, which also bears an inscription by the Qianlong Emperor, lending it the sort of documentary significance that Percival David coveted and for which today's collectors would be prepared to pay a premium.

The lot carrying the highest estimate at the Salisbury sale is described as "an exceptionally fine and rare Chinese Imperial white jade teapot and cover, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong Period," forecast at £200,000-300,000. Provenanced to the Scottish-born cotton merchant Hinton Daniell Stewart (1835-1926) and thence by descent to the present vendors, this was originally acquired in the late 1880s, after being shown at the International exhibitions of 1871 and 1886.

From the same source comes a fine Qing Dynasty Qianlong Period white jade conjoined vase and cover, estimated at £100,000-200,000. This too requires prospective bidders to lodge financial references and deposits prior to the sale.

The Chinese Imperial bronze rat and rabbit sold to a Chinese bidder at Christie's sale of the Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Berg é sale in Paris in 2009 was never paid for and was subsequently returned to Bergé. Nor, as far as can be established, has the bill yet been settled for the Qing vase sold to a Chinese bidder at Bainbridges in Ruislip in November 2010. Both these lots were reputed to have been looted from China and thus were vulnerable to the sort of protest now besetting not just auction houses but museums too.

An Object of Beauty: Steve Martin's new novel explores the seedier underside of the New York art market

2011-04-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Hollywood actor, screenwriter, comedian, art collector, and musician Steve Martin has added another string to his banjo. He has written an entertaining and well-informed novel set in the goldfish bowl of the New York art world.

At first, An Object of Beauty comes across as a gentle romantic comedy in the style of a typical Steve Martin movie, and for a moment it even seemed poised to recover the pictures stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. It's that mixture of the sweet and sour that makes it so enjoyable. One can imagine him intoning the book's funnier lines through his ironic, twinkling smile.

But underpinning it is a darker vision of an art market peopled by vacuous, money-obsessed snobs and corrupt social climbers, which, as anyone with any experience of the art market knows, is not far from the truth.

It's clear that after Tinseltown, Martin has spent much of his time meditating on art, collecting art, reading about art and generally rubbing shoulders with many of the real-life insiders who appear in his book either as themselves or as thinly disguised walk-ons. It is even illustrated with what one assumes are some of Martin's favourite works of art, or which are appropriate to the tale he tells, and this gives him an opportunity to enjoy himself, adding an instinct for art criticism to his many other talents.

The book's main flaw is its central character, the beautiful, metrosexual Lacey Yeager who is determined to screw and scheme her way up the greasy pole of the New York art market. Martin writes with wit and elegance, but as a middle-aged sophisticate he struggles to construct a convincing portrait of an ambitious female in her late twenties/early thirties. When she's not hatching Machiavellian plans to compete with the Larry Gagosians and the Mary Boones, she's communing with her vibrator or obligingly bending over her desk for one of her legion of admiring hunks.

The book is at its strongest when Martin's young male narrator opines on the art world's institutions, from downtown exhibitions of conceptual art to Art Basel Miami Beach — the art world's leviathan shopping mall that happens every December.

There's a scene half way through when Lacey and her chums visit a Manhattan gallery where a typical conceptual art installation leaves them all entertained but mystified. "How the hell do they sell that?" asks Lacey. She has clearly not read her Noah Horowitz.

Later, describing the period after 2002, when the art market engine began revving up to screaming pitch, Martin sketches the ridiculous lengths to which the auction houses went to promote their sales:

"Their catalog entries now had lengthy analytical essays and illuminating reproductions of other pictures, whether they related or not: a minimalist Agnes Martin might be accompanied by an illustration of the Mona Lisa, whose best connection to the picture in question might come under a TV game show category: 'things that are rectangular'. The catalogs' weight increased, and weary postmen in expensive zip codes must have hated it when auction season came around."

Spot on. Those of us who received the 2.9 kilogram boxed set of Damien Hirst's epochal 'Beautiful Inside My Head Forever' catalogues get the joke. I thought I was taking delivery of a Richard Serra sculpture when the grimacing postman passed it over that morning in 2008. I assume he was wearing a truss. Fortunately I live in a seedy part of South London where billionaire collectors are pretty thin on the ground, so my postie only had the one to deliver.

It was hugely rewarding reading this book as a lighthearted counterpoint to Noah Horowitz's analytical Art of the Deal, which I reviewed below. Despite their contrasting tones, there were moments when I forgot which book I was reading. Here's Steve Martin on the irrational behaviour that fuelled art market inflation:

"The publicity that convinced broke home-owners that they could make nice profits flipping their houses was the same as that which motivated moneyed art collectors to go further into the market than was practical. The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it."

Like Horowitz, Steve Martin astutely identifies the root causes of the last bubble, although it's hardly rocket science to anyone with any experience of the art world and its recent history.

Mr Martin's book must have gone to press before the market's recent Lazarus-like recovery, however. That is perhaps just as well. Had Lacey Yeager known the bounce-back was coming, she might never have moved to Atlanta and the art market would still be saddled with the sort of duplicitous operator it can do without.

Steve Martin: An Object of Beauty, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010, hardback, £16.99 (Amazon price £10.87)

"Almost endless smoke and mirrors" … (and Thai dinners): the contemporary art market explained

2011-04-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton, 2011, 361pp, hardback, £27.95 (Amazon price £26.55)

Back in 1979, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss offered a short inventory of "surprising things" that had somehow come to be considered as sculpture. They included: ""narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert." The category formerly known as sculpture, Krauss concluded, had become "almost infinitely malleable" and she went on to describe it as "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."

In the decades since 1979, those "surprising things" have acquired the patina of normality as the field of sculpture has continued to expand to embrace a range of even more abstruse practices. These include an artist arranging to have sex with a collector and recording the encounter (Andrea Fraser); an artist setting up a temporary airport in the middle of the desert and chartering special flights in and out (eteam); and an artist preparing a Thai dinner for a series of invited guests (Rirkrit Tiravanija).

Although some of these activities produce tangible 'takeaways' in the form of collectable or 'ownable' objects and artefacts relating to the event, many do not. How, then, do they fit into the broader economics of the art market? In other words, how are they transacted and 'collected'?

These questions have left many people in the conventional art economy utterly dumbfounded, particularly as most of them cannot comprehend how such practices could ever have been considered art in the first place.

Step forward art theorist and entrepreneur Noah Horowitz, whose new book, The Art of the Deal (cover pictured above left) seeks to illuminate the hermetic mysteries of this strange meta-world.

Given the apparent simplicity of many of these practices (engaging in videotaped sex or eating Thai food is not exactly intellectually demanding), it's noteworthy that they have given birth to a complex body of art critical writing, at the centre of which is the voguish theory of 'Relational Aesthetics' devised by the 'AlterModern' pin-up boy, Nicholas Bourriaud.

Not so very long ago, intelligent books on the art market were about as plentiful as paintings by Vermeer. But over the last few years this publishing micro-sector has seen a minor explosion with economists, anthropologists, journalists and cultural commentators lining up to offer their take on this most opaque and elusive of markets.

One or two of these books have been genuinely insightful, offering an outsider's cool analysis of the economic undercurrents and business networks driving an increasingly global trade. Others, breathlessly in thrall to the glamour of it all, and seemingly more concerned with the socks that dealers wear or what was on the menu at a Manhattan lunch, have been little more than a tiresome distraction.

Horowitz's book belongs very much to the former category. He does a good job guiding us through the occasionally dense theoretical undergrowth, particularly as he seems as interested in the art as in the economics underpinning it.

Back in 1979, Rosalind Krauss could develop a line of thinking about sculpture and related practices without ever mentioning their market referents. Here in 2011, it seems that everything has to be framed within the discourse of market capital, investment strategies, and the economy of High Net Worth lifestyles. This, then, represents further confirmation, if any were needed, of art's final subsumption into the great gaping maw of banking and high finance.

But given these considerations, Horowitz has written an intelligent and hugely interesting book. One caveat — because the art market has now been colonised by financiers and investment boffins any serious analysis of the art market must by necessity be written in finance-speak. So if you're not happy with concepts of arbitrage, asset correlation, shorting and hedging, this may not be the book for you. But jargon notwithstanding, and given the highly specialised topics addressed, the book could not have been more clearly written.

Horowitz started out with the intention of writing a critical account of art investment. Instead, noting the speculative activity that had spread like a virus across the market during the last bull market (broadly from 2002-2008), he shifted his focus. The result is the first constructive attempt to explain the economic infrastructure underpinning the more outlandish examples of 'cutting-edge' contemporary art. But it doesn't stop there. The book also addresses the market for video art, which is another category that seems to elude traditional concepts of "collectability" but which has nevertheless become a vital part of the contemporary art market. It then goes on to address two other topics that have generated interest and controversy in equal measure in art world circles in recent years — fine art investment funds, and art fairs.

Horowitz notes that in the decade from 1998 to 2008, "worldwide sales of contemporary art at auction swelled from just $48 million to over $1.3 billion, representing a more than eightfold rise in the sector's market share, from 1.8 percent to 15.9 percent of the global fine art trade," [Data from Artprice].

He goes on to note that during this same period, contemporary art overtook Impressionist and modern art as the most valuable sales category at the world's leading auction houses, "an astonishing feat given the long-standing supremacy of these established categories and the sheer speed of its ascent." This is interesting in the light of recent research conducted by Dr Clare McAndrew, whose report for the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), published in early March, concluded that: "Modern and Contemporary Art represents 58 percent of the fine art market as a whole, with the Modern art market accounting for six times the value of the Contemporary art sector."

This can perhaps be explained by the fact that Horowitz is referring to auction house business, while McAndrew's research sought to embrace the trade as well as auctions. Furthermore, Horowitz is analysing the period from 1998 to 2008, while McAndrew's research focused on the post-recessionary period from 2008 to 2010. Nevertheless, the contrast between their summary conclusions is noteworthy and exposes the difficulty in achieving a consistent and helpful analysis of the art market when there is no consensus on how its categories and departments are defined.

Take the 'Contemporary' and 'Modern' categories, for example. Artprice defines 'Contemporary' as art made by artists born after 1945, while for Horowitz, 'Contemporary' refers to art made after 1960 "with emphasis on art produced by living artists in the last two decades."

Horowitz's book fills an important gap in contemporary art market literature in striving to understand and communicate how the most outré forms of contemporary art — particularly those grounded in ephemeral experience and which resist being memorialised in tangible collectable objects — are transacted and 'collected.'

He and there he touches on, but never properly explores, the issue of intellectual property and copyright as they pertain to the art movements of the 1960s and later, such as Minimalism, Conceptualism and 'video' art — a topic he explores with exhaustive rigour in the first chapter. It's notable that Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, (whose video work 'How Things Go' was re-phrased by Honda's advertising agency), and British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, (whose shadow projection technique was colonised and sanitised by John Lewis for its Christmas TV ad), were both content merely to register symbolic objections to what they saw as the high-handed appropriation of their work by commercial organisations and yet stopped short of seeking legal redress.

While Horowitz's chapters on Video Art and Conceptual Art are engaging and insightful, I was most drawn to his explorations of art fairs and art investment funds, both of which grew like topsy during the last boom. Art fairs continue to thrive, while most art investment funds have run aground.

Few art funds have had the staying power of the biggest player in the sector — the Fine Art Fund (FAF) run by Philip Hoffman. But then few art investment vehicles have the likes of Ivor Braka, Johnny Van Haeften, Charles Beddington and James Roundell sitting in the back seat. However, such deep expertise must come at a price and I'm not convinced by Horowitz's conclusion that the world's leading art experts are fully incentivized to support the fund with top quality art rather than transact the best objects themselves.

My instinct tells me that most art funds — the Fine Art Fund included — take advantage of the desire of High Net Worth individuals and other credulous outsiders to play in a game they don't understand but to which they are almost fatally in thrall. Most of them are seduced by an equity story that is little more than a fairy tale. One suspects the real money-making deals are done elsewhere by the fund's advisers and buyers dealing on their own account. Most of them have access to capital, or can saddle up with others who have. That way they enjoy all of the upside. As for the risk, well, if the recent meltdown was driven by anything it was driven by that old shibboleth: the greater the risk, the higher the reward.

But despite the false starts, fine art funds are still fuelled by bullish self-confidence. Horowitz quotes one typical investment wonk confidently predicting that art is "heading down the same road" as hedge funds and private equity investing as an opportunity that will be "to the eventual benefit of all investors." However, the book's Appendix, listing "the universe of art investment funds" as of December 2009, reveals that most of these planets are little more than black holes, having long since been dissolved or abandoned.

Horowitz is an optimist too (as a director of the recently launched VIP Art Fair, perhaps he needs to be). He breezily concludes that the rather gloomy landscape does "not diminish the potentially lucrative investment prospects of art funds. If they raise sufficient capital from investors, their large capital reserves and extensive market knowledge could certainly enable them to exploit informational and regional asymmetries arising in the marketplace." Note the big "if" sitting right in the middle of that paragraph.

What seems more likely is that the relatively recent explosion of art investment funds was merely another concomitant of the casino capitalism that sent the banking sector into a death-star tailspin. Horowitz provides a succinct summary of the Wall Street debacle in his conclusion, which effectively ties the art market's fate to that of the broader global economy.

As a balanced, beautifully written, and erudite analysis of the very recent art market, this book isn't likely to bettered for the foreseeable future. Horowitz seems to have put his vested entrepreneurial interest in the art market to one side and has been more critical than most other recent commentators writing on this topic. But at the end of the day, he's wise enough to hedge his bets. "Generalisations, of course, are never absolute," he writes, "but prudence is sensible, moving forward."

Amen to that.

French auction house demands down payment before accepting "crazy" Asian bids for looted Imperial treasures

2011-03-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

Qing scroll painting: €22.1m

It seems undertakers are not the only businesses finding it necessary to request a deposit before taking on new customers.

This week, French provincial auction house Labarbe requested a refundable down payment of €200,000 from Asian bidders seeking to compete for a Qing dynasty scroll painting at their Toulouse auction on March 26, according to my chum Scott Reyburn over at Bloomberg.

In the event, the hammer fell at €22.1 million ($31 million) to a Beijing-based collector, although whether the balance will ever be settled remains to be seen. Like so many prestigious works of Chinese art coming on the market at present, the scroll, dating from 1739, was looted from the Forbidden City in 1900. It came to market from a Parisian private collection.

Labarbe's decision to demand from bidders a cash-expressed statement of intent was prompted by the embarrassing predicament of UK-based auction house Bainbridges. Back in November last year, the Ruislip firm was bid £51.6 million ($83.2 million) by Liaoning-based real estate billionaire Wang Jianlin for a Qing dynasty vase. Bainbridges are still awaiting settlement of the account (see my earlier comments on this issue here and here.

According to Bloomberg, Mr Wang was prohibited from bidding at the Toulouse auction on account of his unpaid Ruislip bill. "I would rather have sold the scroll for 8 or 10 million euros to someone with money in the bank, rather than for a crazy price to someone I don't know," Labarbe's Asian art consultant Pierre Ansas told Bloomberg.

With a UK auctioneer reeling from an unpaid multi-million pound bid and French Asian art experts describing the hammer prices for Chinese imperial art as "crazy," one suspects it won't be long before auctioneers across Europe follow Labarbe's example and demand more rigorous credit checks from Chinese bidders seeking to reclaim their looted cultural heritage. All this comes shortly after this year's TEFAF art market report prepared by Dr Clare McAndrew, which confirmed that China has finally usurped the UK as the world's second largest art market after the US.

Meanwhile, quite why the Parisian vendors chose to consign the Qianlong imperial scroll to the distant Toulouse auction house rather than to a Parisian firm remains unclear. Is it another indication of Paris's rapidly declining position in the global auction league?

Ker Qing! – Chinese cash registers overflowing for Bling Dynasty porcelain, but will they pay?

2011-03-08T02:59:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks the world has looked on in awe as the power of social networking has helped topple brutal regimes in North Africa and threatened to destabilize complacent despots in the Middle East.

Today, we see how the scrutinizing eye of the social network also extends deep into the cultural zone. Auction houses and private collectors now face unprecedented opposition when seeking to profit from treasures looted from subaltern nations during the colonial era. That opposition is invariably being marshalled through social networks.

I suggested back in March 2009 (here) that the quickening debate about the ownership of previously looted cultural objects could usher in a new era of "guerilla activism" at art auctions. That particular post was prompted by the 2009 hijacking of Christie’s Paris sale of the Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé collection when Cai Mingchao, a director of the Xiamen Harmony Art International Auction Company, successfully bought, but subsequently refused to pay for, the Qing bronze rat and rabbit (right) that had been looted from the Summer Palace by the British in the 1860s.

Even more recently, Sotheby’s were forced into withdrawing from sale a Benin ivory mask looted by the British Punitive Expedition to Benin in 1897. Opposition to the planned sale was global and uncompromising and very largely driven by a chorus of voices on social networks.

Now it seems the vendor of the Qing Dynasty porcelain vase that sold for a mystifying £53 million at Bainbridges Auction Rooms in Ruislip a few weeks ago (above left) may be the latest victim of the ongoing cultural heritage war.

This week the The Daily Mail reports that the vendors of the vase are concerned that four months after the auction they have still not been paid. Speculation is growing that this could turn out to be another false bid by Chinese cultural heritage activist groups seeking to disrupt European sales of looted artefacts. Mr Bainbridge, the auctioneer – (seen applauding from the rostrum in the image above right) who is also set to retire on the proceeds – insists that all is well.

It may be too early to pronounce on the Bainbridge vase, but even if the Chinese buyers do pay up one can be sure that skirmishes over cultural objects will continue and doubtless intensify in the months and years to come. One question arises, however. It may be perfectly legitimate to oppose the trade in works of art looted from their countries of origin, but is hijacking an auction the right way to proceed?

Those emerging economies now seeking the return of their material culture argue that western businesses and cultural institutions have been allowed to operate unopposed for too long. Guerilla bids at art auctions are seen as the only recourse available to developing nations, particularly when western museums, auction houses and private collectors stubbornly refuse to enter into dialogue over the future of disputed cultural objects.

It will be fascinating to see whether the Chinese do pay up for the vase. If they don’t, it might explain why such a staggering price was achieved for something so gaudy (“classic Bling Dynasty,” as one wag described it). It would also explain why there were so many grinning Chinese faces in the room as the hammer fell (i.e. they were never intending to pay, but bidding it up so high guarantees media attention for the broader cause).

However, let’s not underestimate the genuine strength of feeling in China about this issue. When I blogged about Mr Cai’s hijacking of the Pierre Bergé sale, Li, a Chinese visitor to these pages, commented thus:

"Those looted cultural heritages [sic] always remind us of what we have been through during the war time. When people's mind and body were fooled and weakened by drugs, homes, palaces and cities burnt, treasuries robbed away. And the Qing Government was very weak at that time.

After 1949, we established our new government. We've been through hard times and good times. Like many countries, we also have issues and problems to face when making our country a better home for its people. And indeed we are getting better and stronger, regaining the strength.

We collected those art pieces, here and there, in different ways. Law suits, and money. Why? There were a lot of things we should do to protect our family during the war time, but we failed to, and we felt shameful.

Today, when we collect the things back, the art pieces designed and made by our ancient artists, we feel that we are healing the scars, little by little, and feel that we are helping our family to regain its glory, piece by piece.

If you get to know a Chinese concept of "Wan Bi Gui Zhao": (A man risked his life to protect his country's treasure), you'd understand more about Mr.Cai's action."

The Drouot death knell?

2011-02-08T03:38:00.000-08:00

The great bell in the basilica of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre in Paris (left) is called La Savoyarde. In the light of the recent scandal besetting the Hôtel Drouot, the centre of Parisian auctions, it may be time to re-name that bell.

A few months ago, the French art world was plunged into crisis when numerous members of the so-called 'cols rouges' ('red collars', after their red-collared uniforms) — the Drouot's 150 year-old unionised family of auction porters historically drawn exclusively from the Savoie region of France — were accused of what amounts to organised crime.

Now the French economics newspaper Les Echos reports that an auctioneer and other officials connected with the Drouot have been remanded in custody this week pending investigations. In a new book on the scandal, French journalist Michel Deléan has described the Savoyard cols rouges operation as "a Mafia-type organisation."

One or two seasoned French art world insiders I spoke to recently told me that everyone has been aware of the problem "for years", but that nobody was willing or able to blow the whistle. Around 6,000 people visit the Drout every day, with some 800,000 items changing hands each year, and yet only three official complaints of theft have been made against the Drouot in the past ten years. One can see why the privilege to work at the Drouot was handed down from father to son in Savoie families, occasionally changing hands between families for up to €50,000.

If, as seems likely, auctioneers and other Drouot officials have consistently turned a blind eye to the diverse criminal activities alleged to have been conducted by the Savoyard cols rouges, the crisis could yet deepen. What effect that might have on a French art market already critically weakened by the scandal and still constrained by sclerotic regulations remains to be seen.

A visit to the Drouot last week confirmed the extent to which it had lost what small lustre it once had. Wandering through the salerooms prior to the auctions, almost every room had the whiff of a down-at-heel provincial flea market. The porters from the Chenue logistics company appointed to replace the cols rouges stood glumly by. Their simple, logo-stamped T-shirts may lack the old world iconicity of the red-collared Savoyard attire, but doubtless most auctiongoers would be happy to swap compromised pomp for plain propriety.

The slightly seedy quality of the lots on sale at the Drouot has long been part of its appeal. It has always been a place where an educated eye can spot unrecognised treasures. But with the exception of a pair of reasonable Boulle bookcases that stuck out like sore thumbs, the quality of the material on offer last week was distinctly unthrilling.

As if all this were not enough, the Paris branch of the venerable Wildenstein dealership dynasty has also been embroiled in allegations of "theft and concealment" after being found in possession of objects said to have been illicitly appropriated from their rightful owners by the Nazis. One of the families affected is the Reinachs. Alexandre Bronstein, a descendant of Joseph Reinach, whose collection was looted by the Nazis, claims that several pieces in the Wildensteins' possession belong to his family's estate, of which Daniel Wildenstein was executor.

This is particularly poignant. Just across town from the Hôtel Drouot on the Parc Monceau, stands the Musée Nissim de Camondo (left), the former family residence of the banker Moïse de Camondo. Moïse left his home and its fabulous contents to the French state as a memorial to his son Nissim, killed in action while flying for the French air force in the First World War.

Moïse's daughter Béatrice survived her brother and her father, eventually marrying the composer Léon Reinach, Theodore's son. A plaque on the wall of the Musée de Camondo testifies to the fate of Béatrice, her husband and her two children:

"Mme. Léon Reinach, born Béatrice de Camondo, her children, Fanny and Bertrand, the last descendants of the founder, and M. Léon Reinach, deported by the Germans in 1943-44, died at Auschwitz."

Sale of looted Benin treasures "reprehensible and unconscionable", say Nigerian cultural activists

2010-12-24T04:41:00.000-08:00

Just about every right-thinking person agrees that the looting of Benin's cultural heritage by a British Punitive Expedition in 1897 was an indefensible act of colonial violence.

The retention of the Benin treasures by European and North American museums and the subsequent refusal to even discuss their return adds insult to that injury. But now, seemingly oblivious to the controversy surrounding the Benin objects, the descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Lionel Galway (1859-1949), one of the British officials directly involved with the Punitive Expedition, have chosen to consign to Sotheby's some of the stolen objects that Galway retained for his own collection. The sale will take place in February.

Unsurprisingly, Nigerian groups are seething with anger at the family's attempt to profit from their ancestor's cultural aggression, condemning the decision to sell as "reprehensible and unconscionable".

As everyone knows, the treasures seized from Benin in 1897 are of unparalleled beauty and matchless craftsmanship. Sadly, this also equates to a very high market value (the mask of Queen Idia is estimated at £3.5-4.5 million), which explains the family's decision to sell. Will the sale go ahead?

The respected art market reporter Souren Melikian recently pointed out in an article in The New York Times that antiquities auctions are increasingly affected by the imperatives of the Unidroit convention. "Many [collectors] suspect that objects that cannot be proved to have been acquired before 1970 — the cutoff date set by the Unidroit convention — will become financially worthless or exceedingly difficult to negotiate."

It is not only Unidroit that constrains the market, however, as the Benin objects may be about to demonstrate.

British Punitive Expedition, 1897

There is no doubt that the Benin objects were acquired before 1970, and yet they remain just as controversial — indeed arguably more so — than many other problematic objects on the open market, chiefly on account of the circumstances of their acquisition. One might wonder at the avarice of the Galway family in seeking to profit from the sale of these objects, but spare some of your disbelief for Sotheby's who are clearly willing to brave the blizzard of negative media coverage that the February sale is already attracting.

Christie's auction in Paris in February 2009 of the Qing Dynasty rat and rabbit heads from the Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé collection illustrated a significant shift in the terms of engagement when previously looted cultural objects come up for sale on the open market.

On that occasion, Cai Mingchao, the general manager of China-based Xiamen Harmony Art International Auction Co., bought the contentious bronzes at Christie's sale, but afterwards refused to pay for them. I pondered here whether the nationalist fervour driving cultural heritage disputes might be ushering in a new era of guerilla activism at public auctions.

Sotheby's usually disperse ethnographic material and 'tribal' art such as the Benin masks through their Paris salerooms, but it seems that Galway's descendants requested that Sotheby's sell them in London instead. Did they fear a similar campaign to that which greeted the Chinese Zodiac bronzes?

One Nigerian cultural group has already written to Sotheby's department head, Helen Collier, requesting that she withdraw the items from the February sale. My guess is that such requests will fall on deaf ears. The major auction houses have consistently shown themselves to be indifferent to the nuances of cultural heritage disputes, placing 'shareholder value' above such ethical considerations.

Part of me feels glad that the Galway family has elected to consign these objects for sale, but only because this has the potential to raise global awareness of the Benin cultural heritage cause and put more pressure on museums holding those objects. One thing must happen first, however. Just as the British Museum continues to resist pressure over the Parthenon Marbles by arguing that the Greeks have thus far failed to make an official high-level request for their return, so too they will claim that Benin has also failed to stake an official claim for its treasures.

Finally, let us not forget that not everyone in Benin pines for the return of these objects. Eighteen months ago, I interviewed (here) the internationally renowned contemporary artist Romuald Hazoumé (left), a citizen of the French-speaking Republic of Benin (as opposed to the Kingdom of Benin). Hazoumé, who continues to collaborate happily with the British Museum, believes that until high-level corruption has been banished from Benin there is nowhere safe in which to house these cultural treasures, even if they were returned:

“It is better that they are in the British Museum right now," he said. "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!”

That kind of utterance is music to the ears of Western markets, auction houses and museums. And doubtless to the ancestors of Lieutenant Galway too.

Sign the petition to stop the sale of the Benin mask from going ahead:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/benin_mask/signatures

The Open University has produced a helpful little film (below) narrating the story of how the Benin treasures were looted by the British in 1897.

How many Picassos does it take to change a light bulb?

2010-11-29T17:49:00.000-08:00

Picasso: Photograph: Ralph Gatti

The news that Picasso's erstwhile electrician has been found in possession of a valuable store of works by the artist — apparently given as gifts by Picasso and potentially worth countless millions were they to come to market — has triggered renewed interest in the problematic status of gifts in the art world...and the uncanny knack of electricians to be in the right place at the right time.

Pierre Le Guennec, a 71-year old retired electrician from the south of France, claims Picasso gave him the 271 works, which include paintings, notebooks, drawings and prints — and even a Blue Period watercolour — as gifts. Smelling a rat, the omnipotent Picasso estate have sent in the legal rottweilers, filing a case for "alleged illegal receipt" of the works in question, according to the BBC. Merde, alors!

Of course, had Picasso been some anonymous artist, struggling like his local sparky to make a meagre living, the "gifts" would never have come to public attention. But Picasso was no struggling artist. He knew the value of what he made. And while that doesn't mean he wasn't capable of generosity, it does make one wonder whether he would have given a couple of hundred works to his electrician. I mean, how many Picasso drawings does it take to change a light bulb?

This brought to mind the 2007 case of the Francis Bacon canvases "rescued" from a dumpster outside Bacon's South Kensington studio after he had thrown them out. Who rescued them? Hey! An electrician!

Some years after the artist's death, they were entered into a provincial UK auction where they fetched hundreds of thousands of pounds (a sale I reported and posted on YouTube here). Many of these works were portrait studies from which Bacon had removed the face with a scalpel, leaving a gaping oval hole where the face had been. Most of us expected that brutal excision would do for them commercially, but no. They went on to fetch extraordinary sums. Here's what I wrote at the time:

"The back story was that an electrician who happened to be working at Bacon's South Kensington home in 1978, 'rescued' the material from the rubbish skip to which, he claims, Bacon was about to consign it. According to the online account offered by The Daily Mail, the electrician, Mac Robertson, 75, 'persuaded the artist to let him keep some of the junk.' Robertson goes on to say, 'I was in the right place at the right time. I had no idea that the bits and bobs Bacon was about to throw away might one day be worth a fortune.' A £1 million fortune, to be precise. Why then, one is tempted to ask, did Robertson want the stuff — old cheque stubs, diaries, discarded photographs? Perhaps Bacon's fame (celebrity was not the concept in 1978 that it is today) was enough to make his daily rubbish seem 'interesting' or, dare one say it, potentially valuable?"

The subsequent appearance of the objects on the market (at Ewbank Clarke Gammon's auction rooms in Woking, UK) inevitably drew criticism from those who saw their removal from the skip and subsequent sale as a violation of the artist's moral rights (Bacon's consignment of the works into the skip was interpreted as a sign that he did not want them to appear as representative of his work as an artist.)

It is perhaps inevitable that mere mortals will seize upon the traces of a famous artist's hand as they might a relic of the True Cross. But whether their motives are to get closer to the source of spiritual nourishment, or merely to cash in on the artist's market value, is a moot point.

At the recent launch of his fine new book on Giacometti — In Giacometti's Studio — the writer Michael Peppiatt told how visitors to the sculptor's Montparnasse studio used to pick Giacometti's discarded sketches off the floor and take them away with them. The artist saw these drawings as insignificant, but clearly those around him viewed them as something more precious — in more ways than one.

Perhaps Monsieur le Guennec really did purloin these works from Picasso, as alleged. But somehow I find it hard to muster any moral indignation about it. At least Picasso's stuff was worth squirreling away. At least Bacon's dumpster detritus still bore the imprimatur of his very particular genius. At least Giacometti's scribbled heads were objects of genuinely compelling beauty.

Such illicit expropriation (if that's what it was) seems unlikely to occur with many of today's celebrity artists, few of whom can draw... or even paint.

As your average electrician might say, "No thanks. They lack that certain spark."

Christian Science Monitor version of the story

Small worlds: travels in a parallel universe

2010-11-18T02:57:00.000-08:00

I was at a reception at the Royal Academy a couple of nights ago for the launch of Michael Peppiatt's marvellous new book, In Giacometti's Studio (left). Artists' studios have long been a source of fascination to writers and photographers, although few books have come close to Alexander Liberman's The Artist in His Studio of 1960.

Liberman's photographic essay gave us a privileged glimpse into the intimate working environments of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Surrealists, and what was then called 'The New Generation', which included Dubuffet, Richier, and indeed Giacometti himself.

What's interesting about these projects is that the camera is drawn inexorably to the telling romantic details — the eloquent detritus on the floor, the humble wood-burning stove, the pinned-up postcards on the walls, the accumulated bricolage of the creative mind. But what they never quite grasp are the true dimensions of the room.

Giacometti's ramshackle studio behind Montparnasse is caked in plaster dust, its walls covered with scribbles and sketches, the floor crowded with his signature totemic figures under construction, some shrouded in wet sheets to keep the clay damp. It's hard to get a sense of how big the room is because the eye is always drawn to the art. However, as Peppiatt informs us, there wasn't room to swing a cat in Giacometti's studio. And yet it remained a popular meeting place for writers, painters, sculptors and assorted intellectuals for decades (1926-66).

After the book launch I got to thinking about that tiny studio as a symbol for the art world in general, which despite its ever-globalizing spread is also a small world populated by relatively few people, many of whom know each other. The main difference is that where Giacometti's room was caked in grime, the contemporary art world is upholstered with cash.

Bainbridge's sale (image: Rex Features)

The image, right, shows representatives of some of the wealthiest collectors in China crammed together like sardines on a French sofa in the small west London auction rooms of Bainbridge's. The guy in the middle is turning to acknowledge the applause of his disappointed fellow bidders who have just watched him offer the winning £53 million for a Chinese Qianlong-reign imperial porcelain vase.

Western nations looted China of many of its cultural treasures in the 19th century and now the Chinese are wealthy enough to buy them back. But who are they bidding against in this project of cultural retrieval? Why, their fellow Chinese, of course.

One cannot help wondering why they don't form what used to be called 'a ring'. This is where a number of specialist dealers team up before a sale so as not to compete against each other on the lots they're interested in. One of them is elected the bidder and the others stand down. Afterwards, when the group's elected bidder has bought the lot at a fraction of what it would have cost had they all been competing against each other, they leave the saleroom and hold a mini auction in a local pub or coffee shop. One of them gets the lot but everyone else leaves with compensatory money in their pockets (based on the difference between what they actually paid and what they might have had to pay had they not formed the ring). After all, why give to the auctioneer what you can keep for yourself?

For decades, the 'ring' was a constant and pernicious presence at provincial UK auctions. I have no doubt it still exists in some form today, despite being technically illegal as a price-depressing mechanism. But clearly the Chinese haven't cottoned onto it, or a version of it. Nor do they seem remotely concerned at having to pay such unconscionable sums to buy back what in many cases was taken from them by force.

Of course, these prices are all relative. There are now hundreds of billionaires in China and their numbers are expanding every week. This changes the relative significance of money and nowhere is that change more pronounced than in the art market.

At the Royal Academy book launch I got chatting to a prominent member of the London contemporary art trade who had just returned from the New York auctions. He was jubilant at the extent to which the market had recovered from the temporary blip of recession and was now back on its familiar upward bell-curve. "What you have to understand," he said, with alarming nonchalance, "is that a billion is not that unusual any more. I have many collectors who think nothing of spending $600 to 800 million per year on their art collection."

Clearly these guys are living in a parallel universe.

Meanwhile, the auction houses, aware of the availability of these seemingly limitless resources, are once again engaging in all kinds of exotic financial derivatives, erecting screens at the auction to close down the sightline between bidders in the room and their staff on the telephones, promising 'guarantees' to vendors and accepting "irrevocable bids" from mysterious third parties in return for a share of "the upside". How all these mechanisms actually work, and the extent to which they manipulate the market, nobody can ever say since they are all conducted by faceless bean-counters in smokeless back office rooms prior to the sale.

And there I was, thinking 'the ring' was bad.

Michael Peppiatt, In Giacometti's Studio (Yale University Press in association with Eykyn and Maclean, New York and London, 2010), £33.25 (Amazon price).

Banging the drum for the BBC

2010-10-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm running the risk of sounding like a stuck record, but that's better than being accused of munching on sour grapes, which is what a guest on BBC Radio Four's Making History programme has just done with regard to my criticism of the British Museum's 'History of the World in 100 Objects' series.

Last Friday I received an email from the Beeb asking if I'd like to contribute to a discussion about whether the '100 Objects' project had been a success. Sadly I had to decline as I had a teaching commitment that morning.

In the event, when the programme was broadcast this afternoon, a disembodied northern voice ventriloquized a quote from one of my blog items criticizing the project as if it were me phoning in. The discussion then used this as a springboard to emphasize that despite wingeing academics like me —"very much a minority view" (hooray to that) — the '100 Objects' project had been a resounding success with the great British public. The British public are generally in favour of restoring the death penalty too...

The discussion concluded with the panellists being asked whether in their opinion the series had been a success. The response was a unanimous thumbs up. You couldn't hear yourself think for the sound of the BBC slapping itself on the back.

Regular readers of my blog will know that my criticism of the '100 Objects' series is framed within a broader critique of museum culture. I've been muscular in articulating that position at times and if I have occasionally overstepped the mark it is perhaps in some of my remarks about Neil MacGregor. I know him to be a very nice man and my comments were not intended to be hurtful. But this is a blog, not an academic treatise. Moreover, I know why the BBC chose to quote my comments about Neil rather than any of the other (hopefully constructive) points I have made in my blog on this topic. The BBC thrives on conflict, frequently at the expense of a more nuanced discussion.

My critique of the '100 Objects' project does not mean, however, that I don't appreciate the British Museum's collections. As an art and design historian how could I not? Nor does it mean that I disapprove in principle of the public learning about those collections. And while we're on the subject, nor does it mean that I have not listened to some of these programmes myself, and with great interest.

Being a drummer, I was fascinated, for example, to hear the programme about the Akan drum (above left). But that does not preclude me from supporting the desire of many developing nations around the world to have some of those objects returned to them so that they might write their own narratives of those objects rather than have the British Museum write those stories for them.

It's often forgotten that the colonial project was not only about controlling people, land, raw materials, commerce, capital; it was also about controlling history, the stories that are written about those nations and their material culture. There is great power in that process. We cannot turn the clock back on the colonial period and undo the crimes of Empire, but we can return to those formerly subaltern nations the power to write their own histories. Those narratives often begin with material culture, with objects, as the British Museum's '100 Objects' project makes clear. While the British Museum covetously holds those objects, the original source nations can only do as they have been expected to do for the past two hundred years — shut up and listen.

As if it were not enough for Western museums to have expropriated the material culture of colonised peoples during the Age of Empire, they now insist on the right to construct and narrate the history of those objects, to market them, to merchandise them, to broadcast them (what are the economics of this '100 Objects' project? We've never been told). And all without criticism, please.

Now I know what it feels like to have someone speak for you. Next time I'd prefer to speak for myself, even if it is "very much a minority view".

Stockholm Syndrome: The Andy Warhol Authentication Board dismisses Brillo Box 'copies'

2010-10-23T05:33:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at my fragile copy of the catalogue of the 1968 Andy Warhol exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (left), which included a number of Brillo boxes, made for the exhibition to Warhol's instructions according to the exhibition's curator, the late Pontus Hultén (1924-2006).

Warhol's original series of Brillo boxes were created for his first show at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in New York in 1964.

Now, The Art Newspaper has followed up on investigations conducted in 2004 by the Swedish newspaper Expressen, which revealed that the boxes shown in the 1968 Stockholm exhibition were not wooden Brillo boxes at all, but rather cardboard Brillo boxes sourced from the Brillo factory.

This would not be quite so newsworthy were it not for the fact that Pontus Hultén, the curator of the Stockholm exhibition, went on to sell some of the wooden Brillo boxes that he claimed had been made with Warhol's blessing and to his specifications for the 1968 show (box from the 1968 catalogue, shown below). The Belgian dealer Ronny van de Velde paid Hultén $240,000 for 40 of the boxes in 1994; and London dealer Brian Balfour bought 22 of them for £640,000 in 2004. Christie's later sold ten of them to renowned London dealer Anthony d'Offay for £475,650. The 'provenance' of Christie's boxes was bolstered by letters from Hultén and the Warhol board.

Brillo box from the Stockholm show

But according to The Art Newspaper, the Authentication Board of the Andy Warhol Foundation has now decided to issue its definitive statement on the Brillo boxes and has effectively pronounced the Hultén boxes as fakes (although the Board has been too spineless to use that word). In the absence of documentary evidence that Warhol authorised the production of the Hultén series, the board has classified them as "exhibition-related copies."

Here, then, is final proof, if any were needed, of the absurdity of the Warhol market. The risible and all too-powerful Warhol Authentication Board acknowledges that it can "neither verify nor invalidate any verbal agreement" [between Hultén and Warhol] and yet, because Hultén is no longer around to testify, he is condemned by the Board for having "misrepresented these works and falsified their history." Misrepresentation and falsification. Would lawyers call that fraud or forgery?

But how 'original' are 'original' Warhol works anyway? This is surely the art market minefield of all art market minefields.

As Andy once said: "I tried doing them by hand, but I find it easier to use a screen. This way, I don't have to work on my objects at all. One of my assistants or anyone else, for that matter, can reproduce the design as well as I could." (Warhol, quoted in exhibition catalogue, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968).

The New York City dealer Janice Washburn was among those who attended Warhol's début exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1964 when the Brillo boxes were first shown. She went along with her friend James Harvey, a painter who augmented his artist's income as a freelance packaging designer.

Harvey had been the designer of the original Brillo box and was also a friend of Warhol. Janice Washburn later recalled, "Jim nearly collapsed when we went in to the gallery and saw people actually buying Warhol's identical version. All Jim could do was write it off as part of the madness of life." (Quoted in Laura de Coppet & Alan Jones, The Art Dealers, Potter, New York, 1984, pp69-70)

One can't help wondering how all those collectors (and indeed dealers) must feel, sitting on Warhols that the Stalinist 'Board of Authentication' might at any moment condemn as a "copy" or inauthentic. Aren't those pronouncements really designed to shore up the market value of the Foundation's own Warhol holdings and diminish those held by others?

Brillo pads used to get the grime off stuff. But some of it just won't budge.

Please remove your hard hats: the British Museum's wretched 'History of the World in 100 Objects' is mercifully over

2010-10-14T03:34:00.000-07:00

It would be funny were it not so outrageous. This morning, BBC Radio Four's Today programme went to the British Museum to help BM director Neil MacGregor unveil the 100th object in its 'History of the World in 100 Objects' project. The final object was the one chosen by those listeners credulous enough to have bought in to this shameless exercise in imperialistic self- aggrandisement.

At the given moment, MacGregor pulled back the veil to reveal a solar-powered lamp and charger. The sense of anti-climax was palpable. This merely underscored what Radio Four presenter Evan Davies described as "the nonsensical secrecy" in which the entire project has been shrouded.

Evidently many people had expected the 100th object to be a credit card. And in fact when the veil was removed, a credit card –the 99th object – was there, sitting beside the solar charger.

"The credit card can only be used in advanced societies, societies that are urban and developed," explained MacGregor, adding: "In a way, we wanted to cheat – you'll not be surprised."

No, we weren't surprised. The British Museum has been cheating nations and communities out of their cultural heritage for 150 years. But this dismal collaboration with the BBC has taken the post-colonial project to new depths. Cheating doesn't get near to it.

Having watched big capital drive untold millions into ever deeper immiseration and poverty through mortgage derivatives, credit default swaps and any number of other Wall Street black magic tricks, we now have to watch the Universal Museum sector collaborating with the BBC to promote the tool most likely to exacerbate and perpetuate that process of credit-enslavement.

"We wanted the solar-powered lamp," said MacGregor, "but also the charger that gives mobile phones to the world because the mobile phone is, of course, the credit card in large parts of Africa and South Asia."

In other words, the credit card is the very mechanism that allows the banks and financial speculators to continue their relentless exploitation of the world's poor.

Well, to hell with the British Museum and its Faustian pact with late capital. My choice for the 100th object is a hard hat (above left) of the kind worn by the 32 Chilean miners, freed over the last twenty-four hours to universal jubilation.

But before we cry 'Arriba!', let's swing the media spotlight onto the Bolivian silver mines of Potosí, where the mineros can expect to live for no more than twenty years after starting work in the toxic mines polluted with every imaginable heavy metal. When, in the mid-16th century, the Spanish heard of the rich silver deposits in Potosí, they enslaved the indigenous people to mine the silver before shipping it back to Europe where it effectively kick-started European capitalism.

As Patrick Stack has pointed out, between 1545 and 1824, some 8 million Indian and African slaves died in the process of producing silver for the Spanish Empire. No wonder they call it The Mountain that Eats Men.

Neil MacGregor, in his naiveté, believes technology "gives a whole range of people power over their lives," blithely ignorant of the fact that it also gives banks the power to enslave the poor of the developing world.

But of course, MacGregor is not remotely interested in solar-powered mobile phone chargers. What his odious 'History of the World' project is designed to do is disguise the deeper agenda of the Universal Museum, the foundations of which are being steadily eroded by those very nations subjugated by the colonial project 150 years ago.

Shame on the supine BBC for conspiring so uncritically in such a loathsome carnival.

For an exploration and analysis of Marx's theory of primitive accumulation of capital, see the catalogue of the current exhibition – The Potosí Principle at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which includes an abridged version of my paper on the Universal Museum.

Art Price: The Movie (PG)

2010-10-05T04:13:00.000-07:00

Another day at the office

I always had Artprice CEO Thierry Ehrmann down as a bit of a maverick. The corporate video he recently posted on the company’s website (here) is surely a contender for Oddbox corporate video of the year.

Artprice is the most bellicose player in the cut-throat battle of the art price databases that has raged since the dot-com bubble of 1999-2002.

Having raised unprecedented amounts of capital on France’s Nouveau Marché tech stock exchange in 2002, Ehrmann retreated to a post-industrial bunker in the small town of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, near Lyon, and began acquiring art market archives and databanks that would have made Georges Wildenstein’s eyes water.

The company’s corporate video opens (above left) with the wolfish Ehrmann loping through a breaker’s yard en route to his office – an underground labyrinth in his so-called Abode of Chaos, its walls daubed with arcane symbols, satanic hieroglyphs and snarling skulls – like the set from a Dan Brown movie designed by H.R.Geiger and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I kept thinking of all those bad serial killer movies where the cops break into the bedroom of the unsub only to find the walls plastered with spidery graffiti written in blood.

Monsieur Ehrmann likes to be seen in demented Rick Wakeman mode (right), hammering out a concerto on his server keyboard or seated behind a bank of flickering PC screens outlining his plans for world domination. Then the camera breaks free and starts prowling down the graffiti-scrawled corridors. The staff – who look like neurasthenic lab-rats suffering from a vitamin D deficiency – all spout the same corporate gobbledygook about “asymmetry” and “disequilibrium” in the market. “As soon as one of us gets an idea, we model it to analyze its ramifications,” says one breathless data-inputter.

Hmm…sounds like an easy-going, laid-back kind of office. “I fancy a coffee.” “Good idea! Hold on, while I analyze its ramifications.”

A moment later we stop beside the desk of a Juliette Binoche lookalike who admonishes the art trade for its secrecy. “The message we send to the market is that it is not in its interests to withhold information.” You have been warned.

Another member of staff poses in front of a frescoed wall portrait of Saddam Hussein (left), and explains: “Artprice has destabilized the small world of the art market that used to be a handful of initiates who had the information but didn’t want to communicate it because it represented their business assets.”

Artprice’s “business assets” now embrace historical paper archives (most of them already digitized or in the process of being so), plus a mind-boggling amount of electronic data that can only be expressed in geek-speak. “We have more than 25 million statistics” says Ehrmann. “…115 million artworks listed in our database in high resolution… 1,800,000 biographies… 1,300,000 subscribers… 18,000 shareholders… we distribute close to 6,300 journals… we have1,000 terabytes of data…the digital volume of our images alone will soon have exceeded 1 petabytes…” Mercy! Enough, already!

If you haven’t glazed over by now, you may be the sort of person Artprice is looking for – someone for whom a petabyte means more than a Pontormo or a Primaticcio.

Monsieur Ehrmann, judging from this video seemingly unsure whether he’s revolutionizing the art market or starring in his own sci-fi movie, may be suffering from delusions of grandeur. This may be a bi-product of running a technology company in a market that has for centuries relied on something called 'connoisseurship' and which is now undergoing seismic change. Ultimately the market will judge Artprice, not on its terabytes of data, but on the revenues it generates.

For me, Artprice, with its illiterate content and satanic black Home Page (I now know why it looks like that), remains a user-hostile, confused, inaccessible, and plain old weird runner-up to Artnet. I can’t imagine ever switching my monthly subscription.

But the one thing I still can’t get my head around. Why stick a portrait of Saddam Hussein on your office wall?

Postscript:

Earlier this year, art market analysts Skate’s reported that misfortunes at Artprice were continuing: “The firm has suffered a double blow — poor financial performance in 2009 coupled with a massive and litigious dispute with the auction industry heavyweight Christie’s.” (The latter concerns Artprice’s wholesale reproduction of Christie’s auction catalogues).

Artprice’s characteristically bullish response to Christie’s litigation can be read in a press relase issued by Artprice’s parent company, Serveur Group, here

Wide awake in Málaga: Spanish museum guards don't sleep on the job

2010-09-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

Museo Picasso, Málaga

There's been much animated discussion following the theft on August 21 of a Van Gogh painting from Cairo's Mahmoud Khalil Museum (see Security problems abound in Egypt's Museum on MSNBC.com for a summary).

Understandably, the Khalil Museum's inoperative surveillance and alarm systems have come under fierce scrutiny, as have the museum's security guards. Associated Press reporter Hadeel Al-Shalchi offered a first-hand account of guards visibly slumbering on the job or engrossed in reading the Quran instead of keeping an eye on the objects in their care.

I recently wrote to Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities tsar, requesting a face to face interview. I wanted to ask him a host of questions about cultural heritage restitution, museum commerce, museum security, and the rest. I pitched the idea to The Art Newspaper, but having recently run an item on Hawass, they wanted a stronger news hook. At that moment, a week before the theft, there wasn't one. There is now.

In the wake of the theft, Hawass told reporters he was satisfied with his museums' security ("I am assuring everyone that all of my 23 museums are well-protected and have good security systems," Hawass told reporters.) That is manifest rubbish, as the van Gogh theft makes clear. Hawass, a bellicose figure in the cultural heritage repatriation debate, may have been attempting to see off the inevitable accusations that Egyptian museums can't look after their own treasures. But let's not get too high and mighty. Last week the British Museum was evacuated after an unidentified toxic emission scare. We're just better at spinning the media.

Ton Cremers, one of the world's leading authorities on museum security and art theft, rightly pointed to the yawning gap between the cost of an up-to-date museum security system and the market value of the sort of art being targeted by thieves. Ton's right, it's a no-brainer, but does anyone heed that logic? It's easier to find a scapegoat. According to The National, the Egyptian courts are now chock-full of rueful museum officials and culture ministers awaiting punishment for their part in the incident (11 facing trial for negligence after thieves steal van Gogh painting).

To those of us who monitor art crime closely and professionally, this judicial outcome is a queasy thing to witness. Few European or North American art thefts have ever led to the prosecution of museum directors or ministers of culture, despite the fact that ultimately they are probably to blame. Were any officials in Paris fired after it was found that the alarms weren't operative during the recent theft from the Musée d'Art Moderne? No. (Or not yet.) If a corporate building were broken into and and its valuable assets stolen, heads would doubtless roll. But generally speaking, with museum thefts we merely shrug and put it down to constrained resources, an occupational hazard. In many cases, however, it's due to lamentably poor management. Perhaps it takes a legal precedent like the one unfolding in Egypt to encourager les autres.

Last week, I visited the Museo Picasso in Málaga in southern Spain. At first I thought I'd inadvertently wandered into Málaga airport when a security guard insisted that I surrender my bag, which was put through an airport-style electronic scanner and then confiscated for the duration of my visit. (A shame, as I'm rather attached to that box-cutter).

Security could not have been tighter, which is perhaps not surprising given that Picasso is the prime target for high-end art theft. But although it took longer to get into the Picasso Museum, the process was neither onerous nor intrusive. Once inside, I noted that all the rooms were patrolled by young, alert-looking security guards in chic, tailored suits. They may have been toreadors working part-time for extra cash, so even if you got the painting off the wall, you'd need to be pretty bullish to get past them.

It goes without saying that guarding a museum is not as exciting as bull-fighting, but there is no question that the young Spaniards looking after Picasso's bequest take it seriously. And they were smiling and courteous too.

The Physical Impossibility of Buying and Selling in the Minds of the UK Museum Establishment

2010-09-09T02:43:00.000-07:00

The breakdown of talks between the Arts Council and Charles Saatchi over Mr Saatchi's plan to donate his gallery and collection to the public touches on a critical issue facing museums today. How to sustain the institution as a dynamic entity without engaging more actively with the market?

According to The Independent (Saatchi rues lost art of conversation as gallery donation talks collapse), the discussions broke down over the mooted plan to part-finance the new publicly-owned gallery by buying and selling works from the £25 million collection. (Incidentally, that valuation seems absurdly low given the hike in prices since Saatchi first invested in work by Damien Hirst and his Brit-Art cohorts in the late 1980s).

How to engage with the art market is arguably the thorniest issue confronting museums today. The Code of Ethics that underpins the UK Museums Association expressly forbids the sort of commercial activities which, over the last twenty years, have allowed Charles Saatchi to build the institution that bears his name. But if the relevant chapters on ethics in my copy of The Handbook for Museums are anything to go by, one can see why most museum mandarins still see the art market as shark infested waters.

It's those two dirty words — buying and selling — that stick in the curator's craw. If you keep to the guidelines, then buying doesn't present an ethical problem (although in economic terms buying is now more difficult than ever as art market prices rocket, museum management costs rise too, and acquisitions budgets whither accordingly.) But selling — or 'deaccessioning' to use museum jargon — is another matter altogether.

Like him or loathe him, Charles Saatchi has been instrumental in expanding British public awareness of contemporary art, using his resources to build a collection that the public visits in droves. In principle, his approach has not been all that different from that pursued by the great proto-museum pioneers of the European Enlightenment who began by sourcing objects from around the world and building collections for their own delectation before donating them to the nation. The British Museum would not exist today without the intellectual curiosity and pioneering acquisitiveness of Sir Hans Sloane, but there are numerous other examples — the Wallace Collection and Dulwich Picture Gallery to name just two.

The eighteenth-century Weltanschauung from which the British Museum emerged still dominates museum thinking in Europe. It has become a seriously constraining factor, notwithstanding a prevailing belief in the crowd-pulling power of contemporary art that most museums now strive to capitalize upon.

Saatchi's decision to offer his collection to the public was grounded in a desire that it would be "a living and evolving collection of work, rather than an archive of art history". That is a model that many museums aspire to, but which few will ever attain without a step change in attitudes towards deaccessioning.

This is not a manifesto for commercialising museums, or for turning museum directors into corporate CEOs (many fulfill that role already). Rather it's a call for a more enlightened approach to collections and for more innovative ways to engage with the market.

Finally, some of the resistance to Saatchi's donation seems based on a fear that it might in some way conflict with Tate Modern. Tate Modern may be an incredible building — with an even more striking extension rising as I write — but the collection is decidedly second-rate. That too can be blamed on British museum conservatism at a time when America was pioneering taste.

The Saatchi Collection remains a big draw for tourists. There's no reason why it shouldn't continue to be so without taking anything away from Tate. But if the talks don't progress just because of Establishment sensibilities over 'buying and selling', one can be fairly sure Saatchi will look to donate his collection elsewhere.

Then, like Ms Emin, London will have made its bed and will have to lie in it.

Is social networking killing off art criticism?

2010-08-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the Australian writer and broadcaster Marcus Westbury blogged a piece about art criticism following the Australia Council’s annual arts marketing summit in Brisbane, which posed the question: 'Whose the critic now?' (Now Everyone's A Critic, Who's A Critic Now?)

The unanimous conclusion the panel reached was: "We all are." The era of social networking, of the free and instantaneous digitized flow of opinions and shared experiences across geographical and other boundaries has done for the art critic.

That's it. RIP. Here's Marcus Westbury describing how the murder was committed:

"The internet has created a plethora of blogs, email lists, social networking, and marketing strategies that are cheap, easy to access, and bypass the traditional critic entirely. Word of mouth — long the holy grail of marketing people everywhere — has become massively amplified by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. We’re all critics the moment we see a show, read a book, watch a film and share our reactions to it. Many of us are creating our own criticism, commentary and feedback without thinking about it."

So, perhaps it's not a murder after all, but a redundancy notice: "Sorry, Smithers, we're going to have to let you go. Here's your P45."

A more disturbing development, however is the conscious decision by younger artists to avoid the attention of professional critics. Westbury claims to know "many" artists who prefer not to be publicized in that way:

"Their assumption, rightly or wrongly, is that they have much better conduits for establishing a reputation or building an audience and they don’t need the 'authoritative' attention of someone who isn’t their audience and may not understand their work."

Or are they, perhaps, fearful of proper, searching criticism and the rigorous testing of their work against a range of exacting aesthetic criteria?

The discourse of social media is predominantly frivolous, mutually congratulatory, obsessed with the fleeting nature of social life, fixated on the ephemeral, surface qualities of fashion, travel, music, and indeed art. It's the economy of the degraded attention span.

Then up popped Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times, who posted an item on a similar topic (Did Bravo TV's 'Work of Art: The Next Great Artist' really redefine art criticism?) about the eponymous TV game show (by all accounts not unlike the BBC's 'School of Saatchi' programme that aired in the UK a few months ago.)

Knight was responding to an item posted a few days before on New York magazine's Vulture blog which suggested that 'Work of Art: The Next Great Artist' had created a new way to practice art criticism. "In online forums and the comment sections of blogs and across Facebook pages, 'people who would otherwise have no access to art-world opinion, criticism or power were given voice.'"

Knight took issue with this, countering that most of these Facebooked and Twittered 'criticisms' were penned without their writers ever having seen the works in any form other than mediated through a TV set. More importantly, he concludes, "To confuse social networking, which can be fun (and certainly useful), with art criticism is quite a blunder. It's probably to be expected, however; Bravo's savvy integration of cable television reality-contests with the Internet hasn't happened before for art, artists and art enthusiasts. The new often disorients."

The Australian panellists, meanwhile, didn't seem remotely disorientated, but they may not have looked critically enough at the topic they came together to discuss.

According to Marcus Westbury, the Australian panel comprised writers, critics, broadcasters and arts marketing people. But where were the artists?

I had an idea that my many professional artist friends might look differently on this topic compared with broadcasters and marketing people, so I polled them. The question I put to them was this:

If you had a say in it, would you prefer your exhibitions to be viewed and written about by well-informed, experienced, professional art critics (whether or not their conclusions were positive or constructively negative), or would it be enough that friends and other 'lay' visitors might mention your work in some way via Facebook, Twitter, etc., which may reach a different, but potentially much broader audience?

I too found a consensus, but not the same one as Marcus Westbury's panel outcome. Here's a small, but representative sample of the responses I received:

"I have been fortunate enough to receive a huge amount of press coverage in the world media and I strongly believe the art critic's opinion is the only one of relevance. Comments on Twitter & Facebook tend to have no weight behind them; on the other hand the art critic helps to contextualise the artist's practice within the broader debates of contemporary art but also, and perhaps even more importantly, from an historical perspective. The absence of the informed opinions of the art critic would create a huge void in the art world.

The art critic is crucial and the more critical the better. Social networking sites will rarely offer the high level of criticality which is essential for an artist to constantly push their practice forwards...constantly challenging preconceived notions and moving forwards with as open a mind as possible. Long live the art critic!"

"To quote Malcolm Muggeridge talking about television in 1959 I think social networking sites are 'a social menace of the first order' and don't in any way deliver an alternative to an informed debate about art or any other subject for that matter. That notwithstanding, it is inevitable that the vast free availability of the written word has hugely cheapened it and will continue to erode the livelihood of writers in the same way as it does that of photographers and musicians."

"I am more on the side of the 'professional art critics'. As an artist I may enjoy Twitter comments etc. — comments off the hat even — can be pithy and fresh — even fun — open forum for everyone; anything goes. The broader audience could have its value, but it does not kill true art criticism.

On the other hand, the professional art critic carries with him/her: knowledge, scholarship, a trained mind and eye, true service to the art community worldwide. Imagine a person who jumps up onto the concert hall stage, sits down in front of a Steinway grand and plays chopsticks. Then think of the 'players' who have 'paid their dues', who have studied for years — developing enduring excellence. Art critics' opinions are still relevant, and 'how.' Preserve them."

"The problem should not be pitched in terms of serious art criticism versus casual mention on social networking sites, but should rather focus on the impact of market forces on the quality and content of writing about the arts. To put it bluntly, art critics of whatever calibre seem only to be interested in, or else are encouraged by their editors only to take an interest in, the major, money-making shows.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was able to attract 'serious' art criticism for my shows, this swing towards "blockbuster criticism" was not as yet apparent. Nowadays, as most PR agencies engaged in the art world will tell you, it is extremely difficult (almost impossible) for smaller organizations or galleries to attract anything in the way of lengthier pieces containing detailed analysis. In view of these circumstances it is no wonder that most artists would be (sadly) only too grateful if their friends and supporters would spread the word about their work via social networking sites.

Another related observation: an art critic friend of mine, taking the very brave step of openly criticizing her own profession, once remarked on the at times very apparent pressure placed on critics by those organizing exhibitions to follow a prescribed script provided in the form of a Press Release. Demands on the critic's time mean that much of these texts will be transcribed verbatim instead of being viewed and assessed critically.

Art criticism is not in decline because of social networking sites but rather because of its loss of independence from the market and the money imperative. Critics write to sell newspapers, art or tickets to exhibitions. Most artists would love to have their work viewed and written about by well-informed, experienced, professional art critics (whether or not their conclusions were positive or constructively negative), but the reality is that most will not unless or until they join forces with a powerful enough institution."

"In terms of critics – their comments are highly influential and for my forthcoming show I proactively sought out a critic, who I knew had some knowledge of my work and commissioned him to write a text for my catalogue. This I consider to be money very well spent as critical text can introduce art audiences (of varying knowledge) to new ways of viewing work(s) or raise issues about, and associated with, the artist/their research/their painting methodology and so forth. His critical text also benefited me directly providing a fresh perspective…quite valuable when most of one’s life is spent in isolation in the studio!

Over recent years, I find that articles on painting in some media are fairly lacklustre and unsubstantial – could it be that we are losing a generation of critics who understand how paintings are conceived and developed, the materials and techniques used and references to art historical contexts? Some articles seem to skim the surface referring to the work in the context of an overall ‘image’ or the concept alone or, even, the celebrity of the artist(!)...perhaps this is part and parcel of the dumbing down of painting in favour of conceptual art over the years…who knows?

A good article/essay/book is worth its weight in gold and our shelves are heavy with the weight of these which are part of our lives both within our practice/research and also teaching."

"If you rave and praise, even to an obvious and ridiculous degree people would believe you, if you venture to say anything less you get the thumbs down. I feel that good art criticsm is especially important now that the goal posts are staked on Everest and beyond. We live in times where only the superlative counts - maybe good art criticism can help people understand what is going on."

"I would prefer my exhibitions to be viewed by all and written about by well-informed, experienced, professional art critics. (If I could choose one it would be Clement Greenberg but unfortunately he is no longer with us.) Positive or negative criticism is a good thing providing it is understandable and makes sense. This is what you should expect from a professional art critic. The professional art critic's opinion in my view is still relevant and valued enough to be preserved.

On the other hand a broader audience like the man in the street or on social network sites are also important because one never knows what can be gained by those thoughts, good or bad. Like Robert Rauschenberg once said, “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics."

I am sure that every artist would appreciate the comments of a knowledgeable art critic. Comments on Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to replace a thoughtful essay.

Thinking about write ups of exhibitions I made the observation that newspapers in the UK are less interested in reporting about venues which are not at the top end of the market. When I have a show in Germany local and regional newspapers write regularly about my work on show. Showing in the UK for the last 15 years I got once a proper article in our local newspaper. Galleries in London are employing public relation agencies to receive the attention of the press. Newspapers in both countries seem to have a different approach to report about the visual arts.

With the decline of the newspapers their influence will vanish and the internet will provide even more fractured and .incomplete information. Artists and galleries being able to master the technicalities of the internet will be the winners in the future."

"At my stage of career the idea of having an art critic write and talk about my work whether positive or negative still seems like bit of a holy grail. It would be amazing to have a 'well informed' person analyse it, and I'm sure would be a learning experience.

Last summer when I organised a joint show with a group of other early stage artists, we tried a few avenues to get someone to write about it (inviting a writer from the writers guild, contacting a curatorial assistant with an art history background we knew...) but none of or efforts came to fruition. We might have tried a bit harder and it was just one of a number of activities, but we didn't really know how to go about it. So in the end our efforts did revolve a lot more around marketing. We did have a press release that we sent to a number of newspaper and art organisations, but no one picked it up. The only success we got was with a few listings websites where we were included in 'things to do'. Great, but not really critical assessment of the show or work. If we had managed to get an art critic to write about our show, we would probably then have used our network of online methods to publicise that further.

I do think the art critic's opinion is still important, and adds (at least the perception of) an unbiased underwriting of the quality/importance of an artist's work. However, I do have to admit that I don't actually read enough of the art press, and couldn't say that I really know much about who the current art critics are or their particular points of view. (I know more about past art critics!) I seem to know more about who the big collectors are, as they seem to be more prominent in popular press as well as the specialist art market press."

Melting point: Scrap metal dealers can be art thieves too

2010-08-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure

In antiquity they used to tie sculptures down for fear that they would walk or fly away of their own volition. Such superstition eventually gave way to a grimmer reality governed by economic rationale. Public sculptures no longer move of their own accord — now they're stolen and melted down for scrap.

One of the most interesting items posted to the Museum Security Network in recent days was the Guide to the Problem of Scrap Metal Theft published by The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP Center).

Although only a relatively small aspect of a larger problem, the theft and subsequent melting down of bronze and other metal statues is a branch of art crime that seems to be on the increase. The social impact of these losses is often more acutely felt than thefts of paintings from museums since public sculpture is highly visible, shares our social space, helps local people relate to their environment, and fosters social cohesion.

Only this morning, an item in the Lancashire Evening Post (also circulated via the MSN digest) reported on the recent theft of two popular bronze animal sculptures from a public park in Cottam in Preston, Lancashire (Fury as bronze statues stolen from city estate). The works were by Dutch-born artist Marjan Wouda, who lives in Darwen, East Lancashire. Such thefts have a deleterious effect on the quality of life of local communities.

"It's such a shame," said one local resident, appalled at the way the sculptures had been crudely hacked off at their bases. "We’ve shown friends them as we’ve walked round the area. They were a local feature." A town councillor added, "It was just something you used to come across and it was quite nice. It was like a focal point."

The POP Center Guide referred to above suggests that scrap metal crimes are often committed by drug addicts and other petty criminals seeking access to quick cash. Some scrap metal merchants, it seems, are only too happy to turn a blind eye to the origin of the material they're melting down, just as many provincial auctioneers used to ask no questions when interesting and valuable consignments turned up straight off the back of a Volvo.

The importance of instilling Due Diligence procedures into the art and antiques trade is by no means complete, but at least most auctioneers are now aware of the risks of handling unprovenanced material and are more scrupulous about what they accept for sale. The broader trade seems to be a harder nut to crack.

It would be interesting to know what measures police and law enforcement agencies are taking to target the scrap metal merchants who are helping turn these objects into hard cash. One suspects it's not easy encouraging the adoption of a rigorous code of conduct in an informal trade that still has about it the whiff of the Victorian rag-and-bone man.

The scrap value of stolen sculpture — which is governed by prices on the London Metal Exchange — is a mere fraction of its true art market value. The Henry Moore Reclining Figure (above left) stolen in December 2005 may have been worth around £3 million on the open market, but its scrap metal value was estimated at just £1500.

Perhaps what's needed is a cost-effective solution to securing sculpture in public spaces. The Pangolin Foundry in Stroud, Gloucestershire, which casts all work by the late Lynn Chadwick, now strives to attach to its public sculptures large armatures that are deeply embedded in the ground, in an attempt to minimize the chance of theft.

I can think of something else that deserves to be deeply embedded in the ground — scrap metal dealers who melt down public sculptures.

Recent UK Statue Thefts

December 2005 — A Henry Moore bronze sculpture, Reclining Figure, valued at £3 million, stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire.

January 2006 — Part of a Lynn Chadwick bronze, The Watchers valued at around £600,000, stolen from Downshire House in the grounds of Roehampton University.

May 2006 — A bronze statue of a First World War soldier on horseback by Henry Pegram, valued at around £30,000, stolen from its plinth at St Leonard's Church in Semley, Wiltshire.

May 2006 — A bronze statue in memory of First World War veteran Sydney Mason Collins, valued at £15,000, stolen from St Mary's Church in Chedzoy, Somerset.

April 2009 — A bronze sculpture of a horse by British sculptor Elisabeth Frink, valued at more than £200,000, stolen from a garden in Surrey.

December 2009 — An unusual steel sculpture of two deer leaping over a fence stolen from a garden in Somerset.

March 2010 — A bronze statue commemorating Camilla Hamilton, a young girl killed in a car crash, stolen from the grounds of her Essex school.

Is the world-famous Wedgwood Museum under threat as a result of ill-drafted Pension Fund legislation?

2010-07-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

Wedgwood's Portland Vase, 1789

It's a familiar scene in those wildlife documentaries on the Discovery channel — a pack of mangy, slavering hyenas lope around a herd of wildebeest, eyes glued to the frailest family member as it struggles to keep up with its sturdier older relatives. The wildebeest herd senses danger, gets skittish and starts to canter away; the hyenas sniff fear and close in. The young wildebeest panics, staggering around in circles, helplessly isolated. A couple of seconds later he's on the ground being dismembered by ravenous predators.

When it comes to the modus operandi of your average private equity group, I prefer this analogy to the heroic sporting metaphors trotted out by the likes of Michael Psaros of US-based private equity group KPS Capital Partners, who recently waited in the long grass while Ireland-based ceramics and glass business Waterford Wedgwood struggled to stay on its feet. At the given moment, KPS moved in. Blood everywhere.

"We are a hard-core, full body contact, operations-driven turnaround operator," a triumphant Psaros told the Telegraph in March 2009, doing his best to sound like a gung-ho marine in a war movie. The KPS "turnaround" meant picking the flesh from the insolvent Wedgwood Waterford and leaving the carcass of debt for others to worry about (standard practice out in the corporate bush).

Among the bones left behind was a pension fund deficit of around £134 million.

It subsequently emerged that five employees of the Wedgwood Museum Trust Ltd., (a wholly separate charitable entity that runs the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston, Stoke on Trent), had their pensions in the Wedgwood Waterford pension scheme. It now seems that the the Wedgwood Museum itself might be vulnerable.

A royal visit to the Wedgwood factory

Evidently an obscure and complex piece of pension fund legislation — (ironically originally drafted to protect pension funds from fraudulent practices) — means that the Wedgwood Museum Trust could be liable for the whole £134 million pension deficit left over after the sale of the Wedgwood Waterford business.

I'd spell this out for you, but I'm not too strong on particle physics. Even Simon Wedgwood, a descendant of the great Josiah Wedgwood, was at something of a loss to explain the masonic intricacies of the legislation when we spoke earlier today.

But what it means, in essence, is that the future of the Wedgwood Museum could be endangered if the Pension Protection Fund (the body established to provide a guaranteed minimum level of pension payments to members of eligible pension funds in cases like this) refuses to bail out the pension fund deficit.

In such an eventuality, the Wedgwood Museum collection — an unrivalled collection of ceramics and glass — could be lost to the nation and its assets sold to meet the pension deficit. Or, perhaps more likely, the nation might be asked to stump up to buy the collection in order that the Pension Protection Fund is spared having to foot the bill. Either way, the outlook seems bleak.

The Wedgwood Museum website recently posted the following comment:

"Five of the Wedgwood Group Pension Plan's 7000-member scheme were employees of the Museum Trust when the Wedgwood companies became insolvent last year, leaving a large deficit in the Pension Plan. As a result, the Museum Trust is now deemed to be liable for the shortfall. The Museum's Trustees are in discussions with a wide range of stakeholders as to how the Trust's internationally renowned Designated Collections can be preserved, and are determined to ensure the survival of the Wedgwood Museum."

Meanwhile, one assumes that Wedgwood Waterford is now benefiting from the €100 million that its new owners KPS Capital Partners promised to inject into the company, which includes not only Waterford crystal glass and Wedgwood ceramics, but historic brands such as Royal Doulton china.

Having bought it out of administration, Michael Psaros reckoned the business would be profitable in twelve months. "The team will expand Waterford Wedgwood into 'huge untapped' emerging markets – India, China and Russia," Psaros told the Telegraph. "Administration is a pedestrian event, not even worthy of being talked about."

It is when a historic museum collection is under threat of extinction.

Images
Top left: Josiah Wedgwood's copy of the Portland Vase, 1789.
Lower right: A royal tour of the Wedgwood factory

Researching the history of collections: America forges ahead as the UK lags behind

2010-07-19T02:57:00.001-07:00

An article by Suzanne Muchnic in this weekend's Los Angeles Times — American art collectors ripe for study — focuses on the fertile research resources open to those interested in the modern history of collecting in the United States.

Muchnic's piece makes clear that researching the history of the art market — who bought what, where, when, and why — is now viewed by American scholars as a noble pursuit that interlocks constructively with the established discipline of art history. The number and range of significant archives available to scholars is expanding all the time. Well-heeled foundations like the Getty Research Institute and the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Collection in New York, to name just two, offer increasingly rich opportunities to mine historical auction catalogues and the manuscript and business archives of former dealers.

As questions of provenance and due diligence become ever more important within the art trade and among collectors, so the importance of these archives grows accordingly.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the great American industrial and financial barons began drawing on the services of British über-dealer Joseph Duveen (above left), to help them build their art collections. With his assistance, they went on to amass extraordinary holdings of the finest art Europe had to offer, which provided the foundations of some of the greatest art museums in North America.

In recent decades, American institutions have hoovered up a host of business archives of important dealers and collectors in an approach that mirrors the art-collecting activities of Frick, Morgan, Mellon, Stotesbury, et al, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Back then, the rich craved art; today, as Google has shown, information is an equally prized commodity and many of the institutions that now collect art business archives are digitizing them as well. Indeed there is a delicious irony in the fact that the Getty now holds the vast Duveen archive, which is in keen demand as scholarly interest in the history of collecting grows.

Duveen's brilliant insight was that America had money but wanted art and Europe had art but wanted money. He exploited that simple equation with staggering success. As a result, if today you want to see many of the great paintings Duveen transacted, you will need to travel to America to do so. However, the same is not true of the digital information relating to those transactions, much of which is being gradually made available to scholars via the internet.

Given the increasing accessibility of that information, there is no excuse for Britain to lag behind the US in developing the history of collections into a scholarly discipline. Sadly, however, with the exception of Sotheby's and Christie's Fine Art courses — which chiefly serve their own business interests — few UK universities look positively on the history of the art market, instead treating it with sneering disdain. This is all the more lamentable given that the vast majority of young art history graduates will go on to work in the art market in some form or another, be it in a museum, an art dealership, an auction house, or even an archive.

Having just returned from my annual stint teaching a course on the history of the art market for the ARCA Masters Course in International Art Crime Studies in Italy, I can vouch for the keen interest in the history of collecting shown by the many graduate students and established art professionals who enroll on the course each year. The vast majority of those students, however, are North American.

If we want a better understanding of how today's art market evolved — to say nothing of clearer insights into what motivates collectors and indeed art criminals to do what they do — we need a more scholarly approach to the history of collecting. America is lighting the way.

Useful archives and other resources
Durand-Ruel (The archives of 19th century French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel)

The Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance (PSCP) (The Getty Research Institute's Provenance Database)

Center for the History of Collecting in America (Frick Collection, New York

Smithsonian Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC)

Journal of the History of Collections (Oxford University Press)

The Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art (Yale University)

The 'Universal Museum': an anthropological perspective

2010-07-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

Dr Magnus Fiskesjo of Cornell University's Department of Anthropology has kindly sent me a link to his recent paper, Global repatriations and 'Universal' museums, published in a special repatriations issue of Anthropology News (51.2, March 2010, pp10-12), which can be found online here.

Thanks, Magnus

Encyclopaedic museums and the 'Primitive Accumulation' of cultural heritage

2010-07-14T23:11:00.001-07:00

An abridged version of my paper on the Universal Museum is to be published by the House of World Cultures (left) in Berlin in October to coincide with an event exploring current thinking on 'encyclopaedic' or 'universal' museums. I'll be giving a paper on the Universal Museum at the panel discussion in Berlin on 9th October.

Among the topics slated for discussion at the conference is the theory of 'primitive accumulation' (of capital) — a notion derived from classical economics, which seeks to explain how a small percentage of the population came to control, at the expense of the majority, a disproportionate amount of wealth.

I've been pondering this in the context of the universal museums and their own 'primitive accumulation' of the world's cultural heritage. Whether one can helpfully map a theory from classical economics onto the history of museums is a moot point, but there are interesting crossovers.

Following Adam Smith's concept of 'previous accumulation' of capital, Karl Marx illustrated his theory of 'primitive accumulation' by reference to the theological notion of original sin. Extrapolating from that, Marx goes on to sketch an economic process that might equally be applied to the development of the great universal museums, often at the expense of colonized peoples who were left correspondingly impoverished:

"In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal élite; the other, the lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. [...] Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work." (Karl Marx, 'The Economics: 1857-1867', quoted in McLellan, D, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, OUP, 1977, p483).

That contrast between the "diligent, intelligent, frugal élite" and the "lazy rascals" (the subaltern Other, for our purposes) echoes the rhetoric used by the "civilizing" imperial powers to justify their accumulation of the material resources and cultural treasures of colonized nations during the nineteenth century. (See, for example, Sharon Sliwinski's excellent paper, 'The Kodak on the Congo: The Childhood of Human Rights', published by Autograph ABP to coincide with 'Mémoire', the recent exhibition of video work and photographs by Congo-born contemporary artist Sammy Baloji at Dilston Grove, London).

If you missed Sammy Baloji's 'Mémoire' at Dilston Grove, it's worth looking out for at other venues. Yet how ironic that so much contemporary art of this kind now finds itself in the collections of the new economic élite, rich on the fruits of their own primitive accumulation of capital.

Italy 1 Spain 0 — Madrid museum shown red card for acquiring looted objects

2010-07-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

If UNESCO showed red cards for cultural heritage misdemeanours, it would surely be Spain taking the long walk back to the changing rooms this week after Madrid's National Archaeological Museum was found in possession of a bunch of Attic hot pots acquired in 1999 in clear defiance of the UNESCO 1970 Convention. Sadly, unlike FIFA, UNESCO doesn't hold disciplinary panels. It was left to The Art Newspaper to blow the whistle.

In an article in this month's paper, Fabio Isman focuses on a number of Attic amphorae in the collection of Madrid's National Archaeological Museum that bear a striking resemblance to pieces discovered in Giacomo Medici's Geneva warehouse during the now famous Italian/Swiss police raid in 1999 (Watson, P & Todeschini, C., The Medici Conspiracy 2006) (see image above left). No, hold on, let's not beat about the bush. They're the same pots.

"Is it right, or moral," Isman asks, "for museums (places established to conserve and exhibit objects, but also to educate and promote culture) to display artefacts plundered after the 1970 Unesco Convention, (on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) rather than, as in centuries past, during wars and conquests? What type of 'culture' are these museums exhibiting, promoting and teaching: the culture of clandestine excavations and fraud?" Good question.

But to imply, as Isman does, that the objects acquired by museums "in centuries past" were acquired exclusively "during wars and conquests" is simply factually incorrect. More importantly, his sentence seems constructed in such a way as to absolve museums of earlier collecting strategies, by implying that war and military conquest represent legitimate circumstances in which to loot countries of their material heritage.

Anyone caring to scrutinize the circumstances in which most of the great encyclopedic collections were formed would have to conclude that very significant quantities of objects in those collections were acquired unethically (whether one judges one's ethics by 19th century or 21st century standards).

I'm often criticized for conflating pre- and post-1970 museum acquisitions and I can understand Paul Barford's constructive criticism of my recent blog posting (Tom Flynn Blames the Museums) that it is not always helpful to mix the question of post-1970 (ie post-UNESCO Convention) acquisitions with acquisitions made prior to that, particularly those made during the age of imperialism.

Nineteenth-century acquisitions are too hot a potato to handle and condemning them probably doesn't help clarify the more pressing and demonstrably unethical post-1970 acquisitions of the kind Isman refers to.

But like an oncologist looking to your family DNA for the cause of your illness, I have good reason to continue conflating these issues.

As Paul Barford points out in his comments on the Madrid affair, the archaeological museum’s then director, Miguel Angel Elvira Barba, said of his 1999 acquisition: “We have taken an enormous step forward both in terms of quality and quantity; [this] collection now puts us among the ranks of the greatest museums in Europe and the US”.

Here, then, is further telling evidence, if any were needed, that European and North American museums remain locked in the same competitive race towards an encyclopedic embrace of the world's material culture, no matter what the consequences might be for archaeology.

That is why I continue to focus on the underlying modus operandi of our museums — namely the Enlightenment-born idée fixe that seeks to place the whole universe "'neath one roof".

And as I said in my earlier piece, that macho museum model is what inspires the private collectors to do what they do. We won't beat the looting and the private collecting of illicitly acquired antiquities until we reform the museums.

Senegalese slave trader: Should he stay or should he go?

2010-07-09T02:53:00.001-07:00

The portrait, left, of the 18th century Senegalese Muslim aristocrat, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (1701–1773), by the British painter William Hoare, was recently sold at auction in the UK. Its export has been stopped while the National Portrait Gallery tries to raise the necessary £550,000 to keep it in the UK. The Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund have already provided grants, but £100,000 is still needed if it is not to leave the country.

Should it stay?

Diallo, also known as Job ben Solomon, was from a family of aristocratic Muslim clerics who traded on the west coast of Africa in the early 18th century (that's a Qur'an around his neck). He was also a slave trader. In 1730, while conducting family business, he was himself mistaken for a slave and shipped to America, where he was bought by a Maryland plantation owner and set to work in the tobacco fields. After his escape and subsequent recapture and imprisonment, he was finally recognised by a British lawyer who sponsored his passage to England where he was welcomed by aristocratic British society.

This immediately brings to mind the case of Omai, the Tahitian who also fascinated British society after being brought to England by Captain Cook in 1774 and whose portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (right) was sold at Sotheby's in November 2001 for £10.3 million.

While unquestionably a compelling image, Hoare's half-length portrait of Diallo has none of the dramatic swagger of Reynolds's full-length portrait of Omai, which has the Tahitian swathed in billowing drapery and wearing a turban, strolling through an extensive English landscape like a tattooed Roman orator. It's not a fair comparison, but while the Reynolds image combined great painterly qualities, art historical importance and an intriguing subject, the image of Diallo is altogether more problematic.

Recent discussions of the painting have focused on Diallo's victim status as a slave, despite the fact that he was himself, first and foremost, a slave trader. Indeed on his return to Africa, Diallo resumed his privileged lifestyle, which included keeping his own domestic slaves.

His obvious 'Otherness' notwithstanding, Diallo was embraced by British aristocrats who identified with his aristocratic bearing and sophistication. Should the National Portrait Gallery be seeking to raise public money for an image of a slave trader whose passage into polite society was secured first and foremost by his privileged background?

One would have to conclude that it is.

Diallo's predicament, if one can call it that — his misfortune at being mistaken for a slave — has a particular resonance in this increasingly globalised world where the currents of late capitalism are rendering growing numbers of people immiserated and powerless.

We in 'the West' are all, in our way, beneficiaries of the many contemporary versions of slavery taking place in developing nations where bonded labour, child labour, and forced labour are used to produce the commodities we take for granted. To say nothing of sex-trafficking, which is arguably one of the worst blights on humanity and to which we all but turn a blind eye.

For these reasons alone, the portrait of Diallo is more thought-provoking than one may at first realise and for that reason ought to be saved for the nation. In 1772, a year before Diallo died (presumably peacefully in his comfortable West African home), a black slave composed a poem which was published in the New London Gazette. Even today, it stands as an eloquent reminder of how conveniently compromised are our attitudes to slavery and other forms of oppression:

Is not all oppression vile?
When you attempt your freedom to defend,
Is reason yours, and partially your friend?
Be not deceiv'd — for reason pleads for all
Who by invasion and oppression fall.
I live a slave, and am inslav'd by those
Who yet pretend with reason to oppose
All schemes oppressive, and the gods invoke
to Curse with thunders the invaders yoke.
O mighty God! let conscience seize the mind
Of inconsistent men, who wish to find
A partial god to vindicate their cause,
And plead their freedom, while they break its laws.

(Quoted in Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century, Thames & Hudson, 1990, pp29-30)

Anti-slavery website

National Portrait Gallery Appeal

La Bella Principessa’s cheerleaders have been in touch

2010-07-07T05:28:00.001-07:00

I’ve just been sent one of those rude comments that bloggers like me tend to attract from time to time. As usual, it comes from someone called ‘Anonymous’, which indicates that whoever has an axe to grind, they’d prefer not to be identified as the one grinding it.

This most recent communication concerns my comments (here) about the so-called ‘La Bella Principessa’ – an unprovenanced drawing on vellum (above) which some people, including the renowned Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, are convinced is an autograph work by Leonardo.

I happen to disagree with him, not on forensic grounds, but because, like Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I just don’t think it looks like a Leonardo. That’s not an art historical opinion. It’s just an instinctive response.

But it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not writing in The New Yorker as David Grann just has in a piece of investigative journalism about a shady Hungarian-born Canadian art restorer that seems to cast the whole La Bella Principessa affair as yet another typical art world scam (The Mark of a Masterpiece: The Man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art – New Yorker, 12 July, 2010).

I don’t normally publish rude anonymous blog comments, but I make an exception in this case as the correspondent seems strangely emotionally invested in the whole rum affair, which is itself revealing:

Dear Mr. Flynn, I really think that your comments are so stupid, and that is better (sic) if you go back to school to study art starting from the contemporary period...you might understand something I hope...
Speaking on the Bella Principessa you are not a specialist on Leonardo, and you are not a in title (sic) to judge if the piece is good or not....did you seen it? (sic) Did you kept it in your hands?? (sic) Did you had a look (sic) at the carbon test results and all other analisis?? (sic) Or you are just saying stupid things for attract attention of people on your blog....why you don't proof (sic) that is NOT by Leonardo...come on, tell me something more of what you know...proof that is not a Leonardo and let's talk later....

Well, it’s true, I am not a Leonardo specialist, but the available evidence would suggest that such expertise is not quite as reliable as many assume. It’s also true that I did not kept it in my hands, but David Grann’s New Yorker piece offers more than a suggestion that one or two of those who have kept it in their hands might not be as disinterested as they pretend. Granted, I did not had a look at the carbon test results, or any other analysis for that matter. But again, given the circumstances in which these seem to have been carried out, what value do they have? Very little, it seems. Moreover, once art goes down the road of fingerprint-dusting, DNA analysis, and multi-spectral imaging cameras as the most reliable means of establishing authorship, we’re doomed. It’s not as if these are being marshalled in the cause of art history. Rather it’s the whiff of money at the end of the rainbow.

I cannot prove that La Bella Principessa is not by Leonardo and nor do I have any incentive to do so…unlike those seeking to prove that it is. But I stand by my earlier comments. This is not an autograph work by Leonardo.

National Gallery in Dublin affirms authenticity of its Caravaggio

2010-07-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

The National Gallery in Dublin has reaffirmed that its version of Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ is the original, documented work of 1602 and that the version stolen from a museum in Odessa in 2008 and recently recovered by police in Berlin is one of several copies of the Dublin work.

Update, 5 July 2010:
And now it seems German prosecutors have conceded that the painting they recovered is not the original autograph work by Caravaggio, but a copy of significantly less value (which is not the same as a fake or forgery). It will be interesting to hear how this news is received by the Museum in Odessa, from which the painting was stolen.

More Artknows posts on this:
Caravaggio copy snatched from Odessa (5 August 2008)

Now you see it, now you don't: 'Caravaggio copy may still be missing (9 December 2008)

Organised crime? Odessa Caravaggio copy recovered in Berlin (29 June 2010)

The Mythology of the Antiquities Market: Reading Ricardo Elia

2010-07-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

Ricardo Elia, professor of archaeology at Boston University, recently published a characteristically combative paper in the journal Cultural Heritage Issues: The Legacy of Conquest, Colonization and Commerce. His article, entitled 'Mythology of the Antiquities Market', rehearses a now familiar argument from the archaeology camp that all antiquities collectors are rogues and there is no such thing as a "reputable dealer" in such material.

"I would like to suggest," he writes, "that the collector community operates on the basis of a particular mythology that explains, justifies, and validates the collecting of antiquities. The essential elements of this mythology have been in place for the better part of half a century and constitute a bulwark against outside criticism and an increasingly inconvenient corpus of facts."

He proceeds to cite the denial on the part of antiquities collectors of the true provenance of ancient objects (what he calls "the myth of the 'old collection'") and their prejudice towards a stuffy community of archaeologists.

The Mythology of the Museum
He is, however, overlooking an important factor in what encourages collectors to do what they do. The precedent for their collecting was set long ago by the real collectors — the museums. We can't turn the clock back, but there is no denying that the history of collecting prior to the modern era of UNESCO Conventions and export restrictions is one of institutionalised looting, the fruits of which ended up in western encyclopaedic museums. This is why, in the eyes of many developing nations, it is not only the activities of the Fleischmans, Ortizs and Levy-Whites of this world that are to blame for the impoverishment of many nations' cultural heritage through looting and smuggling, but our encyclopedic museums as well.

This may not seem to be saying much; after all, doesn't Peter Watson point an accusatory finger at the Met, the Getty and a host of other museums in his exhaustive Medici Conspiracy? Well, up to a point, but it's the epistemological foundations of the great encyclopedic museums that are the real issue, not just the post-1970 Apulian pots and Euphronios kraters.

As Dr Kavita Singh, associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, pointed out in a 2008 article in The Art Newspaper, outside the west, Western museums are seen "as terrifying places with insatiable appetites for works of art."

She goes on to say, "They are also seen as the arm of a more powerful state, with infinite funds and power at their command. To tell a Bangladeshi protestor that universal museums 'build bridges across cultures and promote mutual understanding' would only provoke anger or derision."

In his article, Professor Elia goes on to develop an anthropological, socio-functional mythography that draws on Durkheimian/Malinowskian methodologies to outline a series of myths upon which collectors draw to justify their collecting activities. These include The Myth of the Old Collection; The Myth of the Chance Find; The Myth of the Reputable Dealer, and so on.

He forgets an even more structurally supportive myth, however; namely The Myth of the Encyclopaedic Museum. The Museum's claim to legitimate right of possession, to ethical custodianship of objects and to coherent communicator of meanings and narratives about human origins comprises the fragile superstructure upon which modern antiquities collectors construct and justify their own raisons d'être. It was the museum tradition that taught them to do what they do.

As long as encyclopedic or universal museums remain intransigent in the face of claims for the return of cultural objects — many of which were looted at the expense of the archaeological record — the looting and collecting of antiquities will continue (as will the arrogant denial of the implications). Museums are, by definition, and certainly in practice, the institutional face of 'culture without context'.

The encyclopaedic museum may be all we have, but in its present form it is both disreputable and unsustainable. Can it be made over? What can the great encyclopedic museums do to transform themselves from symbols of overweening power and acquisitiveness into forces for good in a rapidly changing world?

They could start by setting a better example to collectors of antiquities. Not by giving things back — although a genuinely well-meaning, selective approach to that would help — but rather by rethinking their prejudiced and anachronistic condemnation of a notional 'nationalism' as the main motivation of source nations seeking dominion over their own heritage. Until that happens, the History of the World in 100 Objects will remain what many already see it as: wretched propaganda.

Not all of Elia's arguments seem particularly well-thought out. If 'chance finds' do occur, as he seems willing to concede, how can they be described as a myth? The quotes he cites don't refer to specific numbers of chance finds, but to the 'occasional' nature of the chance find. That surely needs to be set alongside wholesale looting as another source of unprovenanced material. It is therefore not a myth.

What emerges most clearly from Elia's piece is the trill of self-regard that is a familiar note in the archaeologist vs collector debate. If the archaeologists haven't bent their backs into the subterranean pit, shone their torches into the Stygian gloom of the tomb and sensitively brushed the grime of ages from the krater, everything is untouchable and of negligible value to humankind. That's clearly not good enough. Until one of them comes up with an alternative solution to the problem of 'orphaned' objects, the mighty encyclopaedic museums will continue to win adoption rights over the Heimatlösen.

Moreover, for every university professor who pours scorn on the utterances of reputable dealers like James Ede (a 'reputable dealer' is an oxymoron in Professor Elia's gloss) there is a Cerveteri archaeologist who is only to happy to count Mr Ede among his colleagues and friends. Who is right?

To paraphrase Professor Elia, I would like to suggest that it is first and foremost the museum community that operates on the basis of a particular mythology that explains, justifies, and validates the collecting of antiquities. The essential elements of this mythology have been in place for the better part of two centuries and constitute a bulwark against outside criticism and an increasingly inconvenient corpus of facts.

Sources
Ricardo Elia, 'Mythology of the Antiquities Market' in Cultural Heritage Issues: The Legcy of Conquest, Colonization and Commerce, Ed. A.R.Nafziger & Ann M. Nicgorski, Martinus Nijhoff Publications 2008, pp239-255.

(Dr Kavita Singh, 'Do we really want the freer circulation of cultural goods?' in The Art Newspaper, Issue 192, June 2008: Link here)

Recovered Caravaggio copy: The Taking and Rolling of Christ

2010-06-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

If the image (left) of the recovered copy of the Caravaggio work The Taking of Christ circulated by the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, German Federal Criminal Police Office) is an image of the actual painting, it would seem that Sergio Benedetti, the world's leading Caravaggio conservator and restorer, may be on a plane to Odessa before too long.

The image seems to show a network of cracks and creases as if the painting had been scrunched into a ball. We know from the original police reports following the theft in 2008 that the thieves cut the canvas from its frame before making off with it. It seems they may have rolled it up for easy transport, causing significant damage to the paint surface.

Any future volume on art theft might do well to invite papers from conservators about the sort of damage that pictures suffer as a result of thefts like this. The failure to treat the picture with even a modicum of respect also tells us something about the criminals concerned.

Organised Crime? Odessa Caravaggio copy recovered in Germany

2010-06-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

Back in 2008, a copy of 17th century Italian painter Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ of 1602 was stolen from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa, Ukraine (see my earlier blog entries on this in 2008 here and here). Back then, I hinted that this might be another case of organised crime rearing its ugly head. I've subsequently learned that this is unlikely to the be the case.

A little afternoon archaeology in the archives of The Burlington Magazine in 2008 offered enough evidence to show that the Odessa picture was not in fact the autograph work by the artist but rather a copy, albeit a very good one, possibly contemporaneous with the original, and perhaps even by Caravaggio himself. The autograph work is in the National Gallery of Art in Dublin.

Now it seems the stolen Odessa picture has finally turned up in Berlin, reportedly in the possession of three Ukrainians and a German. Some news wires (Reuters here, for example) continue to refer to the painting as the original work by Caravaggio, based on the opinion of "Soviet art experts in the 1950s" (They were referring to research by X. Malitskaja and Victor Lasareff).

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no mention of the rather more authoritative Burlington article which showed that in 1993, new documentary evidence and thorough archival and technical research by the expert restorer Sergio Benedetti, one of the world's leading Caravaggio scholars, firmly established the Dublin picture as the original autograph work.(Another version is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Something like a dozen copies of the Dublin original exist.)

The investigation into the theft is at an early stage (the recovery took place on Friday, June 25th), but already a familiar narrative is taking shape in news reports. According to Ukraine's Interior Ministry, it was carried out by "a gang, which focused on high-value thefts," including more than 20 in Ukraine. It will be interesting to see whether this prompts the usual extrapolation (of which I too have been guilty in the past) which attributes such thefts to organised crime. Stealing a Caravaggio from a museum clearly requires a certain amount of organisation, but whether that makes it an example of 'organised crime' is a moot point.

For an indication of how complex and nebulous is our current understanding of the concept of organised crime, see Klaus von Lampe, 'Definitions of Organized Crime', here (www.organized-crime.de/OCDEF1.htm).

What did the thieves intend to do with the picture? They've had it for two years and clearly haven't moved it on. Perhaps they're using it to gain a better understanding of chiaroscuro, the art historical term denoting the dramatic use of tonal contrasts, of which Caravaggio was the greatest exponent. What other concept so aptly evokes the shadow world of art crime?

I've just spent another enjoyable fortnight teaching a course in art crime studies organised by ARCA — the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art in Umbria, Italy. The two dozen bright, motivated students who had enrolled on this year's course spent a good deal of time beyond the lecture hall meditating on the possible motives behind such high-profile heists as the Odessa theft. A broad consensus was rapidly emerging that ascribing such thefts to 'organised crime' is perhaps too pat and all too often based on assumption rather than scholarly research.

Will this Berlin recovery throw up the sort of hard evidence art crime investigators and criminologists require in order to better understand why thieves target such high-profile pictures? After all, unlike more common or garden works of art, documented masterpieces by Caravaggio or the Caravaggisti are too well known to convert into ready cash, which is what most criminals crave most.

The Berlin recovery may remind us of one thing — that there are few if any reliable general patterns one can apply to art crime. Each case needs to be viewed on its own 'merits' and its circumstances carefully parsed and analyzed.

One thing that is often overlooked is that art historical scholarship benefits when a painting of this importance is recovered. Comparison is everything in art history and we need the Odessa picture if only to remind us that the authentic work is the one in Dublin.

But then how many art thieves subscribe to the Burlington Magazine?

Sources
Sergio Benedetti, 'Caravaggio's Taking of Christ, a Masterpiece Rediscovered', Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1088 (Nov 1993), pp. 731-741.

Francesca Cappelletti and Sergio Benedetti, 'The Documentary Evidence of the Early History of Caravaggio's Taking of Christ', Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1088 (Nov 1993), pp. 742-746.

Sergio Benedetti, 'Caravaggio's Taking of Christ', Burlington Magazine, Vol 137, No. 1102, (Jan. 1995), pp. 37-38.

See also, Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting (left), an account of how the Dublin picture was discovered in a Jesuit monastery in Ireland and subsequently restored by Sergio Benedetti.

Paris art heist: who cares?

2010-05-20T19:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's theft from Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne of five important masterpieces by Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Modigliani and Braque, made headline news around the world. Is this a cultural loss, or a financial loss? And in any case, who cares?

BBC 2's Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark seemed to find the theft a source of unbridled mirth last night. Throughout the programme, Newsnight's editors and designers used the stolen Picasso Cubist painting (above left) as running gag, a visual metaphor for the jumbled complexities of the international financial crisis and the incomprehensible mysteries of the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition. To cap it all, the programme wheeled in the Guardian's 'art critic' Adrian Searle, who obligingly sneered at the stolen pictures as if they were vulgar daubs by the reviled Jack Vettriano. Searle effectively told the thieves they were welcome to them.

With the international banking system still teetering close to meltdown thanks to the sub-prime mortgage debacle, serious news programmes have clearly got better things to do than ponder a few stolen paintings. But when did they ever?

The media's blithe dismissal of art theft as a trifling peccadillo might be seen as another version of the museum world's careless attitude to the cultural objects in its care. The Paris theft has all the marks of an inside job (anyone who keeps a weather eye on international art crime will testify to how frequently this is the case in major art thefts). Meanwhile, closed circuit television cameras may have recorded an action-packed video of the heist, but what good it will do beyond make for some Thomas Crown-like entertainment is a moot point. CCTV is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.

And apparently a motorbike was used in the Paris theft. If the early reports are correct, it would seem that the heist was undertaken by a single thief working alone, although how much prior assistance he received from an insider is yet to be discovered. One is reminded of the one-man theft of Cellini's gold salt cellar from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2003 and of the bizarre case of Stephane Breitwieser in the 1990s.

I spend two days each week writing and researching at the National Art Library at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Entering the museum one is required to submit to a perfunctory bag check. Quite what the well-meaning guards are looking for as they pretend to shine their little torches into my rucksack is a mystery to me. Guns? Banksy spray-cans? Razor blades? Weapons-grade plutonium? Cheese and pickle sandwiches? Who knows? Once you're in, you're in, and you are not checked on exit. I often reflect on how easy it would be to wander out with some small Renaissance treasure (the inventory of objects stolen from that great museum over the decades would make your eyes water). This goes for any number of museums here and abroad.

Regrettably, art thefts offer yet another illustration of how fundamentally unsustainable the encyclopedic museum has become in the twenty-first century. How to strike a balance between the costs of security and the need to maintain free and unfettered access to the public? To say nothing of the extent to which security costs eat into acquisition costs, staffing, training, conservation, education, heating, lighting, and so on. Something's got to give. More often something's taken.

Perhaps it's time the world's major museum directors organised an international conference to crunch the thorny issue of security? Instead of meditating on devious new ways to stop source nations reclaiming their cultural heritage, perhaps they should be pondering how to keep their collections secure. In fact, those two considerations may not be entirely unconnected. If you can't look after stuff properly, then give some of it back. That might be one way to reduce costs.

Meanwhile, what's the difference between a multi-million dollar Picasso stolen in Paris, and a multi-million dollar Picasso sold at auction in New York? The Picasso stolen yesterday has disappeared into the netherworld of international crime, while the Picasso sold last week in New York has entered a similar abyss — that of the super-rich private collector. In both cases the pictures have been removed from view for an indefinite period and in both cases their new owners will look upon them not so much as art but as a form of collateral.

The paintings stolen in Paris, if they don't become the subject of a ransom demand will doubtless be used to finance other criminal activities — drugs or arms deals, perhaps. As art crime specialists always point out on these occasions, the pictures were not ordered by some exotic Dr No figure and nor will they be saleable on the open market. But given that the art world's most significant heist to date — the theft in March 1990 from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — still remains unsolved and the pictures still at large, it could be years or even decades before the Paris pictures re-emerge.

The question is, who cares?

For more details of the Paris theft, read Catherine Sezgin's helpful piece on the ARCA blog here

The stolen works, illustrated above, are (top to bottom):
Le pigeon aux petits-pois (The Pidgeon with Peas) by Pablo Picasso
La Pastorale by Henri Matisse
Nature-more aux chandeliers (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Léger
La femme à l’éventail (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani
L’olivier prés de l’Estaque by Georges Braque

Civil servants on the price of Picasso

2010-05-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

With the UK's budget deficit making the Grand Canyon look like a mere hole in the road and the new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government lying in its incubator being carefully tended to by civil servants and watched by a concerned electorate lest it expire at any moment, one hardly expects Whitehall's attention to turn to the art market.

But following the recent New York sale of Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust for $106m (£70m), the civil service intranet has just conducted a brief online survey of its employees to ask "Do you think it's worth it?"

My spies inside DWP inform me that a staggering 4183 votes were cast. The results were as follows:

— There's a need to draw a line, this is too much — 60%

— The price is Surreal [note the capital S], but you can't put a price on great art — 18%

— I wish I had the money to buy it! — 20%

Hard-working mandarins at DWP clearly have better things to do than specify what "drawing the line" might actually entail, but I think we should be told.

Ooh...Aah! The erotic frisson of high-end art auctions

2010-05-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

Roberta Smith has just filed a diverting little piece for the New York Times concerning our perennial curiosity about the likely buyer whenever an astronomical price is paid for a work of art at auction.

"If you follow art auctions even peripherally," writes Smith, "you know that each one leaves a trail of question marks. Who bought the van Gogh? Who bought the Johns? We would very much like to know. Sooner or later we usually do."

That 'usually' should read 'occasionally', because more often than not we don't. Generally speaking, the buyers of so-called 'blue-chip' works such as Picasso's Garçon à la pipe ($104m/£58m), Warhol's Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) ($71.7m/37.7m) and Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust ($106m/£70m) remain shrouded in mystery.

Bloomberg's art market reporter Scott Reyburn recently scooped the buyer of Giacometti's ($103 million) Walking Man at Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern sale in London on February 3rd, revealing it to be London-based Brazilian-born billionairess Lily Safra.

Reyburn succeeded in locating two dealers who corroborated each other's version, a minimum prerequisite if a story is to hold water. Otherwise, it remains pure speculation, as with the unsubstantiated 'rumour' that Paris-based Philippe Niarchos was the buyer of Warhol's Green Car Crash (above left) at Christie's New York in May 2007.

Clearly there are plenty of reasons why purchasers of expensive prestige objects choose to remain anonymous and Roberta Smith helpfully outlines a few, security and privacy being the obvious ones, tax dodges and other financial incentives perhaps also occasionally playing a part.

An arguably even more interesting question is why the rest of us are so curious. What's to be gained from knowing that Lily Safra has a Giacometti parked in her living-room? Would it matter more, or less, if the buyer had been Roman Abramovich? Or Steve Cohen? Or Eli Broad?

Smith's article playfully rehearses the bizarre notion that our curiosity about these matters may have libidinal roots: "Strictly enforcing one’s privacy — at a time when so much goes public as fast at it happens — may be the ultimate public display of power, and thus the most erotic," she writes. This is a kind of exhibitionism, Smith suggests, in which anonymity becomes, for those watching, "pleasurable and voyeuristic," the spending of money "a turn-on."

There is another reason why some of us want to open the auction kimono and it has less to do with a notional eroticism and more to do with the increasing opacity of auctions. The problem with high-end art auctions is that nobody knows what kind of deal has been stitched together behind the scenes beforehand. Sotheby's and Christie's glitzy evening sales might look like spontaneous theatre but they are more studiously choreographed than many people realise.

And there's the rub. The day fine art auctioneers ceased operating solely as agents and became principals in the transaction was the day the 'public auction' relinquished any last claim it had to transparency and openness. How much of what goes on is ethical business and how much of it is the art world equivalent of insider trading?

This might sound like a classic Us and Them conspiracy theory, but it's a serious issue when nine-figure sums are changing hands. We're encouraged to believe that because it's art rather than, say, ethanol futures, credit default swaps or an exotic mortgage derivative, it doesn't matter. But in any other trading arena the structuring of such transactions would be subject to a minimum of external regulation. What, precisely, is the extent of the auctioneer's involvement when the hammer falls at these head-spinning prices? Is the auction house a site of sensuality, or the locus of hocus pocus?

Hats off to Roberta Smith for putting a whole new gloss on the stultifying boredom of evening art auctions. Next time I drop down to Sotheby's or Christie's for one of their glitzy Imp and Mod sales I'll keep a beady eye out for the gavel-grinding voyeurs and the scopophilic saleroom swingers.

I've nothing against a bit of harmless rostrum frottage, you understand. It's the bean-counting that concerns me.

Christie's face lawsuit over 'misattributed' Leonardo drawing

2010-05-10T01:09:00.001-07:00

The picture illustrated left is not a work by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. But if you could get the right people to say it is, it could be worth...ooh... think of a number and add six or seven noughts.

Christie's sold the picture in New York in 1998 for $21,850 (£11,400), when it was catalogued as by a relatively minor 19th century German artist. Shortly afterwards, a leading Leonardo scholar reattributed it to Leonardo and wrote a book about it. Abracadabra! $150 million!

Now the original vendor, Jeanne Marchig, is suing Christie's for negligence.

Given the monstrous prices changing hands at the top of the art market (cf this week's Picasso in New York), it's not surprising that 'La Bella Principessa', as she is now known, is suddenly at the centre of a multi-million dollar legal action. But quite how Ms Marchig can have a case against Christie's when a bullet-proof attribution to Leonardo hasn't been made (and probably never will be) is a moot point.

There are legal precedents regarding an auctioneer's duty of care, most notably the Court of Appeal's decision in 1990 over Luxmoore-May v Messenger May Baverstock.

This concerned an English provincial auction house, Messenger May Baverstock, which sold two seemingly anonymous sporting paintings in 1985 for £840. A few months later the paintings were offered at Sotheby's as works by George Stubbs, where they fetched £88,000. The original vendor, a Mrs Luxmoore-May, sued Messenger May Baverstock for the difference, claiming that the auctioneers should have known the works were by Stubbs.

The court found in favour of Messenger May Baverstock on the grounds that a distinction needed to be drawn between a provincial auctioneer, who could be described as a general practitioner, and a London firm, who could be expected to show specialist knowledge. Within the parameters of their professional function, Messenger May Baverstock merely expressed an opinion and thus were not negligent, the court ruled.

But the case of the 'Leonardo' involves Christie's, who one can reasonably assume qualify as specialists, if not connoisseurs (a critical distinction). Moreover, not everything in the art market can be definitively researched. Pictures often present greater difficulties than objets d'art, although that realm can be a quagmire too, as the case of the Islamic rock crystal ewer at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury in 2008 vividly illustrated.

True connoisseurship is now a moribund skill, having long ago been replaced by the vulgar imperatives of the art market whose ever-widening maw now sucks in not only Wall Street speculators but academics and "freelance art consultants", all bewitched by the siren chime of the cash register. Brush strokes, fingerprints, chemical analysis, carbon-dating...bring 'em on!

The Leonardo market stinks like a Cinquecento latrine.

Back in December 2009, London Old Masters dealer Simon Dickinson was at the centre of a legal wrangle after allegedly taking a commission of more than £600,000 for selling a Leonardo da Vinci drawing to an American client.

According to the Daily Mail, the drawing had been consigned to Dickinson by private art consultant Daniella Luxembourg, who in turn had been instructed to sell it on behalf of a mysterious Liechtenstein-based foundation called Accidia.

The Mail reported the subject of the drawing as "the Madonna and Child with St Anne and a lamb," and yet the three or four known documented Leonardo drawings of that subject are all in national museum collections. Had another authentic Leonardo drawing of that subject been found it would have been major art market news and worth a lot more than three or four million. So what was the drawing Dickinson sold?

For the most informative piece on the La Bella Principessa reattribution controversy, see Richard Dorment's excellent piece for the Telegraph here and for the recent news of the impending court action, see Dalya Alberge's summary for The Times here.

Annus mirabilis for bankers, annus horribilis for those who bailed them out

2010-05-05T03:58:00.000-07:00

Picasso's biographer John Richardson has described the year 1931-1932 as an annus mirabilis for the artist. It was on March 8th 1932 that Picasso painted the portrait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter entitled Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (shown on the wall behind Picasso in Cecil Beaton's photograph above).

That same painting yesterday set a new record for a work of art at auction when it sold to an anonymous buyer at Christie's in New York for $106,482,500 (£70,278,450/€81,991,525). Christie's, for some inexplicable reason, described the result as "staggering". But hey, it's only a little bit more than Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein will trouser in bonuses this year.

The very name Picasso is enough to have art investment fund managers and hedge fund billionaires masturbating into their spreadsheets. The artist's works are the most eagerly-chased 'commodities' on the international art market, seemingly more prized as badges of wealth than for any aesthetic significance that the likes of John Richardson might seek to explore. This may partly explain why paintings by Picasso also figure so prominently on international art theft databases as the most frequently stolen objects in the annals of modern art crime.

As John Richardson observed of another high-priced Picasso - The Dream — it "has become one of Picasso's most popular images; sadly, the record prices it fetched in 1997 and 2006 and its renown as a tourist attraction at a Las Vegas casino have left the painting so sullied that it is difficult to judge it on its merits." (It is arguably now even more notorious for having had a hole punched through it by the elbow of its hapless owner Steve Wynn while showing it off to his guests.)

Christie's may disingenuously declare themselves 'staggered' by the outcome of this week's auction, but being the engineers of the sort of arcane backroom deals that now fuel the international art market, the auction houses know better than most the central role played by investors, speculators and bankers in driving destructive boom and bust cycles. They're in bed with them.

But how will the news of another $100 million painting be received by the humble taxpayers who have already bailed out those responsible for the ever deeper global recession into which we're all still sinking? While the super-rich collector who placed the winning bid on the Picasso now sits staring proudly at his Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (right), everyone else looks on, probably not green, but definitely bust.

There is a certain synchronicity to this week's result. Picasso was among the most investment-savvy artists of the modern period, having been one of the first artists to benefit from a structured art investment vehicle — the now famous 'Peau de l'Ours' fund organised by André Level between 1904-1914. (Note how Picasso looks every bit like a fat-cat investment banker in Beaton's photograph, above).

Nor was Picasso averse to rubbing shoulders with the speculators who amassed his works before they strategically returned them to market for a profit. In the 1930s, Picasso succeeded in persuading one such collector, the Lausanne-based Dr G.F.Reber, to loan a number of works to a retrospective of Picasso's work where, as Richardson notes, they were "discreetly for sale." [Richardson, J., A Life of Picasso Vol III, Cape, 2007, p458].

This week's result has been hailed as definitive proof that the art market has finally recovered from the recession, as if the price of Giacometti's Walking Man back in February ($104m) had suddenly vanished from memory. But this market bears no relation to the art market that most artists and collectors know. This is investment banking. The Picasso and Giacometti prices should be viewed alongside the extortionate bonuses currently being paid to City workers in New York and London. Recession? What recession?

Let's be clear. This is an art market fuelled by the same greed that has steered the Western economies to the brink of oblivion. One hundred and six million dollars for a painting. Read it and weep.

Art Loss Register sues Solomon over Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom case

2010-04-20T01:41:00.000-07:00

The Art Loss Register (ALR), which for a time represented Jack Solomon, the Nevada-based art dealer who recently lost his title battle with Judy Goffman Cutler over Norman Rockwell's Russian Schoolroom, is to sue their former client.

The ALR has declined to comment further on the case on sub judice grounds, but it would appear to be because Solomon failed to apprise them of the full details of the case. The ALR claims that its role was purely that of "mediator" in the dispute and that neither Solomon nor Judy Goffman Cutler were fully open in their disclosures to the ALR. Judy Goffman Cutler vehemently denies this.

Following the painting's mysterious disappearance in 1973 from Solomon's Arts International Gallery in Missouri, his insurers Chubb paid him $20,000 in compensation for the loss. When the painting reemerged in 1988 at Goldberg Auction Galleries in New Orleans, Solomon was a beneficiary at the sale when the $70,400 auction proceeds were shared between Solomon, Chubb, Goldberg Auction Galleries, and the 'couple' who consigned it for sale and whose identity has never been revealed.

Judgement of Solomon
Yesterday, Solomon's attorney Michael Mushkin told the Los Angeles Times that his client will appeal the decision of Nevada District Court Judge Roger L. Hunt on the grounds that Solomon never consented to the sale of Russian Schoolroom at the 1988 auction, despite having trousered his share of the proceeds.

According to Nevada court documents, Solomon told the FBI on 16 October 1988 that he had agreed to share the auction proceeds with the other parties because neither he nor his insurance company had any documents to prove that Russian Schoolroom was his.

Court documents state that:

"The FBI communication concluded by stating that due to the settlement between Solomon and Goldberg Gallery, the painting should not be seized at the October 28 auction in New Orleans."

Solomon's subsequent attempts to clip the ticket a third time by suing Judy Goffman Cutler for ownership of the painting appear to stem from his earlier assertion that: "I'm sure in two calls I could turn [Russian Schoolroom] over for x million dollars".

With the ALR's suit against Solomon and Solomon's appeal both in the pipeline, it seems this one could run and run.