ABOVE: Detail from Ian Walters’ statue of Nelson Mandela, which London Mayor Ken Livingstone is fighting to install in Trafalgar Square.

It’s been an acrimonious month in Europe, what with the scrap between the Paris billionaires, and Charles Saatchi telling his landlord to shove it, and a Renoir heir getting dragged into court, and the Tate kiboshing a perfectly harmless religion-tinged sculpture. We are here today, the last weekday of September, to round out the list with a nasty little scuffle among London Mayor Ken Livingstone, Royal College of Art sculpture professor Glynn Williams, and sculptor Ian Walters over a statue of Nelson Mandela which Livingstone is determined to put in Trafalgar Square.

Walters has made a nine-foot tall depiction of Mandela which Prof. Williams says is “an adequate portrait but nothing more…run-of-the mill mediocre modelling.” Williams, of course, isn’t exactly impartial: he made a statue of British Prime Minsister Harold Wilson which was rejected for placement outside the PM’s birthplace—and rival Walters’ statue was chosen instead. Yesterday, Livingstone referred (during a planning meeting over the placement of the new Mandela statue) to Prof. Williams’ Wilson statue as “a large dog mess.” The mayor continued: “It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself we want a statue to look like the person.” What a month it’s been.

LINK: Telegraph > Mandela statue provokes another battle of Trafalgar
LINK: Guardian > Art attack - mayor and sculptor in war of words over Mandela statue

ABOVE: detail from John Latham’s God is Great; the Tate Britain has removed it from view for fear of offending…you know—uh, those people.

Tate Britain has embarrassed itself by yanking a religiously-inspired artwork from display in response, it says, to the London bombings of July 7. John Latham’s God is Great features the three holy books of the three Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) embedded in a sheet of glass, and now the Tate cowardly says it is a bad idea to display it. Their reasoning is specious on every possible level: Why, for instance, did it take them more than two months to reach their moronic decision, if this is supposed to be a response to July 7? Why do they believe that removing the work from view is meant to assuage irritated muslims—who have apparently been unfazed by the work for the past decade it has been on view? Are muslims perceived at the Tate as being easier to offend than jews or christians? And did they not, you know, consult any muslims about the issue before taking censorious umbrage on their behalf?

No, they didn’t, reports the BBC, which quotes a statement made by the Muslim Council of Britain: “We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork. We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham’s piece. Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive.” Need we say more? Grow a spine, Tatesters.

LINK: BBC > Tate ‘misunderstood’ banned work

ABOVE: County Hall, London, home to the Saatchi gallery—but not for long. After a series of disputes with the landlord, Chas is moving the collection to Sloane Square.

Chilly relations between landlords and tenants are nothing new; but when the landlord is a tempestuous Japanese real-estate titan and the tenant is advertising mogul-cum-21st-century-Medici Charles Saatchi, we must take notice. It seems tensions have been steadily worsening at County Hall, the london building which leases space to the Saatchi Gallery, and things have reached their breaking point. The gallery announced this week that it is packing up and leaving because of its treatment by Makoto Okamoto, who runs the European arm of the Shirayama Shokusan Corp, which it purchased County Hall from the city 12 years ago.

Okamoto and Saatchi have a history of quarrelling over the site, and accusations of vandalism flew after a sculpture by American artist Duane Hanson was spit upon and had its nose broken off. Okamoto also changed the locks on the gallery’s disabled washrooms and reportedly storms around the building, on one occasion saying, to a concerned security guard who asked whether he was allowed to be there, “Tell your manager to fuck off. I am the fucking owner of this place!” Having had it up to here with this behaviour, Saatchi and company are decamping in 2007 for a new renovated space in the Duke of York’s building in Chelsea. Mr. Okamoto will surely be all sunshine and smiles for the next two years of the gallery’s tenancy. Right?

LINK: The Independent > Feud with landlord prompts Saatchi to quit the South Bank

ABOVE: The Getty Centre in L.A. may have bought looted antiquities like the statue of Apollo, left, says a report this weekend in the L.A. Times. In the note in the background, an internal memo published by the Times, the highlighted text reads rather bluntly: “We know it’s stolen.”

The L.A. Times unveiled a gargantuan piece this weekend on the possibility that the J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles may have bought dozens of illegally looted ancient artworks over the last 20 years. Dealers that the museum had been buying from for years have been charged by Italian police for conspiring to traffic looted antiquities, and the Italian government is now seeking the return of 42 objects. The alleged shenanigans date back as far as 1985, and it remains to be seen just how much the museum directors knew and when they knew it.

The Times story necessarily hedges its language, as no one at the Getty was willing to talk to them about it and the investigation is still ongoing. The Museum stiffened its guidelines for acquiring ancient artifacts in 1995, but items with murky provenances have still been purchased or donated. UNESCO has been tooting the looting alarm for 35 years, but as we all know, the world market for art and antiquities is still largely a shadowland of confidence men and graverobbers. From our vantage point, the Getty doesn’t look like a totally innocent naif, but it also doesn’t look like it set out to fill its halls with pilfered Greek and Italian statuary.

LINK: L.A. Times > Getty Had Signs It Was Acquiring Possibly Looted Art, Documents Show

ABOVE: views of Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, unveiled recently in London.

The Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square has only recently come to our notice, although it has been going strong for several years already. But its most recent reinvention is the one that has caught the attention of commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. “Fourth Plinth” refers, with lovable anglo literality, to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, where a rich gent many years ago paid to put up the base but ran out of money to put a statue on top of it. Only in the last few years have Londoners been able to enjoy a rotating series of temporary sculptures on the Fourth Plinth, paid for by the city and changing about every 18 months.

The lastest piece to occupy the hot seat is Alison Lapper Pregnant, an outsize marble sculpture of Alison Lapper, a disabled English artist who was born with no arms and malformed legs. Marc Quinn, the sculptor, took a full-body cast of Ms. Lapper while she was pregnant with her now-five-year-old son, Parys. On September 15, the sculpture was unveiled to public acclaim and critical sniffiness—art heroizing the disabled does have a certain unavoidable Chicken Soup for the Soul sentimentality about it—but most people, Canada’s Heather Mallick included, are thrilled and vocal about it. Mallick also makes it a hook on which to hang a column about bad Canadian public art.

LINK: Rabble.ca > Why do we have such bad public art?

Today is the feast day of St. Adomnan, which we mark around here by spending all day face down in a whole rhubarb pie.

We won’t leave you totally in the lurch, however; take a look at the following articles, provided without the usual pithy, totally unfounded opinion.

• The Financial Times, just like everyone else, says Asian art is hot. In this case, however, they have a dollar figure to prove it.
• The People’s Daily online reports the results of the second Beijing biennale, which no one outside the Chinese state media seems to have noticed.
• Professional supreme boob Antonin Scalia spars with Stephen Sondheim in bizarre debate over gov’t funding of the arts.

See you Monday, as per usual.

ABOVE: detail from Degas’ Portrait of Mme Rene De Gas nee Estelle Musson, one of the prize works of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which weathered Hurricane Katrina through sound planning and sheer pluck.

There’s a moral to the following story: As hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf coast, pushing a cold front of evacuation orders before it, a clutch of employees of the New Orleans Museum of Art brought their families and holed up in the gallery to safeguard the art. As CNN et al. blithely soft-pedalled the seriousness of the hurricane, the employees were removing art from the walls of galleries with skylights, placing stored works in the basement on top of wooden pallets, stockpiling water and food, and generally battening down the hatches. New Orleans is a sodden mess today, but, as the New York Times reported this week, the museum is shipshape, taking little damage and remaining untouched by looters.

A portion of the credit must also go to the museum’s insurers, AXA, which, in a fit of intelligent foresight, paid for an armed private security company to guard the building immediately after the storm. The most shocking thing about the Times story is near the end, when the museum director says that out of 110 museum employees, 30 are still missing, unheard from, and an even larger portion of the museum’s board of trustees are whereabouts unknown. The cleanup is just beginning, but John Bullard, the director, estimates it’ll cost $500,000 just to rebuild the landscaping in the outdoor sculpture garden.

LINK: New York Times > New Orleans Museum, Under Lock and Guard

ABOVE: Left to right, Carmen Politis, O’Leary Bacon and Ali Hansen have contributed artworks to the Empty Chairs—Painful Windows, an exhibit of art at the Cincinnati YWCA to mark Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.

114 women in Cincinnati have been killed by domestic abusers in the last 16 years, when the YWCA first started keeping a running tally. They’re being commemorated now in a YWCA art exhibition called Empty Chairs—Painful Windows, made up of works contributed by local artists who volunteer at the Cincinnati YWCA battered women’s shelter and other facilities. The centerpiece of the show is Solemn Table, a black-draped table fully set with cutlery, plates, goblets, and flowers, with 12 chairs around it, each empty except for a photograph of a woman killed in a domestic homicide.

If this all rings a bell, it should: it’s a gloomy imitation of The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking installation piece from the late 1970s, which was a large triangular dining table set with ceramic plates shaped like elaborately embellished female genitalia. Now, surely this imitation is a sincere form of flattery, and Chicago, one of the strongest feminist artists of her generation, would surely support the Cincinnati exhibit. But reading the YWCA’s website posed, for us, an uncomfortable question: where are the voices of the victims—dead or alive—in this exhibit? The YWCA says the pieces—painted windowshades (the painful windows part)—are the work of local artists who volunteer and work with children and teenagers affected by domestic violence. But what about the women in the shelter themselves? Why isn’t it their work comprising this show? One of the primary focuses of feminist art has always been agency—asserting the right of women to speak, unmediated, for themselves. So why the silence now, at the YWCA of all places?

LINK: Cincinnati Enquirer > Art exhibit puts a face on domestic violence here

ABOVE: aerial detail of Hase (Rabbit), a 200-foot long rabbit doll that will occupy an Italian mountainside for the next 20 years.

Last Sunday the Viennese artists’ collective Gelatin unveiled their latest work to the public: a gigantic rabbit-shaped doll on a mountainside 1600 m above the Italian village of Artesina. Made of some sort of fabric stuffed with straw, the pink bunny is 200 feet long and 20 feet high, sprawled across the mountainside, where it is to stay for the next 20 years. Gelatin says that the rabbit is sturdy enough to climb, and they fully expect hikers to scale its huge pink torso and relax, have a picnic, whatever.

The scale and ambition of this is just too hilariously grandiose, it’s like a piece of land art with a plush pop-art twist. Gelatin’s website provides an amusing, if somewhat abstruse, statement of intent:

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitís body, a country dropped from the sky;
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and
intestines.
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

No matter, how could you not want to make the pilgrimage?

LINK: Ananova > Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain [via Sploid]

ABOVE: Details from Rembrandt’s Self-portrait, left, and Renoir’s Young Parisian, both of which were announced recovered this weekend after an FBI sting.

The last of three paintings stolen from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm during a daring armed robbery on December 22, 2000, has been recovered, the FBI announced to the world this weekend. The four arrested men, an international rainbow coalition of two Iraqis, a Swede, and a Gambian, are alleged to be behind the theft, which involved such Luc Besson-style accoutrements as machine guns, car bombs, and a getaway by boat.

The paintings themselves have reportedly weathered their ordeal fairly well, with the Rembrandt self-portrait unscathed and Renoir’s Young Parisian having sustained a vexing but reparable scratch to its varnish. Both are still in their original frames, too. The FBI sting took place in a California hotel room (which sounds like a Mamet play waiting to happen), and the alleged thieves were selling the Rembrandt, valued at US$42 million, for just $100,000—slightly more than a 99.7% discount. We always knew crime doesn’t pay, figuratively, but in this case it sounds like it was literal, too.

LINK: The Independent > Gang behind $55 m art heist captured in FBI sting

ABOVE: Bernard Arnault, left, has approached Frank Gehry about building a swank new museum to house his art collection in Paris, after François Pinault, right, ditched similar plans.

There was some chatter this spring when French billionaire François Pinault annouced that he was scrapping his plans to build an elaborate new contemporary art museum in Paris and decamp to Venice. Now, Pinault’s nemesis, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, has apparently taken up the fallen cause and intends to build his own museum there, to hold his own equally voluminous collection of contemporary art. The Art Newspaper reports that Arnault has contacted architectural superfreak Frank Gehry about designing a small but flashy museum in the west end of the Bois de Boulogne district.

The whole story is steeped in a rich gravy of personal resentment, one-upmanship, and egomania. Pinault previously beat Arnault when Mr. P’s luxury-goods company, PPR, beat out Mr. A’s luxury-goods company, LVMH, for control of Italian luxury-goods company Gucci. When Pinault threw his hissy fit last year and took his art collection to Venice, he accused the Paris bureaucracy of killing his grand plans for a major new museum; now Arnault, all sweetness, is proposing a more modest project and commissioning a who’s who of modern artists to craft outdoor sculptures for his 12-hectare site. In any case, the building permit hasn’t been issued yet, so it’s hardly a done deal, but it’s fun to watch billionaires squabble.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > François Pinault has abandoned plans to build a contemporary museum in Paris. Will his arch rival do it instead?

ABOVE: stills from a WTVM news story about a public art project that’s come off the rails in Georgia.

A public library art committee in Columbus, Georgia, has taken the rather odd step of voting to use their art budget to pay for other services for the library, like more handicapped parking spaces and more shelving. Worthy goals, certainly, but it seems that the job of an art committee should be to advocate for art, not against it. Sculptor Albert Paley had originally been tapped to build a $250,000 sculpture outside the new Columbus library, but after uproar from the public over the cost, the art committee caved and reneged on the contract with Paley (who is now apparently suing them).

In the report from local TV news station WTVM, local citizens are interviewed about their feelings on the subject, and their sentiment seems to be that public art is a waste of money and that increased shelf space in the library is a worthier use of it. This is such a small local issue, but it struck a chord with us because similar fiascos happen all over the place so frequently. Small communities with scarce resources are obviously in a bind when it comes to big-ish public art projects. But begrudging an outdoor sculpture to a library seems like terminal small-mindedness to us. And for an art committee of that library to allow itself to be bullied like this is just sad. The video stream from WTVM is dismal, but you’ll get the audio experience.

LINK: WTVM News 9 > Art Committee Recommends Money Be Used Elsewhere

ABOVE: detail from Michael Weyhe’s Blue Raindrops (1986), for sale for $300 at BoundlessGallery.com. Artists without established names or little gallery representation are increasingly turning to online galleries to sell their work, says BusinessWeek.

Ever heard of Brown Dwarfs? It’s the name astronomers give to the big gobs of space gas that start to form a star but never really light up. They get good and big, and they’d still totally kill you if you got near enough, but they don’t light up the sky the way true, honest-to-god stars do. In highly competitive fields like art, movies, music, or sport, there are always a few stars and a lot more brown dwarfs. The big names get all the recognition, but they’ve clawed their way to the top of a very large heap of unknowns.

Then came a thing called The Internet, and all of a sudden the nobodies of the world—the philatelists, the scrabble-hounds, the (dare we say it) bloggers—struck out for the unlimited and infinitely divisible super-niches of individual wonkery and electronic togetherness it offered. Artists, for instance, who couldn’t get ten square inches on a legit gallery wall could post ten dozen photos of their latest piece and sell it to a buyer a thousand miles away without ever meeting face to face. This being the art world, of course, there was someone standing by to offer their selling expertise for a modest slice of the proceeds. BusinessWeek points to websites like BoundlessGallery.com, Guild.com, and MyExposé.com that are providing online gallery space for artists who need web representation. The e-galleries are apparently selling more work for their artists and attracting lower-end buyers who wouldn’t normally be art purchasers at all. Welcome to the future.

LINK: BusinessWeek > Art on the Net: The Second Wave

ABOVE: detail from Not a Cornfield, a conceptual art installation growing in Los Angeles throughout the month of September.

It’s been a good year for huge artistic interventions in public spaces, what with The Gates clogging New York, the opening of Millennium Park in Chicago, the new Lichtenstein sculpture in Philadelphia, and now, the much quieter but equally important Not a Cornfield project in Los Angeles. Not a Cornfield is, uh, a cornfield—32 acres of corn growing in an abandoned rail yard near L.A.’s chinatown district. The $3 million project, the brainchild of L.A. artist Lauren Bon, was planted in late July and will be harvested in October, leaving the site ready for construction of a park that the California State Parks system has been threatening to build for decades (naturally, it’s never been built).

Some residents have chafed at Not a Cornfield’s $3 million price tag, but keep in mind that that amount paid for the 1,500 truckloads of soil to plant the 875,000 corn seeds in, and the irrigation equipment to water them. The rail yard will be turned from industrial brownfield to arable land, and everyone in the neighbourhood will have enjoyed 3 months of Aboriginal drum ceremonies, free lectures and discussions, and film screenings. Sounds cheaper and more engaging than most public works projects, if you ask us. The L.A. Times talked to people who seemed enchanted and those who just missed the point, but Not a Cornfield, for all its crunchy-granola pedigree, sounds like it connects with people on a way more personal level than the chilly intellectual hauteur of Christo et al. You can watch the corn grow—seriously—on Not a Cornfield’s webcam.

LINK: L.A. Times > ‘Not a Cornfield’ Idea Is Food for Thought

ABOVE: detail of the Sir Samuel Room on the Queen Mary 2. Art collections aboard cruise ships are becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive.

“Being in a ship is like being in a jail,” the great Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, “with the chance of being drowned.” Why anyone would want to pay thousands of dollars to spend a week getting dysentery on a floating shopping mall and sleeping in a cabin the size (and temperament) of a bathroom stall is totally beyond us. Among the amenities cruise ship companies are now using to lure prey aboard their grimy decks are their art collections.

The Orlando Sentinel notes some of the biggies: Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Dawn has Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Renoir on its walls; the collection aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is valued at about $5 million. Dollar figures appear frequently in the Sentinel’s piece, far more frequently than the artworks those dollars paid for, in fact—like so many news stories about art, it’s just another excuse to talk about impressive sums of money. What we want to know is: who in their right minds insures these works, perched, as they are, on the walls of enormous ocean-going chum buckets?

LINK: Orlando Sentinel (via SouthFlorida.com) > Extravagant art galleries at sea