ABOVE: detail from the Euphronios krater, a 12-gallon greek pot depicting a scene from the Trojan War. New evidence from an investigation into art smuggling suggests the chunk of clay might be boosted goods.

Like mormon missionaries and wood termites, stolen artworks never arrive one by one, but in a swarm. So it seems inevitable now that the growing crisis at the Getty Museum in L.A. over the purchase of allegedly looted antiquities would naturally spread, herpes-like, to museums all over the place. Art dealers, after all, are known for, uh, getting around, you know? If they’ll sell a hot vase to one museum, they’ll just as happily sell it to another. The Italian investigation into looted antiquities at the Getty has turned up evidence (though, of course, not yet proof) that the same group of dealers in that case have also sold works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

It all comes down to a trove of polaroids that Italian police seized in a raid on a Swiss warehouse, which depict the dealers at issue here, Giacomo Medici and Robert Hecht, posing with items that the Italian cops say are looted. The Bloomberg News story says that there are thousands of such polaroids, and the prosecutor from Rome, Paolo Ferri, says that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the traffic in looted Italian antiquities through Switzerland ends up going to “most art museums in America.” Say a prayer and check your receipts, everyone.

LINK: Bloomberg News > Tomb-Robbing Trials Name Getty, Metropolitan, Princeton Museums

ABOVE: Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi drank a lot of beer and tried to walk a balance beam last week in a performance in Cardiff. Naturally, people are pissed—pun intended.

Are stupid people stupid because they misinterpret things all the time, or are they always misinterpreting things because they’re stupid? It’s one of those cause/effect things, difficult to tell in the end. Who cares? People keep on being stupid. Last week Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi presented a performance piece at the Chapter arts centre in Cardiff, Wales. Allurements of Mass Media was a three-hour performance in which Takahashi, who also goes by the handle “Anti-Cool,” proceeded to drink bottles of beer and attempt to walk across a balance beam. Wearing high-heeled shoes and perching several feet above the ground, Takahashi got steadily more drunk as the evening wore on, and her audience became steadily more engaged as she struggled to remain upright. Although Allurements was intended to be a commentary on individual confusion in the face of mass media, we have no idea if that idea got through. But it actually sounds kind of riveting.

Naturally, one of those helpful samaritans on city council was there, outrage prepared and misinterpretations at the ready: “[It] sends out the message that binge drinking is OK,” councillor Ramesh Patel said, completely inverting the point of the performance, and adding that the piece was “trash” and a waste of taxpayers’ money. “If anyone is daft enough to want to see a young woman getting plastered and tottering around in high heels, they can do it in just about every city centre most nights of the week,”said David Davies, a Tory member of the Welsh Assembly. Well, if binge drinking is such a huge freaking problem in Britain (it is), then it seems valid for an internationally acclaimed artist to comment on it, and it also seems valid for a large art institution in the Welsh capitol to pay her the going rate. What kind of po-dunk town do these politicians think they live in?

LINK: The Telegraph > Outcry over artist ‘binge drinking’ on a grant

ABOVE: Detail from Munch’s The Scream, and the thing it’s screaming at: the Norwegian board game The Mystery of The Scream.

Some people just can’t stand to have fun. The Munch Museum in Norway has pulled from its shelves a board game based on the 2004 theft of The Scream from the museum itself in Oslo. People thought that it was more than a little tasteless for the very museum from which the masterpiece was stolen to be selling an entertaining board game based on that theft. It “helps trivialize a national and international drama while the painting is still missing,” sniffed one party pooper.

The Mystery of the Scream itself is just a cat-and-mouse match between players acting as cops and robbers, with the loot in question being The Scream. The Norwegian publisher of the game, Aschehoug, says that the game is educational, as it includes easily digestible factoids about art as players progress through the game. Now, that sounds a little too educational to be entertaining, but we’ll never know because the Munch Museum and the Norwegian people refuse to take a little perspective on a theft that can be called at worst unfortunate. Let the kids play.

LINK: CBC > IN BRIEF: Art theft board game pulled…

ABOVE: Detail from Marc Chagall’s The Juggler (1943), which is to be sold by the Chicago Art Institute to raise needed cash.

A rash of museum sales in the U.S. are coming in the next few months, as institutions with depleted endowments and cashflow problems sell off some of of their collections. The New York Public Library touched off this little wave earlier in the year when it sold almost 20 works in order to raise money for their primary mission of collecting books. Now, the Met, the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art all have dates at the auction block to help clean out their closets.

Art experts, the New York Times notes, are unhappy with the development, since museums have in the past gambled and lost when they reckoned which works in their collection would be important in the future. It’s also a problem for donor relations: Aunt Flo might be pissed that you re-gifted that basket of bath salts she gave you, but imagine if she’d given you a Modigliani and a few years down the road you sell it for cash. One word: Tacky! And yet, we’re not against these sales, when it comes down to it; The NYPL decided, quite sensibly, that their business is books, not paintings, and are selling their collection to people who will care for them properly. And the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Conger Goodyear, claimed from the beginning that the museum’s collection “would have the same permanence as a river,” perpetually reflecting the changing mores of modern art, instead of a tomb for paintings. Also, the art market is totally peaking right now, so sell while the selling’s good, we say.

LINK: New York Times > Museums Set to Sell Art, and Some Experts Cringe

ABOVE: Chris Ofili’s work The Upper Room (1999-2002). The recent publication of some emails relating to the Tate’s acquisition of the work have raised some hackles.

Say you own a large and popular football team. Say one of the many co-owners of that team has a son who wishes to be a football player. Say, even, that that co-owner suggests, quite politely, that perhaps you would like to hire his son for, oh, £700,000. Say that the son is a perfectly talented football player, probably worthy of inclusion on the team. Do you say yes, given the position and stature of the co-owner?

Well, you probably know where this is going, and it didn’t really need that long and wheezy metaphor to get there: The Tate Britain, it was recently revealed by the Telegraph, this year purchased a work by British 1998 Turner Prize-winner Chris Ofili, The Upper Room. Bully for them all, you might say. Well, it’s complicated by the fact that Mr. Ofili is a trustee on the Tate’s board, and mixing those two roles—buyer (trustee) and seller (artist)—seems to many observers unfair. The Telegraph retrieved some delicately-worded emails sent by Ofili’s dealer, Victoria Miro, to Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, stressing the importance of the purchase, trying to speed it along, and politely declining to drop the £700,000 price. While there seems to our eyes to be no cut-and-dried proof of any sinister shenanigans, this is exactly the kind of distracting public relations mess that can embarrass an artistic institution for years and erode public confidence. Ofili’s term, by the way, is up on November 21, 2005, a scant 27 days from now. Wouldn’t it have been so much less stressful simply to wait and buy the piece next year?

LINK: The Telegraph > Tate paid £700,000 for trustee’s work ‘after being told he needed the money’

ABOVE: detail from Till Gerhard’s Das Wir Gefuhl (2004), part of the Saatchi Gallery’s show The Triumph of Painting. It has not been a triumph of real estate: the gallery was evicted by its landlords last weekend.

Charles Saatchi’s feud with his gallery’s landlord came to an abrupt and messy end late last week when the owners of the building, County Hall, won a court hearing to evict the gallery for breach of contract. The gallery had already announced that it was to leave County Hall for a new larger gallery in Chelsea—in 2007. The figurative get-the-hell-out note on the door makes the move a little more urgent. The Saatchi Gallery recently offered a 2-for-1 ticket deal, which the landlord, Shirayama Shokusan Corp, claimed violated the tenant’s agreement.

But that small technicality comes after years of rancour on both sides of the table, with Shirayama Shokusan European rep Makoto Okamoto hurling invective and the equally mercurial Saatchi hurling it right back. The Gallery also apparently did things like park cars on the steps of the building as installation art, which Okamoto wasn’t informed of ahead of time. Tit for tat, Okamoto changed the locks on the gallery’s disabled washrooms, which spawned another fight. Boys will be boys; millionaire boys, doubly so. It’s unclear exactly how much time Saatchi & co. have to vacate the premises, and their space in Chelsea is not ready to move in. A page on the gallery’s website makes reference to the new locale, but details are sketchy—or, shall we say, fauvist.

LINK: The Guardian > Saatchi Gallery gets its marching orders

You will notice, starting today, that we’ve changed the design of Art Digest Daily. The new format allows for some more flexibility in the size and shape of image we can display for your viewing pleasure, and being a blog about art, it seems like actually seeing the stuff might be, you know, important. We hope you like it, but it’s not really up to you, is it?

But that brings us to the other exciting new development we’re implementing today, which is that commenting is now open on all our new posts. You are now welcome, and encouraged, to add your two or more cents at the end of each post, whether you agree or disagree with us, whether you want to write “neato” for the hell of it or compose a 4,000-word essay on the Freudian-Jungian juxtapositions in post-Futurist imagery of the Luxumbourgian interwar years. Write it in for your fellow readers to enjoy. Naturally, any hateful or defamatory language will be swiftly expunged, but other than that, go to town.

Thanks for reading, and keep on doing it. Tell your friends, and email The Editors at add /at/ artdigestdaily /dot/ com.

–ADD

ABOVE: Detail from Lin Fengmian’s Four Beauties, one of 450 pieces to be sold during Christie’s first ever sale in China, on November 3.

The stampede into China took a great leap forward yesterday—pun intended—when top-shelf auction house Christie’s announced [PDF link!] that it has established a pseudo-subsidiary in Beijing. The new auction house, named, rather grandiosely, “Forever,” has a sort of arm’s-length relationship going on, in order to neatly skirt China’s foreign-ownership laws: Christie’s will put its name on the auction, its curators will appraise the works, it historians will print the catalogue, and its auctioneers will wield the hammer. What exactly Forever does, in its no doubt richly-rewarded role as puppet company, is unclear.

The first Forever-Christie’s auction will be held at the Sheraton Beijing on November 3, featuring about 450 artworks expected to fetch up to $10 million. Naturally, the hype about Asian art being what it is these days, it’s possible it could be much higher. The market for art within Asia is bigger every year, and growing in leaps and bounds; no doubt Christie’s wants a finger in that pie. But art auctions are a two-way street: just as flush Asian buyers have been snapping up art around the world for a while now, this new deal gives Christie’s a shunt directly into a very rich vein of asian art that’s in big demand in the west. Christie’s may have obeyed the letter of Chinese law in their deal with Forever, but we bet the People’s Liberation Army is none too pleased.

LINK: New York Times > Christie’s Going, Going to China [*groan* - eds.] to Hold Auctions

ABOVE: Details from two works sold at last year’s Royal College of Art Mystery Sale. The one on the left turned out to be by Damien Hirst; the right painting was by Zandra Rhodes.

Art is an exclusive business: it takes money to collect it, it takes money to show it off in galleries and keep it maintained, it takes money to insure it. You, dear reader, will more likely than not never own a piece of work by a truly important artist. It’s just plain old economics—there’s not enough supply for the demand.

But for a good cause, even the loftiest artistic talents can be persuaded to sell something for £35. In this case, the good cause in question is the Royal College of Art’s Fine Art Student Award Fund. The RCA’s annual Secret Sale works thusly: a bunch of famous artists and a bunch of nobodies paint or draw on little blank postcards, and sign the back. The catch is, they won’t tell you who did which postcard. You’ll have to just pony up your 35 quid and hope you chose right. The Times reports that people line up for days to get inside in hopes of scooping a 3 x 5 slice of artistic genius. The show is viewable from Novebmer 18 to 24, and then the buying starts on the 25th.

LINK: The Times > Can you really buy a modern master for £35? The answer’s on a postcard

ABOVE: The exterior of the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. Wired writes that more than 50 contemporary art biennials are duking it out for audience right now.

Wired News ran an article yesterday by their columnist iMomus on the prevalence, the abundance, nay, the glut of global biennials. At this very moment, he says, more than 50 such biennials or triennials are open, about to open, or just finished. From Yokohama to Istanbul, Liverpool to Havana, it seems you can’t spit these days without hitting a pavilion full of contemporary art.

Obviously there is art enough to go around, and curators to organize it; but the boom in biennales seems to have more to do with desperate pleas for attention by B-list cities than anything else. It’s like there’s a hierarchy, with Olympics at the top, World Expos next down the list, and then descending through film festivals, UN conferences, art biennials, figure-skating championships, spelling bees, and taxidermist conventions. The biennial one of those manageable spectacles for a mid-sized city: kind of showy, kind of daring, kind of sophisticated. But everyone’s caught on, so everyone’s having them now. It’s like limousines—they were classy when they were exclusive, but now that 13 year-olds take them to their junior high prom, it’s just kind of pathetic.

LINK: Wired News > Around the world in 80 biennials

ABOVE: two works by artists competing for the 2005 Turner Prize: left, detail from Gillian Carnegie’s Fleurs de Huile; right, detail from Darren Almond’s Meantime.

Britain’s biggest, splashiest, most infamous art prize opens the exhibit of its shortlisted artists to the public today. The shortlist for the £40,000 Turner Prize is old news, announced way back in the summer. But for the next three months the public will be able to actually see the works themselves at the Tate Modern. The show runs October 18 to January 22, but the winner will be announced in a live broadcast on Channel 4 on December 5.

Of shortlisted artists Darren Almond, Gillian Carnegie, Jim Lambie, and Simon Starling, Carnegie, the only painter of the bunch, is favoured to win. Some of that speculation seems fueled by the mega-exhibit “The Triumph of Painting,” which lumbers onward at the Saatchi Gallery right now. Charles Saatchi, having patronized many past Turner artists before they hit it big, either has his finger on the pulse of an art world that is coming back around to painting (ludicrously suggesting that it ever went off it), or he is simply a collector of such freakishly grandiose financial means that his every well-publicized move shakes the foundations of art. Either way, “The Triumph of Painting” may augur well for Carnegie’s own triumph in December. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….

LINK: Reuters > Birds battle buttocks, bike for top art prize

ABOVE: Detail from Can you see the real me (1999), a work by YBA Saatchi discovery Richard Patterson. He will soon exhibit a work which continues a series that was destroyed in a calamitous warehouse fire.

Richard Patterson took five months each on a series of paintings he called “Culture Stations” in the late 1990s; three of those monumental collage/paint works were purchased by the Black Hole of British Art, Charles Saatchi and placed for safekeeping in the London warehouse Momart. Then the warehouse burned down, taking Mr. Patterson’s paintings, among many other valuable pieces, with it.

Now, Patterson will continue the Culture Stations series with Back at the Dealership Culture Station No. 5, which will be unveiled at the Timothy Taylor Gallery on Saturday. The Independent interviews him in today’s issue and reports that Patterson initially considered exactly reproducing the original paintings but scrapped the idea because it would take too long. Also, whereas the originals were completed through a detailed and lengthy process of layered collage and painting, the new version has been assisted by computer. This doesn’t actually sound like a continuation of the old style, given that the methodology has changed so much. It sounds like something new and interesting, certainly, but this sounds like the artistic equivalent of a Brady Bunch reunion movie: the characters are all there but the magic’s gone.

LINK : The Independent > ‘Young British Artist’ rakes Momart’s ashes

ABOVE: It’s an inapt analogy, but the People’s Liberation Army of China is spending vast money and manpower on taking back chinese artifacts from Western collectors. Kind of a reverse Tomb Raider thing.

Reason #3968 to be scared shitless of the Chinese army: after centuries of art pillaging—among many other kinds of pillaging—by Western collectors, China is fighting back with some scary secret-agent shenanigans and a big pile of U.S. money. This article from the International Herald Tribune tags along with a Belgian, Giselle Croes, who has been jetting around buying rare pottery and bronzework in shady deals in shady surroundings on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army and its business arm, Poly Group. China is sitting on more than $700 billion in foreign currency and wants to buy its stuff back. As a consequence, the selling price for the type of items it’s interested in have jumped to record levels.

Croes says that Poly’s vaults contain art worth over $100 million, amassed in less than ten years. That buying spree, says the Tribune, has been at least partly funded by $200 million worth of arms sales by Poly Group in the US. The drive to reclaim thousands of pieces of Chinese art, representing pieces from 3,000 BCE to the present day, is being directed with military enthusiasm by the Zong Chan Second Division, a squad of elite officers who are directing the movements of dealers around the world, just like Ms. Croes. They’re ready to make offers you can’t refuse.

LINK: International Herald Tribune > China is racing to get its art treasures back

ABOVE: detail from Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), which National Gallery of Australia chairman Harold Mitchell recently said he was offered $100 million for. Such works could become part of Australia’s long-term investment for government pensions.

Call your brokers! Sell sell sell! Take your money out of those stupid blue-chip stocks and buy yourself a Kandinsky or a Picasso, ASAP. Citing the stratospheric appreciation demonstrated by 19th and 20th century American and European modernist masterpieces, the National Gallery of Australia is pushing for a new plan which would invest hundreds of millions of dollars of the Australian government’s pension fund in such works.

The Australians have set aside AU$16 billion this year for a so-called “Future Fund,” to invest for public-sector pensions (expected to reach AU$140 billion per year by 2020). It will be topped up with more after the government sells its partial stake in its semi-privatized telecom business Telstra Corp. The NGA sees an opportunity to build its collection (it had to pass on a Kandinsky earlier this year for lack of funds) and prove it can earn its keep financially. The proposal calls for 1-2 percent of the Future Fund—in the AU$300 million range—to be sunk into acquisitions for the national gallery, where the works can be displayed for the public’s pleasure now and sold off at a hefty profit later. For cash-strapped public galleries everywhere, this is an experiment to watch very carefully.

LINK: Sydney Morning Herald > Sell off Telstra, then show me the Monet

UPDATE: A government spokesman scrapped the plan in a press conference today.

ABOVE: detail from Diane Arbus’sA young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966. The photo is part of Diane Arbus: Revelations, which opens tomorrow at the Victoria & Albert.

The traveling Diane Arbus retrospective, “Revelations,” opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum on October 13, with more than 200 photos on display, plus things like contact sheets, letters, cameras, and other cluttery distractions. The British press have been ramping up to it, as the exhibit is apparently quite important, including photos from private collections that have never been shown publicly before.

But that’s not news: another day, another must-see show, blah blah blah. What we really wanted to show you was this darkly hilarious article by Germaine Greer in the Guardian over the weekend talking about being photographed by Arbus in 1971. The whole slapstick episode has Arbus straddling Greer on a hotel bed for several hours, in total silence, snapping the shutter every time Greer looked on the verge of a sneeze. Arbus was dead of suicide within weeks, a fact which Greer presents matter-of-factly on the page but which comes across a little like flattery, as if Germaine Greer was somehow Diane Arbus’s last straw.

LINK: The Guardian > Wrestling with Diane Arbus