ABOVE: Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998), lauded for its “harrowing frankness and unreserved sexual revelation.” Researchers say that there is a connection between art, sex, and mental illness. We’re just saying, is all. No offense, Tracey.

Some researchers in Britain say that they have completed a survey which suggests a link between schizophrenia and art, and also shows that artists have more sexual partners than the world in general, thus confirming that a) yes, great artists kind of have a screw loose; and b) great artists also turn out to be a loose screw. The pair of psychologists were looking into why mental illness hasn’t been removed from the gene pool by natural selection, and the answer seems to be that being a little kooky is, statistically speaking of course, totally hot.

It seems artists and schizophrenics share a trait referred to by psychologists as “unusual cognition”—the tendency to feel sort of dreamy, cut off from reality, and overwhelmed by your own thoughts. But the schizophrenics also tended to suffer from “introvertive anhedonia”—social withdrawal and emotional void, which the artists didn’t. It seems that schizophrenia and a career in the arts are, in a way, two sides of the same coin, with the artists channelling their mental wobbliness into their creative work. The second part of the survey found that artists reported, on average, twice as many sexual partners since age 18 than the general population, and that the more seriously they pursued their art, the more partners they had. So, young Casanovas around the world: art school is the place for you.

LINK: The Guardian > Mental illness link to art and sex

ABOVE: detail of the new Smithsonian blog, “Eye Level.” Blogger Kriston Capps will write about art in general with the Smithsonian’s formidable catalogue to back him up.

The Smithsonian, the voracious death-star of American cultural heritage (and we mean that in the nicest possible sense) has launched a blog to extend its brand even further online (its website, si.edu, is gargantuan). Blogger Kriston Capps will provide the trenchant insights at Eye Level, which made its hello world entry yesterday. Looking at the site’s colophon, Kriston appears to have—egad—five bosses, from the head of the Smithsonian’s New Media Initiatives all the way up to the Chief Curator. It’s like Lord of the Flies around ADD, so such chain-of-command stuff is alien to us.

The first few entries have touched on the similarities between Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the paintings of Frederic Church; a look at a stereograph image of the former Patent Office Building that houses the Nat’l Portrait Gallery; and the Native American paintings of George Catlin, and their relationship to the NCAA’s decision to shun aborigine mascots/team names. In other words, a whole lot more professional and informed than the wild slander and dilettantish nonsense we toss around here. Read. Enjoy. But please come back.

LINK: > Eye Level [via DCist]

ABOVE: detail from Cellini’s Perseus With the Head of Medusa, the scale of which leads some doctors to diagnose the artist as syphilitic.

So Cellini was kind of on a massive ego trip when he was working on Perseus With the Head of Medusa, a megalomania brought on by galloping syphilis. And Michaelangelo was suffering from gout, his knees depicted in a painting by Raphael as swollen by uric acid buildup in his joints. And Vincent van Gogh was an epileptic, manic-depressive alcoholic who was addicted to digitalis. So is pain good for art?

Dr. Paul L. Wolf, a clinical pathologist at the University of California, has found that yes, it is quite possible that chronic pain, and the wacky substances people take to relieve it, may have a large impact on the creativity of great artists. That’s what he argues in the latest issue of the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and it caught the eye of Forbes yesterday. Van Gogh’s love of yellow? Just the absinthe screwing with his vision. Cellini’s monstrous masterpiece? Mercury poisoning. Kind of takes the wonder out of it all. But progress is progress: artists, line up here please in front of the guy with the baseball bat. You’ll be feeling more creative in no time.

LINK: Forbes > Did Pain Add Power to Great Works of Art?

ABOVE: a terra cotta urn in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Italy has claimed is looted.

The Italian minister of culture jumped the gun a bit by crowing about the likelihood that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will return some Italian artifacts, as the Getty Museum has done. Bloomberg News reports that the culture minister, Rocco Buttiglione, said that “If we have conclusive evidence, and we think we have, then they are ready to give it back.” The met declined to comment on the whole thing.

This campaign is obviously having an effect, as museum directors, like the Met’s Philippe de Montebello, are willing to sit down with Italian authorities to negotiate terms of endearment surrender on individual artworks, and are even, apparently, discussing ideas like swapping the allegedly looted items for replacement baubles with the Italian seal of approval on them.

We know this has lately turned into the all-Getty/Italy-all-the-time blog, but developments like this confirm for us that this is a BFD for American museums.

LINK: Bloomberg > Met Will Return Disputed Art to Italy, Culture Minister Says

ABOVE: a funerary wreath, circa 320-300 BCE, now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. But will it stay there?

Smelling blood in the water, the Greeks have pounced on the J. Paul Getty Museum, charging that the museum has four looted antiquities in its collection, including a gold funerary wreath, above. The Getty returned three items to the Italians last month, so the institution must seem ripe for the plucking from Greece’s perspective. Hammered by a public relations fiasco at home, and with the Italians putting the screws to former Getty curator Marion True in Europe, the museum is undoubtedly likely to take those claims more seriously now than it would have a few years ago.

Anyway, the Greek ministry of culture said today that it plans to rev up its legal team to seek the return of the four pieces, three of which were purchased for $5.2 million in 1993 and the fourth of which was apparently purchased by J. Paul Getty himself in the 50s. This all seems to point to one important lesson for today’s antiquities curators: don’t buy Iraqi artifacts from the back of a pickup truck anytime soon. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

LINK: CBC > Greece to force legal claim on Getty museum

ABOVE: Michaelangelo’s David is apparently capable of inducing fits in tourists who look at him. Could it be those evil hypno-eyes? (note artists’ rough conception of glowing hypno-eye energy)

Great works of art can temporarily drive you kind of insane, Italian researchers said over the weekend. The team has been working at the Accademia Gallery in Florence for several months now, analyzing the responses of tourists who are overcome upon seeing Michaelangelo’s David, a condition now known as The David Syndrome. They say that as much as 20 per cent of people who look at great art have the urge to destroy it immediately, and that the stress and emotional rush of that moment can cause mental breakdown. The researchers have found so far (the study is to continue for a year yet) that Americans are most likely to swoon, while the Japanese are least likely.

The reseachers think the David Syndrome has something to do with the statue’s towering physical perfection, and they trot out some wheezy, dime-store Freudianisms to back it up, talking about the link between sex and death, the erotic charge the statue provokes in both genders, and the equation of creation with destruction and vice versa. Kind of entertaining, nonetheless.

LINK: Boston Globe > Psychoanalyst identifies impulse to destroy art

ABOVE: detail from A Righteous Man’s Reward (2004) by serial killer Alfred Gaynor. Families of Gaynor’s victims denounced an auction featuring Gaynor’s art.

After the start of an online auction on Tuesday by prisoners’ aid program The Fortune Society, families of the victims of a Massachusetts serial killer persuaded state representative Peter Koutoujian to introduce a bill this week to prevent criminals from profiting from memorabilia related to their crimes. Alfred Gaynor, who raped and killed four women in 1997-98, has, like so many of his serial-killer brethren before him, undergone a religious conversion in prison, and contributed a ghastly, mawkish portrait of Christ kneeling in the desert. Labeling it “murderabilia,” the families and Koutoujian have said that Gaynor should not receive the proceeds from the auction.

People have cast this as a free-speech issue, although even Koutoujian has specifically stated that his bill is to prevent Gaynor getting the money, not to prevent him from displaying, giving away, or otherwise publicizing his artless scribblings. The drawing has already been sold to someone with the online moniker “Potsie,” for a grand total of $250. It’s tempting to just let this one slide, since the sum of money is so low and there is nothing about the drawing that exploits Gaynor’s victims. The question is whether the guy should get paid for art that no one would buy if he wasn’t famous for being a serial killer; It seems intuitively wrong for him to get the money, but on the other hand, we can’t think of a rational, moral reason why he shouldn’t. Anyway, everyone’s up in arms.

LINK: ABC News > U.S. serial killer art raises free speech debate

ABOVE: former Getty antiquities curator Marion True is hounded by reporters on her way to her first court appearance in Rome yesterday.

Well, the Italians took a good long time building their case against a group of people they are convinced have dealt in looted antiquities, but once they hit the gas, they really hit it. It was only about 6 weeks ago that the news first hit that the Getty was under investigation for buying artifacts of doubtful provenance, and yesterday the former Getty curator, Marion True, appeared in a Roman court for her first ride on the see-saw of justice. She is defending herself on two charges of trafficking in stolen antiquities, and faces eight years in jail if convicted.

Yesterday’s court visit was heavy on defence arguments and was apparently dryly technical, so there were no stirring courtroom speeches or other Law & Order entertainments on hand. True left without saying anything to the press, and we can’t really blame her for that. The trial resumes on December 5, so we’ll swing this way again in a few weeks.

LINK: BBC > Ex-Getty curator appears in court

ABOVE: Detail from Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder (1501), which the FBI has placed on its “most wanted” list for stolen art worldwide.

The FBI yesterday made public its list of the “Top Ten Art Crimes” and encouraged the public to be on the lookout for a large list of paintings which they want to recover. It’s not a list of the top ten items they’re looking for, it’s a list of the thefts themselves: the top art crime that the FBI lists is the theft of artifacts from the Iraqi national museum in 2003, and that crime alone saw 7,000 to 10,000 pieces go missing. The number two spot is held by the theft of 12 paintings worth a total of $300 million from the Isabella Stewart Garnder Museum in 1990.

Rounding out the rest of the list are: a Cellini salt cellar, a Stradivarius violin, The Scream, and a smattering of Van Goghs, a Caravaggio, a Cezannes, and a Da Vinci. The FBI lists some phone numbers and websites in case you—yes, you, dear reader—know something about the whereabouts of these things. What with the current preoccupation with the security of the homeland and everything these days, it’s nice to see that the FBI still remembers its little art theft unit and wants to publicize it more.

LINK: CNN > Leonardo, Cezanne among FBI’s most wanted

PS - sorry about missing a post yesterday, we’re really, really sorry, and we won’t ever do it again. Until next time.

ABOVE: British artist Andrew Savage indirectly got UK government funding to shoplift items for a photography project, Stolen White Goods, including rice. This, however, just a picture of some rice, not Savage stealing it.

British artist Andrew Savage has raised a mild kerfuffle about his project with Ikon Gallery that apparently incorporates shoplifting into its range of performance. Some have questioned whether such work is worthy of taxpayer support. Now, as the BBC notes, it’s not like the British Council gave him a bag of cash and told him to go knock over a Tesco; Ikon got a package of funding, out of which it paid several artists, one of whom is Savage. He is doing a series of projects on consumption and possession, which will culminate in a book, Stolen White Goods.

Savage says his work doesn’t condone shoplifting, although that seems more than a little disingenuous on his part. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and concede that his work is essentially anti-consumerist, anti-theft, and all the other good things that he wants to extol. The problem for us is that he refuses to say whether the “stolen” items to be photographed—rice, diapers, flour, and other “white goods”—are actually stolen or not. This coyness is irritating, making the whole statement neither one thing nor another. Either acknowledge the artifice of the photographs, or go and steal some rice and risk the consequences, but don’t sit on the fence singing “I’ll never tell” to get some weak publicity.

LINK: BBC > Artist got cash for ’stolen’ work

ABOVE: detail of David Smith’s CUBI XXVIII (1965), which became the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold at auction on Wednesday night, when Sotheby’s brought the hammer down for $23.8 million.

It seems like only yesterday that we were talking about record prices for postwar art. Wait—we were just talking about it yesterday. Only one day after a Christie’s auction set a number of auction records for post-war and contemporary art, the yang to their ying, Sotheby’s, topped them by taking the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of contemporary art. David Smith’s CUBI XXVIII was sold to the svengaliesque dealer Larry Gagosian for a hair-peeling $23.8 million, close to double the sculpture’s already high estimate of $12 million.

The New York Times described the evening as “lifeless,” saying that the crowd seemed kind of tired, although they could just be breathless and spent from the orgy of wallet-emptying the night before at Christie’s. But still, there were some other notables: Cy Twombly’s Untitled (New York City) set a record price for a Twombly work, at $8.6 million. And, in a sale that probably says everything you need to know about the current ludicrous hotness of the art market, an Alexander Calder maquette—not the actual mobile, just the maquette—sold for $1.4 million. Ten years ago, the actual mobile—which is big enough to receive radio signals from Calcutta—went for only $1.08 million. Two words to the owner of the real mobile: sell now.

LINK: New York Times > $23.8 Million Steel Sculpture Sets Another Auction Record

ABOVE: Detail from Roy Lichtenstein’s In the Car (1963), which sold for $16.25 million on Tuesday, the highest price ever paid for a Lichtenstein work.

It was a landmark sale at Christie’s on Tuesday, when a batch of 70 post-war artworks were auctioned for $157.6 million altogether, a record total sale for art of this type. Mark Rothko’s Homage to Matisse went for more than $22 million clams, a new high-water mark for Rothko prices. Roy Lichtenstein’s famous In the Car was sold for $16.25 million, an enormous jump from previous highest price paid for a Lichtenstein work, $7.15 million just three years ago.

The International Herald Tribune says that the stratospheric prices are “the beginning of a new era” for this artistic period, and that it indicates a new confidence on the part of collectors in the art of the postwar period and into the 60s. Contemporary works by still-living artists also did well, such as Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), which also set a career high selling price of $1.28 million. So is this a new era or yet another puff into the art-market bubble?

LINK: International Herald Tribune > Record $22.4 million paid for a Rothko

ABOVE: a gold crown, one of the Treasures of Nimrud, a trove of 8th or 9th century BCE jewelery, which was briefly misplaced in Iraq after the whole war thing started.

Whole lotta looting going on, it seems. (see: pretty much every post we’ve made in the past month.) In order to promote his new book, Thieves of Baghdad, Matthew Bogdanos, the US Army’s chief guy looking into the looting of thousands of priceless treasures from Iraqi museums after the fall of Baghdad, tells the world that a lot of stuff was stolen and we’ll probably never see it again.

According to witness reports, about 300-400 thieves made off with more than 13,000 items from the Iraq Museum’s collection (about 5,000 have been recovered). On top of the fact that it’s a cultural disaster, now various insurgent factions within Iraq are apparently using the artifacts circulating on the black market to fund their fighting. Bogdanos calls the thieves’ haul a “cash crop,” and estimates it’ll take decades to recover most of the rest of the antiquities. Oh, and the book was co-written with thriller writer William Patrick, so it’s probably totally hyped up like the Da Vinci Code or something.

LINK: al Mendhar > On the trail of stolen Iraqi art

ABOVE: one of the famous Elgin Marbles, a collection of ancient Greek statues in the collection of the British Museum. The Christian Science Monitor says the Getty’s recent provenance difficulties is putting pressure on other museums to root out possibly-looted articles in their collections.

We’re sorry to keep harping on the big scandale at the Getty Centre, in which the museum has been accused of not being entirely scrupulous in checking the background of some of its antiquities. But it’s just too big an issue, and growing every day. Over the weekend the Christian Science Monitor published a story about how the Getty’s troubles are drawing scrutiny to the collections of other major museums, and may be swinging the pendulum of public opinion toward stricter guidelines for acquisition and the return of some prized possessions.

Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is quoted as saying that this may be a defining moment for museums, and that as public awareness of provenance issues grows, attorneys general are going to be less and less willing to whistle dixie while publicly-funded institutions hold looted material in their collections. The Getty, the article notes, actually has one of the strictest provenance policies of any American museum, so others are going to see this more and more on their radar.

LINK: Christian Science Monitor > Ancient art, modern crime

ABOVE: detail from JMW Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), which was stolen in 1994 but later recovered. That recovery is under scrutiny in anticipation of a controversial BBC documentary about the incident.

The reason heist movies continue to succeed is because the appeal is based on timeless curiosity: the pure mechanics of thievery, unknown to most people but undeniably intriguing from a logistical standpoint. For people who can’t set their own VCRs, pulling off the planning required to pull of a theft is kind of fascinating. A BBC documentary scheduled to air soon apparently follows the trail long past where most heist thrillers fade to black, tracing the process by which a stolen artwork is recovered, and the tale they apparently have to tell is getting some noses out of joint.

The bluntly named documentary, Undercover Art Deal, will air on Wednesday, and it claims that Tate Britain paid about £3 million for somehow retrieving two Turner paintings stolen in 1994 from the Frankfurt Schirne Kunsthalle. That “somehow” is the qualifier on which hangs a tangle of controversy. After the theft, the museum’s insurers paid out the £24 million for which the two paintings were insured, and therefore essentially owned the paintings if they were ever recovered (the Tate would have first chance to buy them back, however). Skip forward four years with still no paintings, and the Tate buys back the rights to the Turners for £8 million. One painting is found in 2000, the second in 2002. The cost of finding them was apparently £3 million, paid to unknown parties through a German lawyer intermediary. So was it a ransom, or payments for tips from helpful samaritans? That’s the sticky wicket, and we’ll just have to watch BBC to learn more.

LINK: BBC > Row over BBC ‘art deal’ programme