ABOVE: Detail from Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), considered by many Austrians a national treasure; an international arbitration panel, however, considers it the treasure of a 90-year-old Californian.

Who exactly has pegged the prospective price of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I at more than US$100 million is unknown to us; but frankly, we’ll believe it when we see it. $100m+ was the price cited in an article in the Globe and Mail over the weekend about the recent decision that Austria would have to hand over five paintings to a Mrs. Maria Altmann of California because the pieces are considered Nazi war loot. But Austria considers the painting a national treasure: “If we let that portrait go, we might just as well tear down St. Stephen’s Cathedral,” said one Austrian. Therefore, the country is looking to buy back the painting before it even leaves the country, and it’s looking more and more like it will pay through the nose.

If Altmann decides to sell the painting, there will naturally be other institutions and private collectors ready and waiting to take it off her hands for the right price. And if that price lands in the hundred-million neighbourhood, the painting has a good chance of becoming the most expensive single piece ever sold at auction, besting the $104 million achieved by a Picasso in 2004. Austrians (all 8,184,691 of you): your government will accept that US$12.70 per person in cash or cheque….

LINK: Globe and Mail > Klimt could top Picasso price

ABOVE: Detail from Picasso’s Boy with a pipe (1905), the most expensive single painting ever sold at auction for US$104 million. Investment funds hoping to hit it that big have struggled.

The concept of an investment fund that deals exclusively in fine art is one of those things that seems like a good idea but has remained largely unworkable (despite some valiant efforts). Bloomberg yesterday published a longish piece on the perma-fledgling field of art funds, essentially large hedge funds for high-rolling investors looking to diversify their bulging portfolios. Managers like a Mr. Philip Hoffman of London hold their noses and buy the most bankable art they can, storing the paintings or renting them out to their fund clients at a nominal fee until it’s time to sell and cash in for everyone’s collective benefit. But, as numerous people make clear in the article, cornering the market in Rembrandts is very different from the market in, say, soybeans, and more than a few such funds have stumbled early and been put out of their misery.

There’s an interesting bit describing something called the Fine Art Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the art market, which rises and falls with auction results for a selected list of artists and genres. The index climbed 14.5% in 2005 [but then, what index didn’t? - eds.], a handsome ROI for the mucketymucks who had kicked in their quarter mil or more necessary to get into one of the funds. This whole deal apparently parallels what happened in the 80s when the art market was at its last mountaintop, with everyone scrambling to find a way to make a cold, hard investment out of it. It didn’t work so well then, so to the wealthy few who are buying these funds, all we can say is: what goes up, must come down.

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso Lures Hedge-Fund-Type Investors to Art Market

ABOVE: Lynn Chadwick’s The Three Watchers, a bronze sculpture in Wandsworth, England, one figure of which was recently stolen.

Thieves recently struck again in what is turning into a rash of thefts of public bronze sculptures in England, this time making off with one of the three standing figures from sculptor Lynn Chadwick’s The Three Watchers (1960). The Guardian reported yesterday that the incident is the 20th such theft within the last year. The issue blew wide open late in 2005 when a two-tonne, £3 million Henry Moore bronze, Reclining Figure, was carried off in the dead of night by thieves using a portable crane and a stolen truck.

The sculptures are being stolen for their valuable metal content, although everyone notes with chagrin that they would be a hell of a lot more valuable left intact (but try explaining that to a bronze scrapper on the trail of an easy £5,000). Soaring copper prices mean that nefarious characters with a lorry and a few strong helpers can haul away a sculpture in a few minutes, melt the thing down before sunrise, and liquidate it by lunchtime. Institutions with large bronzes on their properties are being encouraged to step up security or move the sculptures to more secure locales.

LINK: The Guardian > As another bronze is stolen, police fear treasures are going for scrap

ABOVE: Pierre Pinoncelli, top right, was ordered to pay more than €200,000 for damages to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

Pierre Pinoncelli, who we reported on earlier this month when he brought his (bang bang!) silver hammer down upon Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain, was ordered by a Paris judge yesterday to pay €214,000 as a fine for his attack, and to pay to have the piece repaired.

Pinoncelli maintains that his attack was a piece of performance art, and that he has made the iconic Duchamp “readymade” into a truly original work by damaging it. The judge, as judges are wont to do, disagreed. Pinoncelli’s hammering was an escalation of his aggression against the hapless urinal, which he urinated into during a 1993 exhibit. It will apparently cost €14,352 to have the piece restored.

LINK: BBC > Attack on urinal work brings fine

ABOVE: Sara Sutherland, an Edinburgh interior designer, says she is now more likely to splurge on a painting than a frou-frou frock.

The Arts Council in England has new figures that show that women now comprise 56 per cent of contemporary art buyers, The Scotsman writes. While there’s been some feminization of the upper echelons of collectors, the real change, notes the article, has come at the lower end of the market, for pieces selling for less than £1,000. Paintings, drawings, or original prints at that price point are purchased as luxury goods, much like a bag or a swank pair of shoes, the numbers seem to suggests.

One expert attributes the surge in female collectors to the increasing visibility and notoriety of female artists (Tracy Emin is the only one named in the article, but Gillian Carnegie, a more recent Turner Prize nominee, deserves credit too). Sara Sutherland, pictured above, tells the paper that she “would now rather own a beautiful painting than a designer dress.” To those lamenting the Sex and the Citification of the world, that’s music to the ears.

LINK: The Scotsman > World of modern art draws female buyers

ABOVE: Detail from Christo’s Over The River, Project For Arkansas River, Colorado (1999), a study for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s latest project.

That Christo and Jeanne-Claude, they’re a class act. The Rocky Mountain News details the first of three wide-open public meetings in Colorado the duo are participating in to persuade the residents of Cañon City to let them run a really big ribbon through their town. Over the River (above) calls for a translucent fabric to be stretched across the river, bank-to-bank, for a length of 40 miles.

Naturally the plan has its detractors and defenders among the locals. People worry about ambulances (bearing mortally weakened patients, you know) being unable to move through the throngs of tourists. They worry about migratory bird patterns. They worry, apparently, about the stress it will induce in sheep. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, though, they never get impatient, they don’t storm off shouting that no one understands their vision, they don’t make threats and throw tantrums. They sit and explain, and take questions, and then they do it again with someone else. As Christo coolly says at the end of the article: “This is not our first project. We are 70 years old.” Guess they’d better get a move on.

LINK: Rocky Mountain News > First of 3 meetings gathers opinion on Christo’s river art

ABOVE: Detail from John Brack’s The Bar (1954), which has already provoked record-breaking estimates on its auction price.

It’s summertime in Australia, and the living is easy. The hot-ish Australian contemporary art market has puffed The Bar, a newly available painting by Australian artist John Brack, into the rarefied, oxygen-starved, braincell-killing stratosphere inhabited by major collectors. The painting is expected by auctioneer Sotheby’s to fetch upward of AU$2 million, a record for any 20th century Australian painting, and not quite 300 percent more than Brack’s previous high seller, which went for AU$530,000 only two years ago. If, that is, The Bar actually reaches that price point. But the painting is considered a better one than Collins St., 5 p.m., a Brack painting which is a prized possession of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Bar was snapped up by a Melbourne collector when it first showed in 1955 for 90 guineas (who knows what the hell a guinea was worth, but rest assured it was a bargain in the long run), and that collector’s death just last month has placed the painting on the block. So far as we can tell, there’s no date for the sale yet, but it’ll be sometime this spring.

LINK: The Age > Money on The Bar

ABOVE: Maria Altmann reacts to news that Austria will return to her five Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis.

Maria Altmann, an 89-year-old Californian, found out yesterday that an Austrian arbitrator has decided that the country needs to return a set of Klimt paintings stolen from her family just before the Second World War. Altmann, whose wealthy Jewish family commissioned a number of Klimt paintings which have in the years after the war become regarded as priceless masterpieces, lost the paintings originally when she and her husband were interned in Dachau.

This might sound familiar, as there have been a number of high-profile lawsuits launched against European countries that have artworks stolen by Nazi looters in their collections. The Klimt paintings in this case are estimated to be worth upwards of $150 million. When exactly the paintings will be transferred from their Belvedere Castle home in Vienna is still up in the air.

LINK: Washington Post > Court Sides With Heir to Looted Nazi Art

ABOVE: Detail from Esam Pasha’s Tears of Wax (2003), which will be part of a new show of contemporary Iraqi art opening this week in New York.

A New York gallery specializing in Middle Eastern art will open a new show of recent Iraqi art on Wednesday, Al Jazeera reports. “Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix” will show at the Pomegranate Gallery (which doesn’t even have a website - horrors!) until February 22. The exhibit is meant to highlight the work of Iraqi artists—some still in Iraq, others expatriate—confronting the country’s post-liberation reality.

After decades of tight government control over galleries and art shows that forced much of the Iraqi contemporary art scene underground or out of the country altogether, the ten artists represented in Ashes to Art say that even as the country continues to be wracked by sectarian violence, art is blossoming again, and the country’s artists are finally allowed to speak openly about the Hussein regime and its grim effects on Iraqi society.

LINK: Al Jazeera > New York to host Iraq art exhibition

ABOVE: an 11th century Vietnamese painting of a one-pillar pagoda, from the collection of Trinh Quang Vu.

Painters and historians at the Vietnam Industrial Art University have completed a restoration project including paintings from the 11th-century Ly Dynasty, Vietnamese websites reported yesterday. Truong Quoc Lap, Trinh Quang Vu, Pham Tam, and Nguyen Tuan collaborated to buff up 54 paintings from the collection of painter and art professor Trinh Quang Vu, a group of paintings spanning about 900 years and depicting a variety of subjects.

Interestingly, the majority of the paintings are by Chinese and European artists, mostly traders and clergymen. This in fact may account for the somewhat workaday subject matter—the foreigners were interested in depicting customs and events that the locals probably found too prosaic to record themselves. The paintings will go on display at Kinh Thien Temple on January 25.

LINK: VietnamNet Bridge > Restored art shows life in Hanoi 1000 years ago

ABOVE: Hyunsoo Woo, who has just been appointed Curator of Korean Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a new position.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced yesterday that it had appointed Hyunsoo Woo as associate curator of Korean Art, a newly-created position made possible by wealthy museum donors. The museum, which has in the past worked closely with Philadelphia Korean-American groups, has a sizeable collection of Korean art. Woo comes from past posts at the Japan Society in New York and the Brooklyn Museum.

As cities become more cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed, more and more of them are going to see such moves: museum board members and donors have long since ceased to be old-money WASPs with a taste for potbellied Regency writing desks and little else. Affluent cultural groups want to see their heritage reflected in public institutions too, and they have the chequebooks to make it happen. While the Philadelphia Museum of Art declined to name the donors who made the appointment possible, so we don’t really know the full story, but in this case, and undoubtedly in cases yet to come, it isn’t hard to connect the dots.

LINK: Philadelphia Inquirer > Art Museum names Korean curator

ABOVE: Details from photobooth self-portraits done by Andy Warhol, and recently made public for the first time by the Warhol Foundation. But are we allowed to show it to you?

Digital law and copyright professor Lawrence Lessig wrote recently in Wired magazine about the policy of the Warhol Foundation when it comes to granting artists and scholars the use of Warhol imagery for their work. Most in their situation, sitting on a mountain of iconic 20th century imagery, most of it highly bankable, are very grabby with their “intellectual property” (as it’s known). But Lessig, who is the founder of Creative Commons and an out-front leader in advocating for less stringent copyright schemes, writes that the Foundation lets artists and scholars use Warhol imagery not only for free, but also free of restriction on how it’s used.

Warhol, after all, made his most famous works by appropriating other people’s images—soup cans, Brill-o boxes, celebrity photos—and so the foundation felt (or so explains foundation president Joel Wachs) that it had a mandate to allow other artists to appropriate Warhol in turn. Not a profound or life-altering decision, certainly, but it does acknowledge the essential truth that artists do not operate in a vacuum, and every idea came from somewhere.

LINK: Wired News > When Theft Serves Art

ABOVE: Detail from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1964), which was attacked by a neo-dadaist last Wednesday.

We can see it now: ten years hence, the MoMA will do a group retrospective, looking back over the work of artists who make their statements by destroying or vandalizing the work of their predecessors (or perhaps they just can’t help it). And the rogues’ gallery of artists profiled in the New York Times last Saturday will comprise its bulk: the ones who painted clown faces on Goya prints, the one who vomits paint on old masters, the ones who relieved themselves in another version of Duchamp’s Fountain. It would actually be quite the show, although it presents some unique curatorial hurdles. Nevertheless, when it happens, we expect a fat slice of that MoMA $20 entry fee. Just want to make that clear now.

Pierre Pinoncelli, a French performance artist, struck the Duchamp masterpiece with a small hammer. This is in fact the second time he has taken a hammer to it: the first time was in 1993, but that time he managed to pee in it as well. The piece, which is one of eight replicas that Duchamp made in 1964, after the original was lost, will be repaired and live to fight Mr. Pinoncelli another day, officials said.

LINK: New York Times > Conceptual Artist as Vandal: Walk Tall and Carry a Little Hammer (or Ax)

ABOVE: Detail from Caravaggio’s Bacchus. A current exhibit of Caravaggio paintings is proving controversial because hi-res digital reproductions are standing in for the genuine articles.

Loyola University is about to blow your mind. They’ve gone all Baudrillard and decided that they want to put on a Caravaggio show—without any real Caravaggios hanging on the walls. “Caravaggio: An Impossible Exhibition” is composed of 57 backlit, mylar-mounted hi-res digital scans of the original works. There are only about 70 confirmed Caravaggios in existence, and putting so many of them on display in one place would be, as the exhibit title says, impossible. But is it OK for the Loyola U. Art Museum (this is its inaugural exhibit) to show these pieces like a real Caravaggio exhibit? Even if they’re very good reproductions, they’re still, you know, um, fakes. One museum administrator offers a rather sheepish sound bite about how it could totally be a post-modernist exhibit if that had been the intention. But it’s not, she adds.

They’re not trying to fake the visitors out here; the museum is clearly trying to show off works which would otherwise be inaccessible in North America—we’re all for accessibility. But the weird part about the exhibit, the fact that they’ve illuminated the images from behind so that some details that aren’t easily seen in the originals pop out more, is bizarre. Showing off a seldom seen collection of paintings is good: messing so hugely with the presentation doesn’t seem right to us.

LINK: Voice of America > Is It Still Art If It’s a Reproduction?

ABOVE: Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oil and gas billionaire who just announced plans to open two new private galleries in Russia.

Times are good in Russia these days: billionaires running around all over the place, throwing their vast post-soviet oil fortunes at all kinds of crazy schemes. The newest such example is Viktor Vekselberg, estimated by Forbes to be worth more than US$5 billion, who has announced plans to open the first major private galleries open to the public in Russia.

Vekselberg’s private foundation, Link of Times, is currently renovating a building in St. Petersburg to use as its primary exhibition space, where it will show off items from the tycoon’s private collection, including a cache of Fabergé knickknacks that he bought in London just last month. Link of Times was only established in 2004, but has since become the single biggest buyer of Russian art in the world right now, acting on its mandate to repatriate Russian works to Russia. Vekselberg apparently keeps his collection in London to put it out of the Kremlin’s reach in case he ever gets the hairy eyeball from Putin et al.—the foundation will put a selection on display in St. Petersburg and later Moscow, when the second branch of the museum is built. Yes, it’s a good time to be a billionaire. As if there’s a bad time.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Billionaire to open first private museums in Russia