ABOVE: some of Art Spiegelman’s artwork. He’s talking twice in SanFran this weekend.

Italy signs deal with Met over disputed art: Today the government of Italy inked its deal with the Met to get back the Euphronios Krater and a 15 Greek silver baubles; the Met will get items “of equivalent beauty and importance,” on long term loan from Italy in return. Go equivalency! [Reuters]

Spiegelman gets people to take comics seriously: comic-book auteur Art Spiegelman is speaking twice this coming weekend in the Bay Area, and he figures in the show “Masters of American Comics” currently on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. [SFChronicle]

Art sales: an old dog learns new tricks: Staid antiques firm Partridge Fine Arts in London has agreed to be taken over by London art dealer Mark Law and his company, and there are some changes being made, including a large, oddly financed sale at Christie’s. [Telegraph]

ABOVE: detail from the Euphronios krater, a 12-gallon greek pot depicting a scene from the Trojan War. Phillipe de Montebello is interviewed in this week’s New York Times Magazine about its imminent return to Italy.

In its almost-always-entertaining front-of-mag interview this week, the New York Times Magazine talks with Phillipe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the fact that the Met is soon to return the Euphronios Krater, a large terra cotta pot, to Italy because it was acquired under less than ethical circumstances. As the refreshingly candid de Montebello says, “the piece came to us in a completely improper way — through machinations, lies, clandestine night digging.”

But he doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to the Italians, either. While the Met has apparently accepted that Italy wants its pot back, de Montebello is fairly dismissive of the quivery nationalism driving that decision, chalking it up to a bias against the U.S., while Italian officials ignore similar shady transactions taking place just down the road in Europe and the Gulf states. And what, after all, is to stop Greece from claiming the Krater itself, since it was originally made there? De Montebello essentially questions the validity of patrimony laws, period. It’s a debate worth having.

LINK: New York Times Magazine > Stolen Art?

ABOVE: Detail from Munch’s The Scream, a version of which was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004. Six men went on trial in Oslo yesterday accused in the theft.

Six Norwegians pleaded not guilty of stealing Edvard Munch’s The Scream in Oslo on Tuesday. The painting was stolen in 2004 along with another Munch work, The Madonna and hasn’t been recovered. Investigators apparently feel that the paintings are still hidden somewhere in Norway, and there is currently a reward of 2 million Norwegian crowns offered for their return.

The spectacular daylight robbery of the Munch Museum was straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, with two masked men storming into the place with a gun and tearing the two works off the wall before making their getaway by car. Reuters says that there has been speculation among the Norwegian media that the theft was actually carried out to draw attention away from a larger, deadlier heist taking place elsewhere in the city. The six accused all entered their not-guilty pleas; if convicted, however, they face 17 years in jail, and prosecutors are pushing for compensation totaling 750 million crowns if the three judges presiding over the case find them guilty. That’s a lot of prison cigarettes…

LINK: Reuters > Six plead not guilty over “The Scream” art theft

ABOVE: some of Tino Sehgal’s “interpreters” doing Sehgal’s work This is so contemporary in a gallery space, with Thomas Scheibitz’s Untitled in the background.

This is another one of those “artists say the darndest things” stories from the Times Online, about Tino Sehgal, who is selling individual words to art buyers out of the bookstore at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. You pay £25 and the shopkeeper will whisper the word in your ear; it is one of 100 words in a complete paragraph composed by Sehgal. Five people have apparently stepped up so far to buy a word, so this doesn’t sound like something that will be replicated at your local Wal-Mart any time soon (although doing so is likely the only way you’d ever catch us dead inside one).

Sehgal’s specialty is selling nothing: his work, according to the ICA, “does not produce tangible objects or any form of material trace.” Instead, he composes situations for gallerygoers. In This is so contemporary, for instance, which displayed at the Venice Biennale last year, Sehgal’s gallery assistants surrounded each visitor and chanted “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary” to them. The Tate has recently acquired one of Sehgal’s 2002 works, (dating such work seems problematic, no?) This is propaganda, late last year, for what the Times calls a “five-figure” price. The piece requires a woman dressed as a gallery assistant to turn to the wall whenever a visitor enters and sing “This is propaganda, you know, you know” twice. The Tate catalogue entry says, as you might expect, “online image not currently available.” Let us know, will you?

LINK: Times Online > Psst, wanna buy a word of art?

ABOVE: Detail from Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes (1902), which sold for £12,328,000 last week at Sotheby’s.

The Telegraph writes today with a certain dry wistfulness about the art auctions’ recent return to “irrational exuberance,” in the words of one observer, but it cautions that the huge Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art, which racked up total sales of £130 million, is not really a return to the overblown sales of the 1980s. For one thing, the number of paintings under the hammer at last week’s sale is quite large in comparison to the auctions of 20 years ago, when a big sale might clock in at 30 to 40 top-drawer items. The Sotheby’s sale last week topped 70 pieces, and a similar Christie’s sale broke the 100 item-mark, so the auction houses are certainly doing record-breaking sales, but they’re having to churn through dozens more paintings a night to get there.

Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes, above, for instance, sold for its lowest estimate (Sotheby’s added on the $1.3 million for their fee) and had only 2 bidders. The Impressionist market, the Telegraph says, is looking exhausted, with fewer good pieces coming up for sale. And the market has also moved on, these days favouring later modern pieces from the 1920s and 30s. On an optimistic note, however, the Telly notes that the buyers at these auctions are a more diverse group geographically and the number of collectors paying more than £1 million for a work has increased times three since the 80s. More buyers, paying more, but the overall picture for Impressionist auctions is looking a little, um, impressionistic.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: return to ‘irrational exuberance’

ABOVE: King Tut’s death mask, part of a traveling exhibition now showing in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Some visitors to the exhibit are suing because they say it doesn’t meet disability requirements.

If you are using a screen reader to read this, then you are one of millions of people out there with significantly impaired vision. This being a blog mostly dedicated to visual art, we must admit that we’ve never really spent much time worrying whether you can see the pictures that accompany the text, although to be fair, we should. Not being able to see art doesn’t in the end have much to do with one’s interest in art either way. A helpful reminder of this appeared in the Miami Herald yesterday, in a story about three blind visitors to the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale’s current King Tut exhibit who are now suing the museum for making inadequate concessions for visitors with disabilities.

We’re interested to learn, for instance, that the audio tour of the exhibit provided for the visually impaired covered only 20 or so items out of the 130 on display, and that the museum keeps no replicas of artifacts on hand to allow blind patrons to get a feel for them. The Met, apparently, has touch tours available for the visually impaired. Accessibility is a huge issue for publicly funded institutions like museums, where the public generally have a higher level of expectation for specialized services. Looks like the MOAFL is getting a an up-close-and-personal reminder of that fact.

LINK: Miami Herald > Disabled sue over access to Tut show

ABOVE: Barry Munitz, now ex-head of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, who yesterday announced his resignation, and a $250,000 payment to the trust.

Boy, the Getty just can’t catch a break. With former Getty antiquities curator Marion True staring down the long maw of the Italian justice system, Greek and Italian investigators still sniffing around their basement for any chunks of marble that may have arrived still caked in pilfered mediterranean soil, and allegations of un-kosher financial deals between senior staff and business partners, the museum has taken an extended thrashing from the press.

The L.A. Times, which has been relentless in shoveling shit around this whole issue, today provides the lowdown on the latest piece of bad news, which is that the head of the $7 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, which oversees the museum, and other educational projects, was resigning amid bad vibes over personal expenses billed to the Trust. Barry Munitz’s resigntation was announced yesterday, with Munitz agreeing to pay the Trust $250,000, forgoing his $1.2 million severance package, but without acknowledging wrongdoing. Both sides say the matter is closed; Munitz has paid his money, the board agreed not to go after him for more. But obviously this is another blow to the credibility of the U.S.A’s third-largest private foundation and one of its most important cultural institutions.

LINK: L.A. Times > Munitz Steps Down as Head of Getty Trust

Dropped the ball this week on a couple days’ worth of posts, for which we are dreadfully ashamed. That’s just what happens when we hyperventilate, pass out, and hit our heads on the coffee table because we’re so excited about the Grammys.

Ok, that’s a lie. No one’s excited about the Grammys. But we’ll be back on the ball next week.

ABOVE: This is not a depction of the Prophet Mohammed carved in stone on the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court. We repeat, you are not seeing this. This is all a dream.

We don’t want any trouble, OK? We just want to make our little post on this article from the Washington Times today about the fact that many museums and libraries contain artworks depicting the Prophet Mohammed, and no one has so far burned them down. Rodin, Dali, Blake, they have all at one time portrayed Mohammed in their work, albeit not in the deliberately provocative manner the European press has done with its crop of cartoons.

There is a stone carving of Mohammed in the frieze adorning the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, apparently (as not seen above, right?), and miniature carvings of the Prophet were not uncommon in 14th and 15th century Persia, where mystics carved them with obscured features so as to make them useless as idols. These things are now found with some regularity in larger museums, so the current furore over the infamous Danish cartoons is, as is so often the case, not over what was said, but how they said it. After all, if the Supreme Court can get away with it, it can’t be that badass.

LINK: Washington Times > Muhammad’s image subject of art in past

ABOVE: Detail from Romare Bearden’s Home to Ithaca (1977). Art by African Americans is predicted to explode in popularity—and profitability—in the coming decade. One collector says Bearden is the most undervalued artist in America today.

Let’s pick a sentence from this week’s edition of BusinessWeek and just think about it, really ponder it for a while: commenting that he thinks art by black artists is just starting to catch on with wealthy white investors, one expert says, and we quote, “There isn’t much else to collect that hasn’t been overexploited.”

Let’s just take a second, let that sink in.

Yeah, so, uh, looks like it’s time for those African Americans to be exploited, huh? After decades of neglect by mainstream collectors, they’re going to come charging in, Amexes at the ready, oohing and aahing at artists they couldn’t give a damn about before they got the whiff of profitability around them. Charming. Naturally, we have mixed feelings about this, since it also means that a) long-obscure artists will finally get some play; b) it will bring the price for African American artists into parity with their paler colleagues; and c) the people who supported black artists when no one else did will make a killing if they choose to sell. So maybe this is equality, even if it seems kind of crass. Too bad you missed the National Black Fine Art Show, which closed yesterday. Happy Black History Month!

LINK: BusinessWeek > Black Art Is Buried Treasure

ABOVE: Robert M. Mardirosan, a Massachusetts lawyer who looked after a set of stolen paintings for 28 years, in his Falmouth, Mass. studio.

Strange story today out of Massachusetts, where a lawyer, Robert Madirosan, has apparently admitted to hiding seven paintings, allegedly stolen by one of his clients, for more than 28 years. The seven paintings, including a Cézanne, were stolen from Stockbridge, Mass., in 1978. A private investigator, one Charlie Moore, has been searching for them since 1979, at the behest of the paintings’ rightful owner.

The illuminating part of the whole story was the labyrinthine series of anonymous intermediaries, shell companies, and border-hopping escrow deals that allowed Madirosan to negotiate the return of the Cézanne painting in return for a promise to waive ownership of the other six paintings. And all this was executed by this one dude a hundred miles down the road from the house the paintings were stolen from in the first place. The statute of limitations applies to the original thefts, and Madirosan was never implicated in the theft itself, so that’s not his problem. There will likely be fines, and the cost of refurbishing the purloined paintings, but criminal charges are still up in the air, related to the 1999 Cézanne deal. If you’ve ever wondered how shady international art deals are made, this is a fascinating piece of reading.

LINK: Cape Cod Times > Gumshoes trace stolen art to Cape

ABOVE: Nam June Paik, the pioneering video artist, died on Sunday at 73.

Nam June Paik, or Mr. Television as we call him around here, died on Sunday at the age of 73. He was married to fellow video artist Shigeko Kubota and had been in declining health since a stroke in 1996. Paik is famous for his pioneering and influential work in video and installation art, having been the first artist known to have used televisions in a sculpture (this according to the obit in the New York Times), and the first installation to make use of a portable video recorder.

There was a big retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2000, which further showed off Paik’s work with lasers, avant garde music, robotics, and massive arrays of TVs. For the legions of video artists who followed, and their cryptic, impenetrable, often deadly serious and equally deadly dull videos, Paik was Adam himself, a one-man big bang, and his witty, articulate, and humane artworks remain the gold standard.

LINK: New York Times > Nam June Paik, 73, Dies; Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers

ABOVE: detail from the cover of John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts?.

This book has been around for a good long time, but the Washington Post just got around to reviewing it, so we’ll happily tag along on the WaPo wagon. John Carey’s What Good are the Arts?, says Michael Dirda, has put his finger on a particularly raw nerve regarding the state of the arts (Carey surveys literature, visual art, theatre, dance, and a grab-bag of other cultural fields). The cleavage between so-called high-art and low is damaging to art and to society, Carey argues, so that modern art “has become synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and sensationalism,” and people are being turned off by the snootiness and elitism of contemporary art.

We’re pretty strongly in favour of popular art around here, as you may have noticed. We love the Turner Prize for its whiz-bang entertainment value, we’re strongly in support of street-level art like graffiti and guerilla postering, we’ll even cover glorified screensavers. But one of Carey’s central themes is puzzling: he argues that “a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person.” That sounds like a conceptual manifesto to us: the chilly post-modernism of deconstruction and all that, very Derrida and Duchamp, not Dumb and Dumber (which would be art, by Carey’s definition, sounds like). Anyone care to reconcile this for us? If My Bed is art, and so is a Precious Moments figurine, but the devotees of each refuse to acknowledge the artistry of the other, is either better off?

LINK: Washington Post > A populist critic takes a long, hard look at the culture of creativity.