ABOVE: Ian Hamilton Finlay in his sculpture garden, called Little Sparta, outside Edinburgh. Finlay died yesterday at 80.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, like many people do, kept a garden. But his was a little different, a little stranger, a little better than most. Little Sparta is a garden sitting on six acres in the Pentland hills just south of Edinburgh, and it was there that Finlay laid out his arrangements of sculptures and plants, turning it eventually into one big garden of conceptualism (although that term is a little too flashy to describe what he made). He worked at Little Sparta for about 40 years, evolving it from a garden with some sculptures in it to a work of art itself—a 2005 survey of Scottish artists named Little Sparta as their favourite art work.

Well, Mr. Finlay shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday at the age of 80, leaving behind his garden, which will be preserved through the Little Sparta Trust, a fund dedicated to maintaining Little Sparta for visitors. Finlay had only been receiving serious artistic consideration in the last few years, so while the recognition was probably nice, it’s a little bittersweet given that it was so overdue.

LINK: The Scotsman > ‘Concrete poet’ Finlay dies age 80

ABOVE: Detail from Marcus Wills’The Paul Juraszek monolith (after Marcus Gheeraerts), winner of the 2006 Archibald Prize for portraiture.

The vaguely creepy picture above is this year’s winner of the Archibald Prize, the Australian award for portraiture. Marcus Wills’ painting of sculptor Paul Juraszek depicts the portrait subject 29 times, as tiny versions of himself working on a larger monument of his own head. The somewhat limp controversy being cooked up over the painting involves the fact that it is a close replication of a 16th century etching by Flemish artist Marcus Gheeraerts, the Allegory of Iconoclasm.

The similarity between the works is undisputed, as Wills’ painting is obviously based on the original etching, and he references the original work in the title. But some people feel that while the new painting is technically accomplished, it’s too derivative to win one of the world’s premiere portraiture prizes. But given the competition, this looks like the clear winner to us.

LINK: Sydney Morning Herald > The 2006 Archibald Prize

Sorry we were MIA for most of last week — we were arrested and tried for converting to Christianity. Whew! What a wacky couple of days! Thankfully, that’s all over with — it turned out to be all a crazy misunderstanding. We’ll post early this afternoon.

ABOVE: Detail from photographer Spencer Tunick’s installation last July in Tyneside. Northumbria police are investigating closed-circuit TV closeups of the participants which have been offered for sale in pubs.

This is a textbook case of the law of unintended consequences, and at the same time a testament to the unsurpassed ingenuity of mankind in making novel forms of pornography. When photographer Spencer Tunick gathered 1,700 naked volunteers in Tyneside, England on a Sunday morning last July, his was not the only camera clicking away. Britain, in case you weren’t aware, is the most camera-surveilled country on Earth, with some 4 million closed-circuit security cameras watching the landscape at any given time. On July 17, 2005, according to news reports today, some of them were trained on Tunick’s volunteers, quietly zooming in and snapping away. Now those images have been found offered for sale in some local Tyneside pubs, for the low-resolution titillation of whoever would buy such a thing.

Naturally, the police are investigating, but the police are the ones who are supposed to be controlling the CCTV cameras, so all signs point to an inside job, naturally. Two civilian police staff are apparently facing suspension related to the investigation, and a Deputy Chief Constable was dispatched to reassure the public that the CCTV system is secure and being used in the interests of crime-fighting and national security and all that. Perhaps the two suspects could claim to be doing an elaborate performance piece?

LINK: The Independent > Film of artist’s mass nude photo shoot being sold in pubs

ABOVE: Turbine Hall, the large entrance/exhibition space at Tate Modern. The Art Newspaper reveals in its latest issue that Tate is actually not, officially and technically speaking, a museum.

The Art Newspaper, which always pulls something crazy and entertaining out of their hat each month, revealed last week that the Tate is not, from a technical standpoint, actually a museum. The iconoclastic institution is not a member of the Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council (the MLA), the only only nationally-funded museum in that position.

The odd arrangement is the result of the Tate refusing to accept the MLA guidelines on deaccessioning, or the selling of museum-owned artworks. The MLA states that museums are supposed to give other museums first crack at taking any works that happen to be on their way out of the catalogue. The Tate says it wants to reserve the option of swapping works by living artists for superior works by that same artist if the possibility arises. It’s never been done, but the option is there. Now the MLA is threatening to take Tate off the list of institutions that receive works through the Acceptance in Lieu (AIL) program, which allows inheritors to settle tax bills by donating art works to the AIL, which in turn gives them away to member institutions. In other words, membership has its privileges.

LINK: The Art Newspaper > Tate is not a museum

ABOVE: Detail from Picasso’s Drawing Arles, bought on Costco.com for US$39,999.99 last year. Picasso’s daughter is now claiming the drawing is not genuine.

Perhaps it was always destined to end in a crying match. You may remember last July when megaretailer Costco started selling Picasso artworks on its website, essentially acting as a broker for a Florida art dealer named Jim Tutweiler. Costco’s expertise being deep discounts on Chinese mountain bikes and cases of Slovakian mineral water, the move into original Picasso drawings was perplexing. Well, as it turns out, the plan has hit a few snags: namely, Picasso’s daughter thinks two of those drawings are dodgy, and alleges that the certificates of authenticity that accompanied them are forgeries. Remember to check those return policies.

The best part of the New York Times’ coverage of this story is its description of Louis Knickerbocker, the unfortunate consumer who purchased one of the drawings in question. The description of Mr. Knickerbocker in the first passage is priceless: driving in his big SUV, listening to talk radio, and then phoning his wife by cellphone—while driving—to get her to rush to the nearest computer to charge the Picasso to his credit card. And who says there’s no life left in the American Consumer? Anyway, there’s been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among everyone involved in the sale, and Costco assured Mr. Knickerbocker that, as with all Costco merchandise, he could return the Picasso drawing. Can’t make this stuff up.

LINK: New York Times > It’s Costco, but Is It Picasso? Art Sale in Doubt

ABOVE: Detail from Canaletto’s Venice, the Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge (circa 1730), the most expensive art purchase of 2005.

Picasso was again the most actively traded artist of the year, with 1,409 artworks trading hands internationally, according to Artprice, an art market analysis firm, Bloomberg reports today. Andy Warhol moved up, bumping Claude Monet from 2nd to 3rd place, and Canaletto, who ranked 239th last year in market churn, rocketed to 4th place because of the artist’s record-breaking sale of Venice, The Grand Canal (above) and the excitement that the sale generated for the 18th-century painter (it was the most expensive painting sold at auction last year, you may remember).

Other interesting trends of note: Dadaist art jumped in popularity and price, with Artprice’s Dada Index (yes, such a thing exists) rising 137 per cent. Futurist works closely followed in price, rising 93 per cent. Total fine art auction sales last year topped US$4.2 billion, up 15 per cent over 2004, and auction prices increased by 10 per cent.

And here’s the final list of the 10 most actively traded artists of 2005 (no drumroll necessary, 9 of them are dead and won’t care):

1. Pablo Picasso
2. Andy Warhol
3. Claude Monet
4. Canaletto
5. Mark Rothko
6. Marc Chagall
7. Willem de Kooning
8. Fernand Leger
9. Jean-Michel Basquiat
10. Lucian Freud

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso, Warhol Top List of Actively Traded Art

ABOVE: Detail from Rembrandt’s The Apostle James the Major, for sale at the Maastricht art fair right now, one of the few Rembrandts to reach the market in the past decade.

There are two Rembrandts for sale at the current TEFAF Maastricht Art Fair (which runs through March 19), quite an oddity considering that there have been only about a dozen Rembrandts put on sale anywhere in the past decade, The Telegraph reports today. The Apostle James the Major (above) is on sale by New York-based Salander-O’Reilly with a price tag of upwards of €32 million, while Dutch dealer Robert Noortman is selling Portrait of a Man in a Red Doublet for around €26 million.

Rembrandts, despite their obvious cachet for collectors, have traditionally had a hard time selling because their enormous value limits the pool of collectors with the cash to buy them, and also because most of the best work is already in public museums, leaving gloomy also-rans like Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes to the private market. Exchange rates have also shut out all but the richest American collectors, and we have to imagine that the risk of buying something that turns out not to be a real Rembrandt is also giving potential buyers the fantods.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: old Master seeks new owner

ABOVE: detail of Urs Fischer’s Intelligence of Flowers (foreground, the big holes) and Untitled, both part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial opened in New York last week, to the usual critical chorus of “this is trash”/”this is insightful”/”this is just a bunch of wacky crap thrown together for no discernable reason.” Many things the Whitney may be, but it is seldom innocuous. The museum has also made some changes this year, bringing in non-American artists, giving the biennial its first title (the Truffaut-derived “Day for Night”), and giving over part of the show to the Wrong Gallery, which is guest-curating part of the exhibit.

Rather than, um, doing the work of actually summing up the critical reaction for you (which might require some actual reportage), we instead provide you with this handy rundown of what the world was saying about the WB06 over the last little while.

• Bloomberg uses the phrase “disaster has struck” in the second paragraph. Not a good sign. [BB]
• Artnet complains that it takes a full wall-length essay to explain the “Day for Night” name, and more verbiage for every artwork. [AN]
• The Village Voice calls it the “Liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious biennial ever”. [VV]
• The New York Post sneers that it’s the “worst Whitney Biennials in decades—which is saying a lot.” Ouch. But who reads the Post, anyway? [NYP]
• Canada’s Globe and Mail sez: “What a bloody mess.” But also: “It adds up to something memorable: a disturbing reflection of a dark interlude in American history.” [GaM]
• And our winner, the New York Times: “The whole ethos of the show is provisional, messy, half-baked, cantankerous, insular — radical qualities art used to have when it could still call itself radical and wasn’t like a barnacle clinging to the cruise ship of pop culture.” Check Please. [NYT]

The biennial runs until May 28, 2006. Enjoy.

ABOVE: Detail from the poster for the famous 1913 Armory Show; the latest version opens today at piers 90 and 92 in New York.

Go today to the totally-not-owned-by-Dubai-and-damn-proud-of-it New York waterfront to see the legendary Armory Show, the international art fair for contemporary art held on the piers overlooking the Hudson River. The exotic locale (if pier 90 overlooking the verdant shores of New Jersey can be considered so) has led to some logistical difficulties in the past, the New York Times reports.

A 4.5 tonne Anish Kapoor sculpture, for example, had to be placed on a large and aesthetically disastrous steel plate to distribute its weight and keep it from plunging through the floor into the river below. And the whole thing is pretty much a temporary construction, housing spaces for 154 galleries spread over 100,000 square feet. Then, during last week’s frenzy of construction, a cruise ship carrying 4,000 passengers had to dock there because there were no other piers available. Light a candle for the put-upon Chuck Newman, who as executive vice president of Port Parties, the company that handles events on the piers; the Times interviewed him right after a stress test at his doctor’s.

LINK: New York Times > Move That Ship. It’s Time for an Art Fair.

Paul Kastel, founder of the influential Canadian Kastel Gallery, is closing after 45 years in business.

Dealer Kastel Closes Landmark Art Gallery — the famed Montreal art dealer Kastel Gallery has closed after 45 years in business. Paul Kastel’s first sale in the late 50s was an A.Y. Jackson, for CAN$275, (now worth CAN$20,000). [WE]

Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc. Announces 2005 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results — Sotheby’s had revenues of over US$200 million in its fourth quarter, a record attributed to the blazing art market. Revenues for all of 2005 were US$513 million. [MSNm]

Tallinn’s new art rumour — The capital of Estonia, Tallinn, is getting a brand new national art gallery, called KUMU, or “rumour” in Estonian. [SaS]

ABOVE: Detail from Henri Matisse’s Luxembourg Gardens, one of four paintings stolen in Rio de Janeiro in late February. It turned up yesterday on a Russian auction site.

One of the four paintings stolen from the Chacara do Ceu museum in Rio de Janeiro during a Carnival parade on February 24 turned up for sale on a Russian auction website, Interpol revealed on Monday (yes, we’re kind of late to this party). Matisse’s Luxembourg Gardens was posted for sale for about four hours on the Mastak site, with an asking price of US$13 million.

The Russian connection gives some credence to the theory that the heist was a collaboration between illicit foreign art dealers and drug traffickers, but Brazilian police say they believe the four paintings—a Monet, Picasso, Matisse, and a Dali, the pride of the Chacara’s collection and worth about US$50 million total—are still in Rio. They believe that the thieves (who not only hustled the four paintings out into the crowd still in their frames, but also mugged some tourists inside the museum for good measure) are trying to liquidate their loot for cash to fund drug smuggling. Sound familiar?

LINK: Sydney Morning Herald > Stolen Matisse on auction website

ABOVE: Detail from Richard Lewer’s I was either going to be an artist or own my own sport shop, part of the current Melbourne show “Game On!: Sport and Contemporary Art”, through April 23.

The rigid division of the world into various high-schoolish cliques is a fact we much bemoan: jocks, preppies, geeks, weirdos, etc—many of these sad and limiting labels seem to survive the transition to real life (i.e., everything that is not high school). For those among us who have sat morosely sketching pictures of bleeding eyeballs in the hallway listening to whiny rock music while the lacrosse team rumbles through on the way to their ball-and-stick exertions, it is a truth universally understood that the boundary between “jock” and “art-class-freak” is impermeable to all but the most gifted and despicable individuals. But a new exhibit in Austalia boldly crashes that barrier, and it sounds worth a look.

Game On!: Sport and Contemporary Art opened in January and continues through the end of April, and it is dedicated to art that addresses sport, and the artists who are taking the public and private ritual, the spatial enormity, the mythical celebrity, and the dynamic physicality of the sporting world as their subjects. New Zealand Art Monthly has reprinted in part some of curator Chris McAuliffe’s catalogue essay for the show, and while it gets a bit wonkish in parts, it makes a compelling case that this show could mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

LINK: NZArtMonthly > Art is what we do, sport is what we do with each other

ABOVE: Samia Halaby’s Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, (2003), on display in New York starting March 14 as part of the show “Made In Palestine.”

Given that a large swathe of the population cannot actually agree on what “Palestine” is, a travelling exhibit called “Made in Palestine” pretty much has controversy built right into the title. Bringing it to New York, which after all has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the most painful first-hand experience of Islamo-Arab terrorism on American soil, things are a little, shall we say, tetchy. But although the reception has been chilly from some quarters and downright hostile from others, the group of Palestinian artists have succeeded, we’re happy to say, in finally opening “Made In Palestine” as of March 14.

An interview with Samia Halaby, who is one of the organizers of the group, al Jisser (”The Bridge,” to symbolize increased communication between the West and the Arab world), is published in a story yesterday on Worldpress.org, and it sounds like it was quite an uphill battle to raise the funding needed to bring the show to New York. Although several of the artists in the show, including Halaby, have found mainstream success on their own, they seem to have found that as a group of “Palestinian artists” with fairly frank political axes to grind, that the major funding institutions suddenly seem to be washing their hair that day. Regardless of the obstacles to getting the exhibit off the ground, the art is what matters, and from the samples available on the website, it’s all over the map. But still, if you’re in the area, sounds like it’s worth taking a look.

LINK: Worldpress.org > The Art of Politics

ABOVE: Detail from Tigers, from a series of panels from Nanzen-ji Temple; the deteriorating paintings will be replaced soon with high-tech reproductions.

HP, the company that is taking us all to the cleaners with every overpriced inkjet cartridge we buy, is partnering with the Kyoto International Culture Foundation in Japan to make high-quality reproductions of irreplaceable and delicate artworks from temples across Japan. The Kyoto Digital Archive Project will make reproductions of 3,500 pieces of art, spanning between the 13th and 17th centuries, and the originals will be moved to special climate-controlled storage so their forgeries stunt doubles can take their place.

HP is reportedly pursuing fine art reproduction as a growth area for their business: CNN Money says the art reproduction racket is a $7.5 billion per year industry and growing fast. Making the high-resolution digital scans of the art, and then using cutting-edge printers to make the repro is persnickety work, the kind of skilled work that you can charge an arm and a leg for. Better keep those ink cartridges, then.

LINK: CNN Money > HP’s new big business: art reproduction?