ABOVE: Portuguese business magnate Joe Berardo, who is donating a huge collection to the Portuguese government to start a new museum of 20th century art.

After ten years of bickering over the details of the deal, Portuguese tycoon Joe Berardo and the government of Portugal have reached an agreement that sees Berardo loaning a significant portion of his 4,000-strong collection to the state to start a new museum of 20th century art. While the bulk of the collection is comprised of old books, jewelery, coins, and other upscale garage-sale fare, it also includes some Picasso, Dali, Miro, Koons, Bacon, and Warhol. Like other art-rich collectors before him, Berardo was holding the government’s feet to the fire by threatening to move his collection to another country, probably France.

The 900 pieces mentioned in the deal will be set up and on display in a new museum by the end of the year, according to the Portuguese culture minister. But it looks like it’s not going to be a flashy new building per se, as the works are going to be housed in the Belem Cultural Centre in Lisbon. Perhaps they’ll tack on a new wing to put it in? Perhaps there’s another big-bucked portuguese industrialist looking for a museum extension to put his name on?

LINK: Reuters > Portugal to create museum of 20th century art

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 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 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 from three vigango, carved memorial posts made by the Mijikenda people of Kenya. The Christian Science Monitor reports a booming grey-market trade in the sacred objects.

Here’s a number for you: ten years ago, the trade in non-Western cultural property was about $1 billion; it’s now brushing $4.5 billion, according to Interpol. And if you follow the money, it naturally turns out that a fair chunk of that amount is being siphoned off by rakes and scoundrels who are willing to trade under the table, leaping patrimony laws, ethical acquisition policies, and plain good taste in a single bound. The Christian Science Monitor reports today that the trade in vigango, a type of memorial carving made by the Mijikenda people of Kenya, is growing, to the material and spiritual detriment of Africans.

The totems, which are carved wooden posts memorializing the dead, are the Mijikenda’s equivalent of a gravestone. They get snatched by young Kenyan men to sell to Western dealers, who pay them between $300 and $800 in Mombasa; in the west, they are valued at upwards of $5,000. The trouble is, the vigango (it’s a plural word; the singular is kigango) are not classified in international patrimony agreements as antiquities, since most are not that old. So trading them is certainly a crappy thing to do, but not technically illegal. And the Kenyan government doesn’t qualify them as protected cultural property, so the trade continues. You’d think that with all the current talk about patrimony, smuggling, and shady acquisitions at leading cultural institutions (*ahem*, Getty, Met, Princeton), that there would be some reluctance to buy these totems, which have deep spiritual significance for the people who make them. But the trade is growing.

LINK: Christian Science Monitor > Theft of sacred vigango angers Kenyan villagers

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: 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: 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