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: 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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: 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.

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 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 Madonna of the Pinks (1506-7), reputedly a Raphael, from the collection of the National Gallery in London, a controversial acquisition on the NG’s part.

Rupert Christiansen wrote yesterday in the Telegraph about the trend at public and private galleries toward “deaccessioning” artworks in their collection—selling less relevant or seldom-displayed pieces in order to finance new acquisitions. Christiansen sees a rising problem of institutions selling off works for no reason other than cashflow problems, such as the Buxton Art Gallery in Derbyshire apparently did several years ago.

He argues halfheartedly in favour of the American model, in which institutions sell works primarily for the purpose of buying new ones, but is more concerned that valuable pieces of the historical record are being lost or going into private collections because large public institutions don’t have the cash or the room to look after them.

LINK: Telegraph > the quick-fix threat to our cabinets of curiosities

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.

Finally, a list we can approve of. That “greatest painter” nonsense from earlier in the year was a methodological atrocity, based on totally subjective criteria and blut statistical instrumentation. Luckily, the bean-counters at Forbes ride to the rescue today with a rundown of the most expensive art auction purchases of the year. It’s positively mathemagic.

The duopoly of Sotheby’s and Christie’s control 95% of all worldwide art auctions, Forbes notes. Christie’s moved $759 million worth of merchandise through its New York outlet alone, but Sotheby’s had the distinction of hammering the largest single price for a painting this year, a Canaletto (above), which fetched $32.6 million from an anonymous phone buyer. Spokesbots for both Sotheby’s and Christies were preening for the press and remain bullish—well of course they would, wouldn’t they?—for 2006, predicting that all those newly minted Russian oil billionaires and Indian techno-tycoons will move on the art market in a serious way, keeping prices buoyant.

LINK: Forbes > Most Expensive Art 2005