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 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.

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: 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: 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

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: 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 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: 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