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: 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

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 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 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?

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: 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: 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