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 Picasso’s Boy with a pipe (1905), the most expensive single painting ever sold at auction for US$104 million. Investment funds hoping to hit it that big have struggled.

The concept of an investment fund that deals exclusively in fine art is one of those things that seems like a good idea but has remained largely unworkable (despite some valiant efforts). Bloomberg yesterday published a longish piece on the perma-fledgling field of art funds, essentially large hedge funds for high-rolling investors looking to diversify their bulging portfolios. Managers like a Mr. Philip Hoffman of London hold their noses and buy the most bankable art they can, storing the paintings or renting them out to their fund clients at a nominal fee until it’s time to sell and cash in for everyone’s collective benefit. But, as numerous people make clear in the article, cornering the market in Rembrandts is very different from the market in, say, soybeans, and more than a few such funds have stumbled early and been put out of their misery.

There’s an interesting bit describing something called the Fine Art Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the art market, which rises and falls with auction results for a selected list of artists and genres. The index climbed 14.5% in 2005 [but then, what index didn’t? - eds.], a handsome ROI for the mucketymucks who had kicked in their quarter mil or more necessary to get into one of the funds. This whole deal apparently parallels what happened in the 80s when the art market was at its last mountaintop, with everyone scrambling to find a way to make a cold, hard investment out of it. It didn’t work so well then, so to the wealthy few who are buying these funds, all we can say is: what goes up, must come down.

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso Lures Hedge-Fund-Type Investors to Art Market

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

ABOVE: Detail from Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder (1501), which the FBI has placed on its “most wanted” list for stolen art worldwide.

The FBI yesterday made public its list of the “Top Ten Art Crimes” and encouraged the public to be on the lookout for a large list of paintings which they want to recover. It’s not a list of the top ten items they’re looking for, it’s a list of the thefts themselves: the top art crime that the FBI lists is the theft of artifacts from the Iraqi national museum in 2003, and that crime alone saw 7,000 to 10,000 pieces go missing. The number two spot is held by the theft of 12 paintings worth a total of $300 million from the Isabella Stewart Garnder Museum in 1990.

Rounding out the rest of the list are: a Cellini salt cellar, a Stradivarius violin, The Scream, and a smattering of Van Goghs, a Caravaggio, a Cezannes, and a Da Vinci. The FBI lists some phone numbers and websites in case you—yes, you, dear reader—know something about the whereabouts of these things. What with the current preoccupation with the security of the homeland and everything these days, it’s nice to see that the FBI still remembers its little art theft unit and wants to publicize it more.

LINK: CNN > Leonardo, Cezanne among FBI’s most wanted

PS - sorry about missing a post yesterday, we’re really, really sorry, and we won’t ever do it again. Until next time.

ABOVE: one of the famous Elgin Marbles, a collection of ancient Greek statues in the collection of the British Museum. The Christian Science Monitor says the Getty’s recent provenance difficulties is putting pressure on other museums to root out possibly-looted articles in their collections.

We’re sorry to keep harping on the big scandale at the Getty Centre, in which the museum has been accused of not being entirely scrupulous in checking the background of some of its antiquities. But it’s just too big an issue, and growing every day. Over the weekend the Christian Science Monitor published a story about how the Getty’s troubles are drawing scrutiny to the collections of other major museums, and may be swinging the pendulum of public opinion toward stricter guidelines for acquisition and the return of some prized possessions.

Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is quoted as saying that this may be a defining moment for museums, and that as public awareness of provenance issues grows, attorneys general are going to be less and less willing to whistle dixie while publicly-funded institutions hold looted material in their collections. The Getty, the article notes, actually has one of the strictest provenance policies of any American museum, so others are going to see this more and more on their radar.

LINK: Christian Science Monitor > Ancient art, modern crime

ABOVE: Damien Hirst has topped Art Review’s Power 100, meaning he gets a lifetime supply of Swiffer dusters. Or something.

There are some cases where a numerical rank of individuals makes sense: the Forbes Richest list is one such example: there are quantifiable things to rank, like the number of dollars in someone’s bankroll. That’s a ranking. But most powerful? Prettiest? Best? These are pretty loosey-goosey concepts to shoehorn into the lock-step grid of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. Not that people don’t try. Now, Art Review has drawn up its own annual “Power 100″ list, a ranking of the most powerful people in the art world. We can’t approve of the concept, but the result is still amusing to debate.

Damien Hirst topped Art Review’s list this year, the first time an artist has take the #1 spot (he actually dislodged his own dealer, Larry Gagosian, to take the position). The list was compiled based on a methodology of total sales, show attendance, and a subjective category of “artistic influence.” After Hirst, Gagosian is second, followed by François Pinault, Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate is fourth, and Glenn D. Lowry of MoMA ranked fifth. Now, undoubtedly these are all appropriately potent dudes and all that, but do they really fit into their assigned slots that easily? Does this represent the moment Damien Hirst, uh, Jumped the Shark? We don’t really want to spoil anyone’s fun, but wouldn’t a list of powerful art-world figures in no particular order be just as effective, and less of a mathematical atrocity?

LINK: Reuters > Hirst tops art power list

ABOVE: The exterior of the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. Wired writes that more than 50 contemporary art biennials are duking it out for audience right now.

Wired News ran an article yesterday by their columnist iMomus on the prevalence, the abundance, nay, the glut of global biennials. At this very moment, he says, more than 50 such biennials or triennials are open, about to open, or just finished. From Yokohama to Istanbul, Liverpool to Havana, it seems you can’t spit these days without hitting a pavilion full of contemporary art.

Obviously there is art enough to go around, and curators to organize it; but the boom in biennales seems to have more to do with desperate pleas for attention by B-list cities than anything else. It’s like there’s a hierarchy, with Olympics at the top, World Expos next down the list, and then descending through film festivals, UN conferences, art biennials, figure-skating championships, spelling bees, and taxidermist conventions. The biennial one of those manageable spectacles for a mid-sized city: kind of showy, kind of daring, kind of sophisticated. But everyone’s caught on, so everyone’s having them now. It’s like limousines—they were classy when they were exclusive, but now that 13 year-olds take them to their junior high prom, it’s just kind of pathetic.

LINK: Wired News > Around the world in 80 biennials

ABOVE: Details from Rembrandt’s Self-portrait, left, and Renoir’s Young Parisian, both of which were announced recovered this weekend after an FBI sting.

The last of three paintings stolen from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm during a daring armed robbery on December 22, 2000, has been recovered, the FBI announced to the world this weekend. The four arrested men, an international rainbow coalition of two Iraqis, a Swede, and a Gambian, are alleged to be behind the theft, which involved such Luc Besson-style accoutrements as machine guns, car bombs, and a getaway by boat.

The paintings themselves have reportedly weathered their ordeal fairly well, with the Rembrandt self-portrait unscathed and Renoir’s Young Parisian having sustained a vexing but reparable scratch to its varnish. Both are still in their original frames, too. The FBI sting took place in a California hotel room (which sounds like a Mamet play waiting to happen), and the alleged thieves were selling the Rembrandt, valued at US$42 million, for just $100,000—slightly more than a 99.7% discount. We always knew crime doesn’t pay, figuratively, but in this case it sounds like it was literal, too.

LINK: The Independent > Gang behind $55 m art heist captured in FBI sting

ABOVE: detail of the Sir Samuel Room on the Queen Mary 2. Art collections aboard cruise ships are becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive.

“Being in a ship is like being in a jail,” the great Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, “with the chance of being drowned.” Why anyone would want to pay thousands of dollars to spend a week getting dysentery on a floating shopping mall and sleeping in a cabin the size (and temperament) of a bathroom stall is totally beyond us. Among the amenities cruise ship companies are now using to lure prey aboard their grimy decks are their art collections.

The Orlando Sentinel notes some of the biggies: Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Dawn has Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Renoir on its walls; the collection aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is valued at about $5 million. Dollar figures appear frequently in the Sentinel’s piece, far more frequently than the artworks those dollars paid for, in fact—like so many news stories about art, it’s just another excuse to talk about impressive sums of money. What we want to know is: who in their right minds insures these works, perched, as they are, on the walls of enormous ocean-going chum buckets?

LINK: Orlando Sentinel (via SouthFlorida.com) > Extravagant art galleries at sea

ABOVE: Details from stolen art objects being sought by the FBI Art Theft Program (from left, one version of Munch’s The Scream, a clay pot which was among the artifacts stolen from an American Indian cultural center in Indio, Calif., and Munch’s Madonna). Trafficking in art is now thought to be a $6 billion a year business.

The world black market in stolen art is worth $6 billion a year, Prof. Amareswar Galla, vice-president of the International Council of Museums, informed a UNESCO workshop this week, and is the second largest such illegal trade after narcotics. It’s no coincidence, either, as Prof. Galla explained, since drug cartels are apparently sinking their profits into art and artifacts or using them as currency in cross-border deals.

“Trafficking in cultural property,” as the UNESCO people call it, is especially problematic in Asia and the subcontinent because, as Dr. Galla said in this story from the Navhind Times, “the 1954 Hague convention on the subject is extremely euro-centric and does not address the concern of asian nations.” Essentially, billions of dollars worth of artifacts, and the priceless cultural heritage that goes with them, are being sucked out of the developing world and used to fund black markets in the West. Welcome to civilization.

LINK: Navhind Times > Trafficking in art objects next only to narcotics trade: UNESCO

ABOVE: left, detail of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks; right, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The Chronicle of Higher Education says art students are now trained to be “half-baked social scientists,” rather than serious artistes. Zing!

The world is going to hell in a handcart. Art students these days would rather slather themselves with paté and shave weasels inside a plexiglass box suspended in the Tate Modern foyer than sit quietly with a bit of charcoal and sketch the wonder of nature. Art schools have abandoned craft for flash, trashed their still-life seminars, embraced theory and concept instead of good, wholesome drawing and painting. It’s true: we read it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently you can buy water in bottles now, too, instead of digging your own well. And those horseless carriages are awfully popular these days. It’s a crazy old world, dontcha know!

The Chronicle, which might as well rename itself Harrumph Weekly, for the number of these ridiculous kids-these-days essays it runs, says that art schools are getting weaker on craft and skill and emphasizing superficial individual expression and theoretical wankery. OK, point taken, there are art school students graduating right now who couldn’t sketch a bowl of pears if you put a gun to their heads, but let’s have a little perspective. That which is new is not automatically inferior to that which is old. The world already contains an awful lot of oil paintings depicting bowls of pears, and perhaps it’s OK to take a breather for a bit. We’ve worked on charcoal sketches of voluptuous nudes for, oh, about a billion years, so perhaps we can have the conviction and the patience to experiment with this video art thing for another decade or so and see if it pans out. They’re really into tradition over at the Chronicle, but they seem to believe it’s awfully fragile.

Also, that Joyce reference in the headline: totally original thinking, guys. Bravo.

LINK: The Chronicle of Higher Education > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess [via ArtsJournal]

ABOVE: Audience members at the Tate Modern last week for a panel discussion on new art history book Art Since 1900. Panelists, from left to right: Hal Foster, Mark Godfrey, Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, and Briony Fer.

Artforum over the weekend blogged about a recent panel-discussion-cum-advertising-plug that took place at the Tate Modern last week featuring the authors of the new art history textbook Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. The book, by all accounts (including ours) is rattling the cheese tables of the art world with its “kaleidoscopic” approach and unapologetic partisanship.

Claire Bishop’s account of the five-hour gab-a-thon is similarly opinionated and entertainingly mean-spirited, carefully picking several instances of Rosalind Krauss’s casual arrogance and enjoying the “fireworks” introduced by several outspoken audience members. The article concludes by saying that the very fact that the book is being marketed as a “landmark” work means that “oppositional art history” is here to stay, and therefore can’t wait to see the backlash. It’s begun, obviously—the only question is how big and how bad.

Artforum Diary: “Selective Memories”
The Guardian: Lost in a Labyrinth of Theory

Above: Manuchehr Yektayi - Trees, (1975), from the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

Alireza Sami-Azar, the apprently controversial director of Iran’s Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, handed in his resignation yesterday, reports the Mehr News Service. The Story is light on detail and ominously mentions “dissatisfaction” with Sami-Azar’s decision to exhibit some art and not other art—which seems to us like the job of a curator. Anyway, some artists went to the “Department of Artistic Affairs of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance” to oppose the resignation, so we’re inclined to believe Sami-Azar was shown the resignation was—at least—reluctant.

Curator of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art Resigns - Mehr News Agency

The India Times’ “Economic Times” section reports that Installation art is gaining popularity in India. The article is vague on the details of this trend but notes several artists—some new, some established—who are experimenting with installation. Satish Gujral, for instance (that’s his work above) , although Gujral’s website (more…)