Art Gallery in Nazi Shelter

A vast Nazi-era air raid shelter too tough to tear down is to be revamped as an art gallery and luxury penthouse. The seven-storey building in central Berlin was erected on Hitler's orders during Allied bombing of the city. After the war, its 2.6m thick steel reinforced wall thwarted a series of East German attempts to demolish it. Advertising guru Christian Boros has bought the building - a listed building because of its historical importance to the city. The new development will be "like James Bond, very cool, with exposed concrete and glass".
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Irish Art


Art Of The Leap

A performance artist wearing a business suit and safety harnesses jumped repeatedly from a Chicago museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, but his spectacle was scorned by some onlookers and victims' relatives. Collaborating photographers snapped away as Kerry Skarbakka fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. The photographs will be retouched to erase the pulleys and wires that kept Skarbakka from hitting the pavement.
New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it "nauseatingly offensive," A woman whose son died in the terrorist attack, told the (New York) Daily News. "He's an artist? Go paint a bowl of fruit or something."
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Irish Art

Art Bins Flip Their Lids

A costly British art project involving moving litter bins and benches was shut down within hours after an embarrassing series of smash-ups, a report said on Wednesday. The $200 000 display in Cambridge was meant to see the robotic solar-powered bins keep roaming outside the Junction music venue in the city, The Daily Telegraph reported. But despite being fitted with sensors designed to prevent crashes, the bins and benches lasted just three hours before being recaptured after running amok and repeatedly slamming into everything in the vicinity.
"On the launch day they were showing signs of some anti-social behaviour and kept on being intimate with the bike racks and with each other," said a spokesperson for the Junction. "The artists felt there was no other option but to take them away."
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Irish Art

Russia Split Over Art Booty

A senior Russian official has angered the country's nationalists by announcing that Moscow is close to agreeing the return to eight European countries of art "appropriated" by the Red Army during the Second World War. He said Russia had agreed to return a collection of paintings to the Netherlands which are currently housed in Moscow's Pushkin Museum. The collection is reported to include canvasses by Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Rubens and Tintoretto, and is valued at up to half a billion dollars. Russia is estimated to have 260,000 pieces of "trophy art" acquired by the Red Army, three million archive items and 1.5 million books.
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Irish Art

Hirst Drops "Murder" Plan

Damien Hirst who planned to turn the murder scene of Nairn banker Alistair Wilson into a painting has dropped his plans.
Hirst had wanted to recreate on canvas a photograph showing forensic experts outside the victim's Highland home, but now says he will not go ahead with the project because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Irish Art

Are Corpses Art?

Some of the cadavers are macabre - one nonchalantly holds his preserved skin on a clothes hanger. "I certainly think these exhibits are art," said Kevin Moore, an instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and an expert on surrealism. "If the bodies were just used anatomically, there would be no reason to pose or light them the way they do. It's intended to be viewed as art."

Moore concedes that the sculptures probably couldn't be purchased like paintings, but given the high fees charged at each of the exhibits, "it's still for sale in a sense." Body Worlds charges $21 for general admission to the Chicago and Cleveland shows.
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Irish Art

Multi-Billion Pound Art Row

Works by the great Impressionists, hidden in bank vaults for four generations, could come into public view as a result of a feud within one of the world's leading art collecting families. Alec and Guy Wildenstein, whose father Daniel died four years ago, will challenge a French court ruling in favour of their 71-year-old stepmother Sylvia to break up the huge private collection, believed to include Renoirs, Monets and Manets. The Wildensteins have an art collection worth an estimated €10 billion (£6.6bn). The brothers' legal move, due to be heard in the French appeal court on 21 June, comes in the wake of an earlier ruling that Mrs Wildenstein should receive a share of the estate because Alec, now 64, and Guy, 60, misled her into signing away her inheritance rights. Mrs Wildenstein claims to be penniless, and her lawyers insist that the private collection will have to be broken up and sold in order to settle the inheritance claims.
The Wildenstein empire was founded by cloth merchant Nathan Wildenstein in 1875. His maxim was 'never buy a painting you cannot afford to hold on to'. By the time he died in 1934, he had amassed a considerable collection which he passed on to his son, Georges, a specialist in Impressionist art and a patron of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. In 1940, Georges left for the US with his son Daniel and grandchild Alec. Daniel's second son, Guy, was born in the US in 1945.
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Irish Art

Galleries Sue for Millions

More than 40 artists, galleries and collectors have begun a legal battle against the storage company Momart over works destroyed in a warehouse fire in east London last year. The list of litigants includes some of the most powerful figures in the industry: the artists Damien Hirst and Gillian Ayres; the sculptor Barry Flanagan; five Royal Academy of Arts trustees, including the celebrated architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw; and a host of galleries.
The lost artwork is believed to have been valued at a total of £60m. The Waddington Galleries lost about 150 works by artists from Heron to Flanagan, including 20 of major significance. Tracey Emin, who was among the most high-profile artistic victims of the fire, whose destroyed work included her famous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 - 1995, confirmed that she was not suing Momart.
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Irish Art

Damian Hirst Plans "Tasteless"

For his latest creation controversial artist Damian Hirst is said to be using a photo of the doorstep where Scottish bank manager Alistair Wilson was murdered last November, Scotland Today reports.
The office of the Turner prize-winning artist has contacted the photographer for permission to use the picture which was taken while forensic teams were carrying out their investigations. Detectives have described the plans as tasteless. As yet no one's been charged in connection with the murder.
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Irish Art