World Art News at IrishArt.com
Snippets of interest to lovers of Art - Irish Art or otherwise - sometimes the ridiculous, the obscure, the unusual or just art stuff you might have missed. Updated every day... If you have something for our Blog, email us at md@irishart.com
The Philadelphia Museum of Art's Salvador Dalí exhibit generated $55 million in economic activity in the Philadelphia region, created 830 equivalent full-time jobs, and added more than $4.46 million in increased tax revenue, according to a report.
American painter Al Held was found dead Wednesday in the swimming pool of his house in the Umbrian countryside of Italy. He was seventy-six, and died of natural causes.
The maiden voyage of a crewless, self-navigating sailing vessel also said to be "a work of conceptual art" docked at Newcastle after a five-day run from Shetland. History may record the £150,000, 28ft vessel, Ghost Ship, as the world's most expensive remote-controlled boat. Claims that it is art - it was dreamed up by Chris Burden, an American who once had himself shot in the name of art - could be more controvertible, although the Arts Council deemed the project creative enough to receive a £40,000 grant.
The Tate snubbed one of Britain’s foremost collections after it rejected a gift of 160 paintings that had been given pride of place at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said that the works did not deserve to be in a national collection, even though their 5 month exhibition last autumn drew thousands to the Walker, one of the outstanding collections of fine art in Europe and part of National Museums Liverpool. The works were painted by the Stuckists, an international group of artists founded in 1999 to promote traditional artistry, looking to the Old Masters for inspiration. Experts said that the artists had “inaugurated the rebirth of spirituality and meaning in art, culture and society”, with their works worth £500,000, but the Tate was less than impressed.
A water company has given notice to a work of art which has already shed enough water to sprinkle half the lawns in Surrey.
Saudi tycoon Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal has donated 20.4 million dollars to finance a new wing dedicated to Islamic art at the Louvre museum in Paris, the museum announced. The French government will contribute 26 million euros and the oil giant Total will add four million euros to build the wing to house the museum's 10,000 pieces of Islamic art. The wing is scheduled to open in 2009.
An artist appealed on Tuesday for the return of an art work that consisted of a bottle of water on a plinth, saying he fears it was stolen and then drunk. United States artist Wayne Hill had devised the art work, a two-litre clear plastic bottle filled with melted ice from the Antarctic, to highlight the dangers of global warming. Entitled Weapon of Mass Destruction, it was on show at an arts festival in Devon, south-west England. "It looked like an ordinary bottle of water, but it was on a plinth, labelled, described and in the programme of the whole festival," Hill said. "It was very, very clear what it was -- a work of art." The purpose of the piece was to bring people in direct contact with the rapidly diminishing West Antarctic ice sheet, the artist said.
Curious art lovers gathered in Ottawa a few days ago to gawk at one-of-a-kind art pieces made with DNA. Ottawa-based DNA 11 creates unique portraits by photographing human and non-human DNA with a special camera and then visually enhancing the photographs with colour and filter effects, resulting in an abstract art piece. This is the first time DNA has been extracted for an art piece, apparently. Fancy getting your own piece commissioned? Off you go then to www.dna11.com...
A publicity-shy American hedge fund manager from Connecticut, has emerged as the world's number 1 art buyer by the US magazine Art News. Steven A Cohen, 48, whose net worth is estimated at $2 billion has spent more than $300 million on art over the past five years. He has bought a rare drip painting by Jackson Pollock for $52 million, an Andy Warhol painting of Superman for $25 million and Damien Hirst's pickled shark.
BBC Radio 4's Today programme has joined forces with London's National Gallery for a new poll which aims to find the greatest painting in Britain. The survey, believed to be the first of its kind, will allow members of the public to nominate and comment on their favourite works of art. Any painting currently hanging in a British art gallery is eligible, regardless of its origins.
More than three hundred of Andy Warhol's works will tour Russian cities this fall under the title "Andy Warhol: The Artist of Modern Life,. The exhibit is the Andy Warhol Museum's largest undertaking since the show "Andy Warhol: The Mirror of His Time" toured four cities in Japan in 1996. It's the first traveling Warhol exhibition to visit Russia since the US Department of State sponsored a forty-piece exhibition of the artist's works five years ago in St. Petersburg
Artist Christo, who specializes in public art pieces so big they can be seen from space, is moving forward with plans to drape a giant canopy over the Arkansas River. Buoyed by the success of The Gates, Central Park, which opened in New York in February, Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, are coming to Colorado to renew their work on Over the River, a project to cover a 10-kilometre stretch of the Arkansas with huge pieces of clear fabric. Their previous projects have included wrapping the Reichstag in Germany and surrounding 11 islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay with fabric. The projects typically cost millions of dollars and take years to assemble.
A volunteer working at the National Archives has made a major discovery, a cache of inventories of Sir Robert Walpole's possessions. Compiled for a family legal dispute which followed the death of Sir Robert in 1745 they list the paintings owned by the first resident of 10 Downing Street, many bought by Catherine the Great and are now in the collection of the Hermitage Museum. They include works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens and Leonardo and previously unrecorded landscapes by Brueghel and Tintoretto. The documents on an auction held after Walpole's death provide a fascinating insight into sale practices in the 18th century. Among the costs charged by auctioneer Christopher Cock was just over £4 for dinners at the Shakespeare's Head.
Pablo Picasso and David Hockney are acknowledged as two of the greatest draughtsmen and printmakers of the Twentieth Century. The Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork St, London is holding a major survey comparing and contrasting their graphic work. Picasso is responsible for some of the most enduring images inartistic practice. In lithography, etching and linocut, he was in everysense of the word a master printmaker, utilising each medium to its greatest effect. He was also a great influence on Hockney and the exhibition concentrates on works that have defined both artists' careers. From Picasso, the exhibition will include examples from the Vollard suite, the 347 series, classic linocuts, and erotic etchings. In terms of Hockney, it will include examples from the classic early etchings such as, Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Bothers Grimm, portraits of Celia Birtwell, swimming pools, still lives and works from the infamous Moving Focus series.
