The First Great Fight Over Modern Art In one of the great libel trials of the 19th Century, James Whistler sued the great art critic John Ruskin, author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, over a review that dismissed him as a fraud. "There had been rows about modern art before. But none that are so uncannily familiar, none that speak our critical language in all its odd mixture of the extreme and the banal. It is easy for us to laugh, with the condescension of posterity, at the sexual hysteria of French journalists distressed by Manet's Olympia (1863). But Ruskin's denunciation of Whistler is the template for a thousand denunciations to come: it is the definitive rejection of modern art as fraud, and every subsequent diatribe against beds, bricks or the lights going on and off reproduces it." The Guardian (UK) 06/26/03

Art Of The Pooch "With pets holding court as favored members of the family, pup art has become big business. Dozens of artists advertise their talents on the Internet. Pet parodies in the style of famous artists depict everything from a cut-up geometric Picasso beagle to a tabby frozen in Edvard Munch's "Scream". Getting your pooch's picture with Santa has been popular for years at vets' offices and animal shelters, and photography studios report a brisk business in non-human shoots. Given this flurry of furry activity, museum-quality custom paintings were inevitable..." USAWeekend Magazine 06/29/03

Why Overpay For The Old Stuff? Art forgery is usually a dangerous business, but Christophe Petyt has turned it into a wildly profitable business. "At 32, he is the world's leading dealer in fake masterpieces, a man whose activities provoke both admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the painting and for as little as £1,000 he will deliver you a copy so perfect that even the original artist would struggle to tell the difference." The Telegraph (UK) 06/30/03

Who Says Farmers Don't Know Art? Back in the 1970s, an Australian farm-implement and hardware company needed something to put on the walls of its headquarters, and began to make a project of acquiring museum-quality art. The company now owns better than 600 works, and last year, it mounted an exhibition to allow the public a glimpse of what the company's execs see every day. "National interest was so great when the exhibition was originally limited to the Art Gallery of Western Australia last year that it was decided to tour it nationally. The paintings will be on the road for the next 2 years, visiting all states." The Age (Melbourne) 06/30/03

Restored Tiepolo To Be Shown In Melbourne "It sounds like a marriage made in heaven - one of the world's greatest paintings housed in one of the world's great art galleries. By the end of the year, the marriage will be consummated. The celebrations will be held in Melbourne at the opening of the $160 million renovation of the National Gallery of Victoria's St Kilda Road headquarters. The painting, Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra, will have pride of place. The freshly restored work will hang at the end of one of the new, high-ceilinged galleries that have been installed in the former open courtyards." The Age (Melbourne) 06/30/03

The World's Biggest Jigsaw Puzzle Meets The World's Best Math Geeks "A mathematical formula is allowing Italian researchers to recompose one of the most complicated jigsaw puzzles in history: the fragmented 15th century frescoes which once decorated the Ovetari Chapel of the Church of the Eremitani at Padua." The fragments were photographed, digitized, and are now being painstakingly reconstructed on computers, with the aid of "'circular harmonics' — mathematical formulas that are able to identify and 'retain the memory' of the piece's orientation." Discovery News 06/27/03

Forget the Museum! How About That Storage Shed? This week, Atlanta's High Museum of Art will close for two months of extensive renovation and expansion, the latest in a string of American museums to break ground on expensive new wings. But even more impressive than the renovation plans is the $5 million facility where the museum will house its 11,000-piece collection during construction. "Even with its artwork under one roof, the High will have enough room left over to accelerate a pack rat's heart: 21,472 square feet of amply lit, high-ceilinged, generously shelved capacity... The storage facility is equipped with high-tech fixtures, too, such as the shiny white vapor-tight cabinets ($4,000 apiece) that currently house the ceramics collection." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 06/29/03

Frank Lloyd Wright Does Baghdad? In the 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright went to Baghdad and drew up plans for "rebuilding Baghdad into a glittering capital of Islamic culture like the one that once dazzled the world." Librarians at the Library of Congress in Washington DC have the plans, and some suggest they should be used. "Iraqis think we want to kill their culture. Yet when America's greatest architect drew a plan for Baghdad in 1957, where did he turn for inspiration? Not to American or European 'modernism,' which was so fashionable at the time, but to Arab and Persian architecture, which had shaped the famous Baghdad of the 8th and 9th century." Washington Post 06/29/03

Art In The Walls "As contemporary artists increasingly turn to wallpaper as their chosen medium, this superficial material is gaining some serious respect. In fact, artists have been dabbling in wallpaper since the 16th century (or earlier), among them Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Rowlandson (whose 'Grotesque Borders' caricatured the British upper crust) and Salvador Dalí. Andy Warhol used it famously in 1966, when he papered the Leo Castelli Gallery with his 'Cow Wallpaper,' a fuchsia-and-yellow series of repeated bovine heads, accompanied by floating silver balloons. Like Warhol, most artists reviving this tradition do so with ironic or subversive results." The New York Times 06/29/03

Venice - Who Was In Charge Here? Perhaps the menu for this year's Venice Biennale looked good on paper. But it turned out as a mish-mash. "What was supposed to signal democracy, open-endedness and all-inclusiveness appeared more like an event headed by a curator reluctant to shoulder such a herculean task on his own." The Art Newspaper 06/27/03

Surprise - Chapmans Win A Prize "The Chapman brothers, the most studiedly shocking of the rapidly ageing generation of young British artists, yesterday won the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The brothers were more genuinely shocked yesterday than any viewer of their works: despite their fame, and infamy, they have never before won a major art prize." The Guardian (UK) 06/27/03

Restorers Enlist Bacteria To Fix Frescoes Art restorers in Pisa, Italy have discovered that bacteria applied to medieval frescoes that were covered in glue 50 years years can cut through the glue and reveal the painting. "Scientists from Milan University have shown that the bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri, applied with water on cotton wool, can eat through 80% of the glue in about 10 hours. Chunks of the 14th- and 15th-century series of frescoes at the Camposanto (cemetery) were removed for repair and restoration in the 1950s" when they were covered in glue, and restorers have been trying to figure out how to remove the substance ever since. The Guardian (UK) 06/27/03

Brazil Halts Guggenheim Plans A Brazilian court has blocked construction of a new Guggenheim Museum in Brazil. "The ban follows public outcry that the $US250 million project is a luxury the city cannot afford. Many of Rio's citizens said the money should be spent on fighting crime or improving education and health care in the city's teeming shantytowns. Billboards have appeared showing a photograph of a homeless girl drinking from a puddle on the sidewalk with the caption, 'Does Rio need such a museum? and the Guggenheim name encircled in red." ABCNews.com 06/25/03

Intervening Against Art "In a number of recent and high profile instances, certain individuals, card-carrying artists and regular civilians both, have acted upon the urge to respond critically with a physical intervention into a piece of art. It would appear that the art world has gone intervention crazy. You could blame it on Guy Debord and the Situationist International with their fondness for challenging the gallery environment with dynamic interventions. But that's too obvious. As usual, I blame Brian Eno." The Telegraph (UK) 06/26/03

Kimmelman: Sloppiest Biennale By accident, Michael Kimmelman finds himself at the opening preview of the Venice Biennale. "There are gems to find, although the picking is especially tough this year, the 50th edition of the event. This is the largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall. The curator, Francesco Bonami, has provided the usual nebulous title, pregnant with meaning but signifying nothing. This time it's 'Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer.' It doesn't begin to account for the miasma that Mr. Bonami has allowed to be assembled." The New York Times 06/26/03

Battles At Ground Zero Daniel and Nina Libeskind are battling with the various competing interests who want to control what goes up on the site of the World Trade Center. "At issue is their measure of control over what is built at Ground Zero—whether what goes up there reflects Mr. Libeskind’s vision, or the maelstrom of competing interests that has come to define the story of the World Trade Center. If the Libeskinds have one thing going for them, it is themselves. The two—with matching salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, sharp eyes and black clothing—have a way of refracting off each other. They finish each other’s sentences. They interpret each other for their audience. But they are complementary rather than similar." New York Observer 06/25/03

Neighbors Who Oppose Met Museum Plans (And The Neighbors Who Oppose Them) A group of the Metropolitan Museum's neighbors is mobilizing to oppose the museum's expansion plans. Museum foes are circulating a letter: "If the Museum goes ahead, it will own our lives until at least 2015. We have a window of opportunity to act now, before the first jackhammer bursts or the first blast shakes. Can you imagine the negative impact on the value of your home if trying to sell during the 12-year assault? We could stop the whole magilla." But now a group of opponents to the Met's opponents has sprung up, charging self-interest... New York Observer 06/25/03

Middle East Archaeology At Standstill "Since the start of the current Palestinian uprising more than two years ago, archaeology in the disputed territories has ground to a virtual standstill. And the demands placed on security forces on both sides have left many important archaeological sites vulnerable to looting." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 06/24/03

From Venice To Basel (Oh What A Relief It Is) The Basel Art Fair is "strategically timed to consolidate the impressions made and deals struck in Venice [at the Biennale]. This year we could not wait to leave the pavilioned heat and enter the temperate climate of Switzerland and the air-conditioned neutrality of Basel's exhibition halls. It was not only the most searing heat since 1908, nor humidity pushing 90 per cent, nor 40,000 art professionals who for three days were simply pushing, that made this the most disappointing Biennale for many years. There was a strong sense that the exhibition's format had run its course." London Evening Standard 06/24/03

Sistine Chapel Online Now you don't have to travel to Rome to see Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings. The Vatican has put its art online. "Now, at the click of a mouse, they will now be able to zoom up to the recently restored ceiling, under which the painter - who only wanted to be a sculptor - spent endless months, between 1508 and 1512." The Vatican website gets 50 million visitors a month. The Guardian (UK) 06/24/03

Free At Last - Winthrop's Collection Is Liberated Grenville L Winthrop was "arguably the most discriminating and independent-minded of all 20th-century American collectors. Yet his collection of 4,000 paintings, drawings and objects is far less well-known than theirs." He left his collection to Harvard's Fogg Museum with instructions the art was not to be loaned. "Then, about five years ago, the director of the Fogg looked again at the fine print in Winthrop's will. The document stipulated that, if the museum ever lent a work from the bequest, it would be obliged to pay to the Foundlings Hospital in New York City the sum of $100,000 - a fortune in 1937 when the will was drawn up, but not such a big deal in the late 1990s. In a coup so outrageous I smile every time I think about it, the director simply sent a cheque to the happy orphans, and, hey presto, the magic spell had been broken. The museum was free to lend any of the pictures anywhere, any time, and to anyone who asked. Art that had been immured in an ivory tower went global." The Telegraph (UK) 06/25/03

Venice - Just Looking At Art Many people have worries about contemporary art, and the Venice Biennale can make those worries rear up at you. But "you don't have to like it all in order to embrace it. You're allowed to make distinctions and your distinctions are as likely to be right as anyone else's. Only a certain percentage of what is in fashion now will stand the test of time. In this way, contemporary art is not so very different from the art of the past." The Telegraph (UK) 06/25/03

Rijksmuseum To Get Makeover Amersterdam's Rijksmuseum, or national gallery, is getting a makeover. The new design "envisions spacious, bright exhibition halls, better facilities, and a grand entrance hall large enough to shelter guests from the characteristically wet Dutch weather - instead of having them wait in the lines that now stretch outside the building for most of the year. The $230 million renovation, scheduled to run from 2004 to 2008, will be the most extensive since the original four-towered building by Pierre Cuyper opened in 1885. It was then the southern entrance to the city and accommodated only a tenth of the 1.2 million visitors it now receives each year." Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 06/24/03

Norwegian Painting Returned A prized JC Dahl painting stolen in Norway a couple of weeks ago has been returned by the thieves. They "either got cold feet or decided the painting was more of a liability than an asset for them. They returned it using a local commercial radio station, P4, as intermediary."
Aftenposten 06/24/03

• Previously: Norway's Biggest Art Heist Since "The Scream" Norwegian authorities are calling the bold theft of a classic landscape painting from industrial concern Norsk Hydro "one of the biggest art heists in Norway since Edvard Munch's 'Scream' was stolen in 1994. The thieves disabled security cameras and alarms to steal JC Dahl's 'Rjukanfoss' landscape from 1830." Aftenposten (Norway) 06/12/03

Indian Government Nixes Taj Mahal Mall The Taj Mahal glows with light at dawn and twilight. But "before the Indian government stepped in at the weekend, the 17th century marble monument's source of illumination was in danger of being cut off by a tourist complex of shopping malls, restaurants, multiplex cinemas and other entertainment facilities. Construction on the project, less than 300 metres from the Taj Mahal, began in November but was halted by the Indian government, which said the new structure could divert the river during monsoon rains and damage the base of the monument." The Guardian (UK) 06/24/03

Dutch Government Returns Art The Dutch government has finally begun returning art that hed been stolen by Nazis. "For a long period, between the end of that war and 1997, a veil of secrecy had been drawn over the so-called "NK collection", works of art that had been recuperated but had remained unclaimed when the date for submitting an application for restitution passed." The Art Newspaper 06/20/03

Stolen Schiele Painting Sold A rare Egon Schiele painting that had been stolen by the Nazis has been sold at auction in London. "An anonymous telephone bidder who made the highest offer for the Schiele will pay more than £12.66 million once the buyer's premium is included - a record auction sale for the artist and the most expensive restituted impressionist work ever sold at an auction." BBC 06/23/03

British Museum At 250 - Lowkey "The 250th anniversary of the founding of the British Museum has been a low-key affair. Three years ago the plan was to honor the occasion with the opening of a new $55 million Study Center in a nearby building. But lacking money the museum sold the property. So instead of a glitzy inauguration, this month's anniversary festivities are built around music, dance, lectures and exhibitions. Yet for all that the mood inside the museum's sprawling neo-Classical home in Bloomsbury is not glum. Credit seems due to Neil MacGregor, 56, who last year took over as the museum's director." The New York Times 06/24/03

Hiro's Light Hiro Yamagata is one of the most commercially successful artists alive today. "His work, much of which is sold at shopping malls, generates an estimated $4 billion in sales a year." Now he's covered two building-size cubes on the Yokohama waterfront with mylar, shooting light into them to make them shimmer and pulse with color. CNN.com 06/23/03

British Art Sales Down Since 9/11 Sales by the 400 leading British art and antiques dealers declined by almost 10 per cent in 2001-02. Dealers blame the downturn on the aftereffects of 9/11. The Telegraph (UK) 06/23/03

Museum Insurance Rates Soar 37 Percent "When Los Angeles County Supervisors on June 3 approved a new insurance policy covering the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, they found that premiums had jumped 37% from the year before. Also, the new policy doesn't cover most potential losses from terrorism - an exclusion many insurers have added since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Los Angeles Times 06/22/03

Venice - Politics Ruins The Day The Venice Biennale has been compromised and ruined by politics, suggests Laura Cumming. "Fifty festivals, a golden year, but no birthday celebrations. The Biennale has become so worried about its inflated status as the Grandest Show on Earth that it wouldn't dream of congratulating itself in these desperate modern times. It is still a multinational market, of course, where droves of dealers tout their artists to rich collectors and curators on the look-out. But the real world presses in, and the director, Francesco Bonami, wrings his hands." The Observer (UK) 06/22/03

Iraqi Looting Count Climbs Above 6000 The count of items stolen from the Iraq National Museum is going up. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement say that as of June 13 "the official count of missing items had reached 6,000 and was climbing as museum and Customs investigators proceeded with an inventory of three looted storerooms. The June 13 total was double the number of stolen items reported by Customs a week earlier," and the final total will likely be much higher. Washington Post 06/21/03

The New Prada Store: Is Anyone Selling Clothes Anymore? With the opening of its architecturally stunning new store in Tokyo, Prada has further blurred the line between art and commerce. In fact, the store, with all its accompanying hoopla, isn't really about selling clothes at all. And of course, that's entirely the point, at least in the minds of the Prada folks, who long ago realized that the best way to make people want to buy your product is to associate it with other impressive stuff, and then pretend that you don't care if anyone buys it or not. Regardless of the capitalist aspect of the enterprise, though, the store is an artistic triumph, says Julie Iovine. The New York Times 06/22/03

Venice - One Great Big Mess "Launched more than a century ago, the Venice Biennale should bring together the world's best new art in a series of national pavilions. In recent years, it has been the Biennale director who has gathered together the most dynamic selection in the old shipworks and the rope factory of the Venetian republic. This year, however, the new director, Francesco Bonami, abandoned any attempt at curating the event himself or presenting a coherent vision of the state of art today." The result? A mess. The Economist 06/20/03

• Venice Just A Symptom Of A Larger Ennui The problem isn't that the Venice Biennale is failing to reflect the true diversity of a vibrant and thriving 21st-century art scene, says Blake Gopnik. The problem is that there is no vibrant and thriving scene to reflect. "The show's so huge, you've got to figure that it has its finger on the art world's pulse. Or that it would, if only there were any pulse to find." The art world is in a decided lull, and while such cycles of greatness and mediocrity are nothing to worry about in the long term, it seems a bit silly to blame Venice for the lack of good contemporary art. Still, it's awfully depressing to wander through "room after room, building after building, neighborhood after neighborhood filled with dull retreads of art that's come before." Washington Post 06/22/03

How The Art World Spends Its Summer Vacation There was a time, not so long ago, when museums were as inactive during the summer months as most TV networks. But today, with global art fairs and insanely high-profile events like the Venice Biennale and Art Basel dominating the summer scene, curators worldwide have no choice but to leap into the fray. With everything from Picasso masterpieces to little-known pen-and-ink drawings waiting to be acquired in Europe, the summer festivals have become a way of life for the wealthy art-collecting elite, and by extension, for the museums who depend upon the generosity of such collectors. Dallas Morning News 06/22/03

Artner: Curators Are Not Artists Why is the art world more interested in the people who buy art and move it around than we are in the people who actually create it? It's a dangerous progression, says Alan Artner. "Where the '80s made stars of purveyors and acquisitors, the '90s turned the spotlight on curators - and today we live with the consequences: pseudo-intellectualism replacing scholarship, an indifference toward the past, fashionability substituting for merit, the exercise of style instead of analysis, and an elevation of artistic stewardship over art." Chicago Tribune 06/22/03

Living With Contemporary Art The Guardian takes six pieces of contemporary art out of the galleries and puts them into private houses. How would ordinary people feel about living with a Tracey Emins or a Chapman Brothers artwork? "Many participants expressed anxiety about exposing their ignorance, aware of a kind of knowing exclusivity that characterises the art world. But they also expressed a sneaking suspicion that this world might be applauding something empty and banal." The Guardian (UK) 06/21/03

China Arrest Museum Official For Stealing Art China has arrested a museum official in Chengde, a city north of Beijing, for "stealing some of the precious antiquities he was supposed to be guarding. It is the biggest such theft reported in half a century of Communist rule." The official is accused of "stealing 158 relics during 12 years, substituting fake artifacts or doctoring inventories to conceal his crimes." Voice of America (AP) 06/20/03

Toon Town: Is Superman The New Apollo? Cartoons are more and more showing up in "serious" art. " 'Making art from cartoon figures today 'is like painting a Madonna in the Renaissance'. With cultural literacy at a low ebb, a riff on Superman communicates more universally than Bible stories, mythology, or fairy tales. Archie and Veronica have become our Aries and Venus." Christian Science Monitor 06/20/03

A Small-Town Museum Grows Almost As Large As Boston's MFA The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts has a new home designed by Moshe Safdie, writes Robert Campbell, and it's a winner. The old museum "was a hodgepodge of buildings and additions that accreted over more than a century and a half. With the new addition - and the dozen or more historic houses in Salem owned by the museum - PEM now has, according to its director, Dan Monroe, 88 percent as much floor area as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A local provincial museum has morphed into a potential national icon. It's not easy to fit so big a museum into the modest surroundings of historic Salem. On the whole, Safdie pulls it off. Boston Globe 06/20/03

The Cleaning-David Ordeal How do you clean an icon such as Michelangelo's David? Carefully, of course. But it turns out that the restorer hired to do the job was maybe too careful. When her bosses insisted on a more invasive cleaning process, she quit. "I hated to do that, because the David is the best job a restorer could have. But I simply could not be party to diminishing Michelangelo's masterpiece." Will the alternative method destroy David? "Unlikely. Short of taking a hammer to it like Piero Cannata, or blowing it up, it is, as Ms Parronchi insists, pretty hard to do that." The Telegraph (UK) 06/20/03

Critic's Hell - The Venice Biennale One critic laments the crowded Venice Biennale: "I don't mean to be philistine, but art in quantity - black box, video, car-boot-sale installation art - is not a pretty sight. Nor, come to that, are we in such numbers. Too much of now about us, too much dogma of the hour. And too much perspiration. We don't sweat well in the art world. Here we all are, anyway, come for the vernissage, which literally means varnishing but now denotes the two or three days set aside for professionals to make their judgments while the paint dries. Since there is precious little in contemporary art that needs varnishing, a better translation of vernissage might be The Shining - every critic and curator on the planet, and not a few artists to boot, thrown together in a confined space and left to go berserk." The Guardian (UK) 06/20/03

Museum Finds Drawings In Its Attic The Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Osler has hundreds more Emanuel Vigelands than it thought it had. This week electricians who ventured into the museum's attic for some repair work discovered several hundred sketches signed by Vigeland. The museum has no idea how they got there. Aftenposten 06/19/03

Ossuary Is A Fake An ossuary thought to have been the resting place of the Biblical James is a modern fake, not an ancient relic, says a commission of antiquities experts. "A media frenzy followed last October's announcement that André Lemaire of the Sorbonne University in Paris had found an inscription - James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus - on a light brown limestone box of the type commonly used for burials in first-century A.D. in Jerusalem. It seemed that this box, or ossuary, had once held the bones of James, brother of the biblical Jesus, who was stoned to death in A.D. 62 according to the historian Flavius Josephus. Publicized in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, the ossuary was hailed by Time magazine as possibly 'the most important discovery in the history of New Testament archaeology'." Archaeology 06/18/03

• Ossuary Isn't Fake Experts Say Several experts have contested claims that the James ossuary is a fake. "Several paleographic, geological and linguistic experts previously examined the box and saw nothing suspicious. 'They all may be mistaken, I recognize that, and if it's a forgery, I want the forger put in jail. But we're not there yet by any means'." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/19/03

Library Of Congress Buys $10 Million Map The Library of Congress has bought the "Waldseemuller world map of 1507, a cartographic treasure and the first known document to call a land mass America. The old and rare chart is also the first to depict two oceans instead of one. The price was $10 million." Washington Post 06/19/03

Afghan art Still Imperiled "Two years after the Taliban destroyed much of Afghanistan's cultural heritage, attempts are being made to restore what is left." But the task has been hampered because since "US-led forces evicted the Taliban from Afghanistan 18 months ago, the international community has done little to help the government of Hamid Karzai restore the museum or get back thousands of artefacts looted from Afghanistan over the previous decade." The Guardian (UK) 06/18/03

Venice - The Countries That Are There But Not There Scotland does have a representative at this year's Venice Biennale. "Though the artists’ names are listed in the index, Scotland does not appear in the list of participating countries. Not all of these listed countries have a presence in the Giardini. There simply isn’t the room. So a good many late-coming nations have pavilions scattered throughout Venice. But officially, as we are not listed, we do not have a national presence, though the ground floor of the same palace, the Ca’ Gustinian-Lollin, is the official national pavilion of Singapore. The Welsh, who also have a presence this year, are treated the same way. They are there, but not there. The politics of this is obvious." The Scotsman 06/17/03

Guards Charged With Stealing Dali Four guards at New York's Rikers Island prison have been chaged with stealing a Salvaore Dali painting. The four "staged a phony fire drill" to "steal a $250,000 Salvador Dali sketch from the jail's lobby, then replaced the artwork with an unframed copy, prosecutors said Tuesday."
New Jersey Online (AP) 06/17/03

An (Ancient)Queenly Furor Berlin's Egyptian Museum placed a 3000-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti atop the modern nude torso created by German artists, who then videotaped it for their installation at the Venice Biennale. But Egyptians are protesting, saying the project demeans their culture. Museum officials defend the work, saying that "the 19-inch-high bust, with its elegantly arched brows and towering blue headdress, sat only briefly on the life-size body created by Hungarian artists Andras Galik and Balint Havas. The transfer on May 26 was done with care." CBSNews.com (AP) 06/17/03

Swiss Take Steps Against International Art Theft Because of its lax laws, Switzerland is well-known as a "transit centre for stolen works of art". But the Swiss Parliament has passed a new law to bring it into compliance with the UNESCO Convention against cultural goods trafficking. "Until now, Swiss law has treated cultural goods no differently to ordinary merchandise. With the new legislation, which has taken over ten years to be approved, the laundering of stolen artworks should also disappear." Swiss.Info 06/17/03

World's Oldest Children's Museum Forced To Cut The Brooklyn Children's Museum - opened in 1899 and the first museum for children - is cutting its outreach programs and charging more for admission after having its city funding cut. The small museum attracts 260,000 visitors a year. New York Daily News 06/17/03

California Center for Arts Museum To Close The California Center for the Arts Museum in Escondido is closing July 20. It's said to be a "temporary closure" but as the staff is being let go, it looks like the museum is done. Why? The CCA blames reduced state funding. "Though it consumes only $438,000 of the center's current $7.3 million budget, the center says it can no longer afford to keep the museum open with reduced state funding." San Diego Union-Tribune 06/15/03

Iraq Museum Staff In Revolt Most of the staff of Iraq's National Museum are revolting against museum leadership. "More than 130 of the 185 staff of Iraq's state board of antiquities office in Baghdad, which runs the museum, have signed a petition demanding the resignation of its directors. Staff said they believed that some of the thefts from the museum were an inside job. They also accused Dony George, the board's head of research, of arming them and ordering them to fight US forces." The Guardian (UK) 06/17/03

Art Vigilantes Threaten To Tear Down Art A piece of public art in Sydney that some residents call "poo on sticks" has so infuriated protesters that a group of "art vigilantes has threatened to tear it down. "The group, which calls itself the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places, has set a three-month deadline for the offending sculpture to be whisked away. If the deadline is not met, it says, the work will be defaced or destroyed. 'We have blowtorches, angle grinders and bolt cutters, and we will use them if necessary'."
The Independent (UK) 06/17/03

My Life As A Dog Canada's representative at this year's Venice Biennale is a film directed and shot by a dog. "For all its carefree frolicking 35 cm above ground, Stanley's [the dog] perspective and Jana Sterbak's editing produce a profoundly affecting piece that is shown on six screens zig-zagging across the length of the Canadian pavilion. It conveys both the exuberance of a young pup's discovery of the world, but also his nervous, toddler-like dependency on the people looking after him. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/17/03

Venice - Ideas, Ideas, Who's Got The Ideas? "There are hundreds of artists and works in the Venice Biennale, which opened to the public last Sunday. So many voices and idioms, so many fractured dialogues, so many languages. Everyone comes to Venice, but everyone comes from somewhere else. There can be no totalising critique or curatorial stance, nor any shared artistic value we can depend on. Only one thing is certain: that pain is universal." The Guardian (UK) 06/16/03

• Lala, The Artistic Chimp One of the more entertaining artists at this year's Venice Biennale is Lala, a 20-year-old chimpanzee. Not just any old ape, but a simian Sophia Loren, known for her "classic" Italian caper movie Bongo Bongo, and now the star of the biennale's most bizarre happening, Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A. Her installation turns on assembling six-lettered dice to spell Utopia." The Guardian (UK) 06/16/03

Monumental Decision Proposals are being considered for a memorial on the site of the World Trade Center. Such competitions are necessarily good, writes Christopher Benfey. "In the end, we're likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed?and inevitably 'controversial'?monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the 'soaring' memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space?that it be left as a hollowed-out void." Slate 06/16/03

Swiss Artists Win Top Prize At Venice Biennale Peter Fischli and David Weiss won the Golden Lion for best work exhibited in the international exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/16/03

Iraq's Archaeological Sites Still Being Looted Looting of Iraqi archaeological sites is continuing, accoring to a survey of the country. "The worst looting is taking place in the south of Iraq. Umma, Isin and Adab - Sumerian settlements of the 3rd millennium BC, north west of Nasiriyah - are still being pillaged on a massive scale." The Art Newspaper 06/14/03

Expressionism On The Outs "In an environment of unprecedented artistic variety, where almost anything is permissible and worthy of encouragement, Expressionism stands out today as the one strand of art that is woefully unfashionable. Expressionism is not quite as dirty a word, mind you, as it was in the 1930s, when the Nazis labelled it 'degenerate' and when, adding insult to injury, Thomas Mann contributed the idea that German expressionism and Nazism sprang from the same root of emotional self-abandonment. Nevertheless, although there have been subsequent periods when forms of expressionism were revived, the word is now generally used pejoratively." The Guardian (UK) 06/16/03

A Hot Steamy Venice Biennale Opens "The humidity and the extraordinary heat were inescapable. The gardens at the tip of Venice, home to the biennale's national pavilions for most of that event's life, became a giant sauna. Even worse than the gardens were the miles of art in the nearby, cavernous Arsenale, the medieval network of shipyards and workshops where the Venetian fleets were once built and where the work of emerging artists is on view. Overwhelming amounts of art were displayed in raw factory spaces and amid relentless heat intensified by the power needed for lighting and video installations. These conditions sent even the most die-hard art lovers fleeing to their hotels during part of each of the three preview days held before the public opening on Sunday." The New York Times 06/16/03

• Photos From The Venice Biennale Can't make it to Venice to make the Biennale this summer? Here's a gallery of photos of artwork from the Biennale to look at... BBC 06/15/03

Recreating The Sistine Chapel Paintings On The Streets Of California A dozen top street painters converged on the Bay Area to re-create Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The painting will be "about half the size of the original. Parts of the ceiling have been done at various international festivals, but this 75-by-25-foot work is apparently the first to re-create the entire biblical epic, which contains more than 300 figures arrayed in a richly detailed architectural setting of spandrels and pendentives and putti-adorned pilasters. It took Michelangelo from 1508 to 1512 to complete the great work for Pope Julius II. These artists are replicating it in six days. 'We want to make it as true to the actual ceiling as possible, but allowing each artist to bring their expression into it'." San Francisco Chronicle 06/14/03

Face To Face With Impressionism In The Round J. Seward Johnson Jr. makes three-dimensional sculptural versions of famous Impressionist paintings. "The experience sounds risible, more the stuff of amusement parks than sculpture parks or museums. But there's an uncanny quality to seeing a familiar painting expanded into real space, and being able to walk through the picture plane is positively weird. It heightens the physicality of the motifs in the composition and thereby underlines the artifice and skill that went into transforming them into a painting. Also, I have to confess, wandering around in the three-dimensional paintings is really a lot of fun. And with no restrictions on photographing or touching the works, who can doubt the show is going to be a riot for grown-ups and an absolute paradise for children?" The New York Times 06/15/03

The Iraq Museum Lie - How Did It Happen? First reports from Iraq said the National Museum had been looted of 170,000 artifacts. That was wildly off the mark. It was untrue. "What happened? The source of the lie, Donny George, director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, now says (Washington Post, June 9) that he originally told the media that "there were 170,000 pieces in the entire museum collection. Not 170,000 pieces stolen. No, no, no. That would be every single object we have! Of course, George saw the story of the stolen 170,000 museum pieces go around the world and said nothing - indeed, two weeks later, he was in London calling the looting "the crime of the century.' Why?" Washington Post 06/13/03

A Gift With Broad Implications Eli Broad's $60 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art towards the construction of a new wing is being hailed as an unexpected windfall at a time when many museums are having to postpone or cancel expansion projects. But the gift's impact may be more far-reaching than even Broad himself expected, says Christopher Reynolds: "Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA's leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution." Los Angeles Times 06/14/03

• Previously: Broad Donates Money For New Contemporary Art Museum Philanthropist Eli Broad has agreed to fund a new building for contemporary art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "In a memorandum of understanding with museum leaders, Broad has laid out plans to pay for 'every penny' of a new, 70,000-square-foot building, said LACMA board Chairman Wally Weisman. The new building, tentatively dubbed the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA and projected to cost roughly $50 million, would stand along Wilshire Boulevard just east of the former May Co. building now known as LACMA West." Los Angeles Times 06/12/03

Can't Anyone Paint A Face Anymore? When did it become so impossible for an artist to sit down and crank out a recognizable representation of an actual human being? Has contemporary art become so self-conscious, and so detached from the real world, that a decent portrait is no longer achievable? The dearth of quality portrait painters is such a problem, in fact, that Britain's National Portrait Gallery has been reduced to holding a contest to find an artist capable of doing the job. The gallery generally "has to make do with the artists available; and when they are famous in their own right, it then has to deal with the consequences, for example, of blowing untold funds on a Lucian Freud or a Hockney." The Observer (UK) 06/15/03

When Art And War Collide The Dead Sea Scrolls go on display in Montreal this week, and if you think that's not a big deal, you ought to have a word with the curator who had to get them there. From the Palestinian uprising in 2000, to the 9/11 attacks, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, global events have conspired to keep the scrolls out of Canada for years, and no one in Montreal dared believe that their exhibit would actually go off as scheduled until the scrolls physically arrived this month. The Montreal exhibit marks the first time that all three scrolls have been exhibited together outside of Israel. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/14/03

New Urbanism Comes To Denver In Denver, where an abandoned railroad yard long considered a blight on the downtown area has been transformed into "a vibrant new inner-city neighborhood with a mix of offices, residential units and retail businesses," architect Todd Johnson and his Design Workshop are being celebrated as shining examples of the New Urbanism. At the heart of the Denver design was the notion that it is no longer enough just to build an urban landscape and expect people to flock to it. But the tired notion of getting suburbanites to return to downtown by bringing the suburbs to the city hasn't worked either. The key to a successful urban design, says Johnson, is to create a space that makes people want to move around in it, preferably on foot, with lots of other people. Denver Post 06/15/03

Architects In Crisis Few people think of architecture as a job requiring much in the way of crisis management skills. But a recent symposium in Boston examined the way that architects and engineers have handled some of the most devastating architectural crises in recent decades. From a collapsed hotel balcony in Kansas City, to a Manhattan skyscraper that could have toppled in a high wind, the all-too-human reactions to tragedies of human error changed the way many in the architectural trade view their jobs. Boston Globe 06/15/03

Ashes To Art (Hi, Uncle Charlie) Miss that special someone? Now you can keep them around, even after they're dead. A Seattle artist is "making urns from human ashes, following a formula Josiah Spode invented in 1797, producing fine English china glaze by adding calcinated cow bone to the company's clay mixture. Friends and relatives of various deceased gave him the ashes he's using in his human urn sculptures. Each comes in an edition of two, one piece for the commissioning parties and one for him." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 06/13/03

Thieves Hit Rothschild Collection "On Tuesday night, in what is believed to have been the latest in a long line of highly organised 'stolen to order' art heists, a gang of thieves escaped with a haul of precious items worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from Waddesdon Manor, home of the world-famous Rothschild Collection. Thames Valley police confirmed that a gang of five men, disguised in boiler suits and balaclavas, broke into the National Trust-owned stately home near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and made off with more than 100 gold boxes and a number of other valuable pieces including several works of art." The Scotsman 06/13/03

Art Returned To Iraq Museum In Trunk Of A Car The Iraq Museum has had one of its most valuable artworks returned. "The sacred Vase of Warka, a centrepiece of the Iraqi National Museum collection and feared to have been lost for ever after being looted, was returned yesterday. Three unidentified men brought it to the museum in the boot of a car." The Scotsman 06/13/03

Broad Donates Money For New Contemporary Art Museum Philanthropist Eli Broad has agreed to fund a new building for contemporary art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "In a memorandum of understanding with museum leaders, Broad has laid out plans to pay for 'every penny' of a new, 70,000-square-foot building, said LACMA board Chairman Wally Weisman. The new building, tentatively dubbed the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA and projected to cost roughly $50 million, would stand along Wilshire Boulevard just east of the former May Co. building now known as LACMA West." Los Angeles Times 06/12/03

Norway's Biggest Art Heist Since "The Scream" Norwegian authorities are calling the bold theft of a classic landscape painting from industrial concern Norsk Hydro "one of the biggest art heists in Norway since Edvard Munch's 'Scream' was stolen in 1994. The thieves disabled security cameras and alarms to steal JC Dahl's 'Rjukanfoss' landscape from 1830." Aftenposten (Norway) 06/12/03

Look But Don't Touch. Or Breathe. William Morris, a 19th-century artist specializing in rich tapestries and wall coverings, is well-known even today for his designs, which often featured leafy green patterns and twisting vines. But according to a new scientific investigation, Morris used arsenic to derive the green pigments he needed for his work, and the deadly chemical sickened some of his clients, depite Morris's protestations that arsenic was not toxic. In truth, the artist knew better: he was on the board of an arsenic mining company, where he had been told all about the dangers of exposure. Wired 06/12/03

It's A Date - When Van Gogh Painted Experts have known that Van Gogh's painting of a field of haystacks in Provence, France, was painted "sometime in the summer of 1889, toward the end of the most productive, but troubled, period of the artist's life. However, the precise date of its creation has vexed art historians for many years. Now, Southwest Texas State University astronomers Russell Doescher and Donald Olson, along with Olson's wife, Marilyn, an English professor, have determined that Van Gogh was working on the picture at 9:08 p.m. on July 13, 1889." Wired 06/11/03

The Farce Of The Iraq Museum Story Roger Kimball is amazed that journalists were so quick to denounce Americans for the looting of the Iraq Museum. "The story of nonlooting of the Iraqi museums gave us a glimpse into that heart of darkness. That tragedy has collapsed into farce." OpinionJournal.com 06/12/03

500 Turners Discovered Curators at the Tate have discovered hundreds of missing Turner paintings after a search for a new catalog. "About 500 pieces were discovered when curators set about the task of documenting all of Turner's works for a dedicated website. They were traced to private owners during a 14-month detective trail overseen by curators at the Tate Gallery. Some pictures had been stored away in cupboards or attics." BBC 06/11/03

The Meaning Of Beauty For a long while beauty was a quality that lost favor in art. But slowly, beauty has begun to reassert itself, and a new book makes a case for its importance. "One submerged argument is that what we say about beauty can affect what we see of it, perhaps even its capacity to manifest itself. " San Francisco Chronicle 06/11/03

Missing Turner Surfaces A long-lost Turner watercolor has turned up after more than a century. "It was owned by the eminent art critic and Turner fanatic John Ruskin, who displayed it with other gems from his private collection in public shows in 1878 and in 1900, the year he died. The painting was then sold to an unknown private collector and disappeared for more than a century." The Guardian (UK) 06/11/03

Damien Finds God? Damien Hirst is taking a religious turn. His next series of pieces are religion-themed. "In a series of sculptures inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, which will be seen in London this autumn, Hirst will depict Jesus and the apostles as 13 pingpong balls bobbing on spurting fountains of red wine. A washing bowl to bathe Christ's feet will sit beneath their Formica table." The Guardian (UK) 06/11/03

Who Said What About Iraq Museum Looting? It is obvious now that the Iraq Museum was not looted of all its art. So what accounts for the reports that it had been, and statements made by t6he museum's director, Donny George? Says George: "There was a mistake. Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move." This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. "Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects. Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting." The Guardian (UK) 06/10/03

Gallery Makes Offer On Prince Harry's Paintings Two paintings by Prince Harry shown as part of a TV piece on him as he graduates from Eton, have drawn a purchase offer of £10,000 from a gallery in Portugal. Sky News approached St James's Palace with the request. Half an hour later, a spokeswoman came back with the official reply: 'They aren't for sale'." SkyNews 06/09/03

7000 Spaniards Strip Naked For Spencer Seven thousand Spaniards strip for photographer Spencer Tunick in Barcelona, the most people he's used for one of his photos. "There was a festival-like atmosphere among the crowd even though many of the models became quite cold from standing around naked for 90 minutes in temperatures of 15 degrees Celsius." The Age (Melbourne) 06/09/03

US: Most Iraqi Artifacts Now Accounted For US officials say that estimates of Iraqi artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum were grossly overestimated and that most of the art has been recovered. "Initial estimates after the war ended in April suggested that as many as 170,000 pieces, including the Nimrud treasures, were lost or stolen during the sacking of the museum, according to U.S. officials. They now say 3,000 pieces remain unaccounted for and may have disappeared into the shadowy world of black market antiquities trading." Washington Post 06/08/03

Controversy Over Cleaning David "Italy's art world is in a flap as experts quarrel over how to preserve the priceless cultural icon. In 2004, it will be 500 years since the 4-metre-high statue depicting the courageous, naked young biblical hero was unveiled in Piazza della Signoria, the square that remains Florence's lifeblood. The block of marble itself is even older. Now, one of Italy's leading restorers has thrown down her tools — chamois cloth, silky soft brush, cotton swabs and an eraser — in a spat with other experts over how to clean David." Toronto Star 06/08/03

Hadid's New American Masterpiece Herbert Muschamp is unequivocal about Zaha Hadid's first American building, the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati: "It is an amazing building, a work of international stature that confidently meets the high expectations aroused by this prodigiously gifted architect for nearly two decades. Might as well blurt it out: the Rosenthal Center is the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war." The New York Times 06/08/03

• Previously: Hadid's Latest Is A Coup For Cincinnati Cincinnati's new arts center is not the type of outsized, over-the-top structure generally associated with today's high-profile architecture. In fact, Zaha Hadid's design is in many ways the antithesis of the Blockbuster Building, which may be part of the reason that critics have been falling all over themselves to praise it. Benjamin Forgey is impressed with the building, if not with the hype, and says that the museum will reflect well on its hometown. "For the city itself, which contributed money along with the state and private donors, the architecture is a coup. The building will become an "early Hadid," a period piece folks will fight to save from the wrecking ball in a half-century or so." Washington Post 06/01/03

British Museum The Greatness Of 250 Years In its more recent history, the British Museum has been beset with problems, not the least of which being a lack of money to keep the place running as it ought to be. But the weekend, the BMA turned 250 years old, and a party was held to celebrate one of the world's great museums. The Guardian (UK) 06/06/03

Should The Guggenehim Get To Choose US' Vennice Artist? There's always much interest in which artist gets to represent the US at the Vinnice Biennale. The Guggenheim owns the US pavilion, and it appears Guggenheim director Thomas Krnes tried to steer this choice to Matthew Barney (who wasn't chosen). "The Art Newspaper has discovered recently that the entrepreneurial director proposed a deal to the State Department, suggesting that his museum have periodic control of the US participation in the Biennale." The Art Newspaper 06/06/03

Why Maxwell Anderson Is Leaving The Whitney “ 'It has become clear in recent months that the Board and I have a different sense of the Whitney’s future, in both the scale of its ambitions and the balance of its programming.' In March the board had cancelled a long-planned expansion by architect Rem Koolhaas, which a disappointed Mr Anderson says, 'Signals a pace of growth that is different from what I envisioned'.”
The Art Newspaper 06/06/03

The British Museum At 250 The British Museum turns 250 years old this week. "In its lifetime, the museum has acquired some of the most important archaeological objects, including the Rosetta Stone and the world's oldest glass - Egyptian, dating from 1460 BC. And as the home of the British Library, which grew out of the royal library and now receives a copy of every book published in the UK, it has nourished the minds of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Lenin, to name a few." Nature 06/06/03

Will Disney Hall Be LA's Defining Building? Many cities are anxious to have some sort of iconic defining piece of architecture to add to add to their skyline. "This sense of a great city with a vast meeting place at its heart is important. Los Angeles has failed as a place for public spaces, but civic connectedness is something L.A. needs to be a truly great city." So will Frank Gehry's new Disney Hall be that building? Christian Science Monitor 06/06/03

Christo Project To Raise Money For Central Park Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always raised money for their big projects themselves. But their Central Park project - due to take place in 2005 - might cost $20 million. And there are environmental concerns about protecting the park. "While the potential for marketing products related to these project is almost limitless, the artists have never allowed any licensing or taken any such initiatives themselves. Until now." The artists have allowed a foundation to license worldwide marketing rights to the project, with all the proceeds going to protecting an restoring Central Park. The New York Times 06/06/03

Selling Saatchi "For many, this is a veritable freak show - one now worth an estimated £50 million - in large part due to the yBas, a group of young British artists who fought a frenzied fight for attention in the late 1980s and '90s. It was a conflagration that Saatchi, advertising man to the core, had an instinct for uncovering and promoting. One suspects that Saatchi perceives himself as a kind of magus, someone whose primary motive is control. It seems quite possible that his pleasure comes from the manipulation of taste, the general public and art community." ArtNet.com 06/04/03

Go 2 R Museum Trying to attract younger audiences, York's railway museum is trying a new ad campaign. "Posters showing a pair of oily handprints on a woman's denims went up yesterday in clubs and student bars across York to try to bring down the average age of helpers at the National Railway Museum. Heavily reliant on enthusiasts in the their 40s and above - a problem shared by scores of other museums and galleries across the country - the final home of hundreds of historic trains is also texting young people in schools and colleges in the city to tempt them into helping. Designers have created a locomotive-like logo using computer symbols from the asterisk to the double-dash, and added the message: 'Ifu think trAns R ZzZz thnk x2.' (If you think trains are boring, think again.) The Guardian (UK) 06/04/03

A Place For Big Ideas Suzaan Boettger writes that Dia's new outpost at Beacon is a place where space could allow for the jumble and interplay of big ideas. "The Dia collection harkens back to a decade when the convergence of strong fiscal growth, the largesse of Great Society programs, increasing support for civil rights, anti-Vietnam war protests, and myriad forms of personal and sexual liberation made such artistic innovation on a large scale a cultural manifestation of the utopian belief that 'anything is possible'." Artnet 06/03/03

Royal Mail: Hands Off Queenie Britain's postal service is protesting an artist's use of a picture of the Queen on stamps. The Queen's face has been hidden by the addition of a gas mask. "A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: 'We do take any breach of copyright very seriously especially in relation to the Queen's image. We produce over three billion of these stamps every year and the images belong to the Royal Mail'." BBC 06/04/03

American Museums Discover Latin America "American museums, long accustomed to regarding Latin American art as an appendage of other divisions or to ignoring it altogether, are bolstering their commitment to buying, showing, and studying everything from Mexican colonial portraiture to Chilean Surrealism. Two major institutions, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), have recently appointed their first chief curators for Latin American art. Others have held major Latin American shows. Museums across the country have established community groups aimed at drumming up support and interest for their Latin American programs, and dealers say the institutional push into Latin American art is adding momentum to the market." ARTNews 06/03

Sculptor of Heroes Many of us have a distinct sense of what we think constitutes a fitting statue in honor of a great figure. That image comes from the 18th century, and "when we visualize one of these heroes, we are almost always referencing Jean-Antoine Houdon's brilliant sculptural portraits. Between 1775 and 1789 he sculpted the men of letters and of the nobility of Europe and America." Artcyclopedia 06/03

Protester Dumps Red Paint On Chapman A man was arrested in London after throwing red paint on one of the Chapman brothers. "The unidentified man fought with the Turner Prize nominee after throwing the paint in an apparent protest at his alteration of work by Goya, the Spanish master. The attack came the day after Jake and his brother Dinos were shortlisted and strongly tipped for this year's £20,000 prize." The Telegraph (UK) 06/01/03

• Previously: Just Who Are The Chapmans? "The Chapman brothers are the best-known of the shortlisted artists, and recently hit the headlines for adding comical and grotesque faces to Goya etchings. Their work is often restricted to adult viewings because of its content, and they took part in 1997's Sensation exhibition with dolls with penises instead of noses." BBC 05/30/03

Mislaid Picasso Print Finds Its Way Home Last week a man left a case with a rare Picasso in it in a subway station. "The man who found it is a mystery. But he, in turn, left it leaning against a wall on the Upper West Side, under a poster advertising bagels. The next man to find it, a sidewalk book vendor, took it home to Queens. He liked the portfolio. No idea there was a Picasso in there, and he would not have picked it out if he had looked. Just another drawing of two guys on a bench. But soon, it was all over the papers, and his wife figured it out first. He called the man who lost the portfolio and inquired about the reward. Next thing he knew, the police were waiting for him at his corner today when he showed up for work." The New York Times 06/03/03

Damien Hirst In Space There is a flurry of spacecraft from earth on its way to Mars and beyond. "For now, Beagle 2 has stolen the limelight. It goes into space with a spot painting by the British artist Damien Hirst - which also acts as a colour calibration chart for its cameras - and a callsign composed by the Britpop band Blur." The Guardian (UK) 06/02/03

Canada's Classic (Controversial) Artwork (They Took It Down After 8 Days) Canada's most controversial artwork? It's got to be "Greg Curnoe's notorious magnum opus of 1968, the 170-metre-long Homage to the R-34 (the title refers to the first dirigible to cross the Atlantic to North America from Britain), otherwise known as the Dorval Mural, a spectacular, Technicolor work that existed at its intended site - the arrivals area of the Montreal airport - for just eight days before being packed up and stored. The mural was deemed by the federal Department of Transport that commissioned it to be too controversial, too provocatively antiwar and anti-American, to greet our Vietnam-weary visitors from south of the 49th parallel. Since its fiery demise, Homage to the R-34 has remained sequestered in storage crates, briefly coming up for air at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998, when the mural was finally officially transferred to its collection." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/02/03

Chapmans: We Don't Welcome Casual Attention Now that the Chapman Brothers have been shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize, a wider audience is sure to be examining their work. The inevitable casual examinations of their work isn't exactly a good thing, they say. "The reason I say that is not because I intend to offend people who have a casual encounter with art because casual encounters can be very rewarding and interesting. But I'm obsessed with countering the idea that it's necessary to those people's lives and the necessity is brought to bear by people who have an institutional interest in art." BBC` 05/30/03

• Just Who Are The Chapmans? "The Chapman brothers are the best-known of the shortlisted artists, and recently hit the headlines for adding comical and grotesque faces to Goya etchings. Their work is often restricted to adult viewings because of its content, and they took part in 1997's Sensation exhibition with dolls with penises instead of noses." BBC 05/30/03

In The Middle East - War Destroying Valuable History War in the Middle East is destroying some of the region's most historic buildings. In Israel, "the damage to Nablus was awesome. The town was founded by the Romans in about 70AD - it's about the same age as London - and it became an important Crusader town and, later, a trading centre for the Ottoman Empire. Buildings from these eras survive - or did, until a few months ago. Over 100 important historical buildings just aren't there any more. Nablus was the most important historic town in the Middle East, and it has been devastated." The Guardian (UK) 06/02/03

Protecting Art To Death? Blake Gopnik and the Hirshorn's Ned Rifkin talk about how museums protect artwork. "Is it possible that museums are actually too eager to preserve their art? That preservation, in a sense, has become fetishized to the point where it can detract from the art experience, rather than serving it? How should a museum strike a balance between protection and presentation?" Washington Post 06/01/03

How Artists Represent America "When the Vennice Biennale opens to the public in two weeks, Fred Wilson will be America's artist. His $650,000 show, titled 'Speak of Me As I Am' and organized by the curator Kathleen Goncharov of the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., will scrutinize some longstanding American themes — immigration and integration — but will view them through Venetian history." So how was it decided that Mr. Wilson would represent us? A panel of course... The New York Times 06/01/03

Body Of Work - Photographer Jailed For Pictures Of Dead People In Ohio, Thomas Condon "photographed corpses juxtaposed with various objects signifying the cycle of life and death. Some of the confiscated negatives were mysteriously leaked to the local press, inciting a public furor as relatives of the deceased and local pundits denounced Mr. Condon's project as 'sick' and 'repulsive'. Despite support from civil libertarian groups like the National Coalition Against Censorship, Mr. Condon was convicted and imprisoned from April to August 2002, after which he was released pending appeal. Now a state appeals court has affirmed his conviction, meaning he may face another 13 months in jail." The New York Times 06/01/03

Hadid's Latest Is A Coup For Cincinnati Cincinnati's new arts center is not the type of outsized, over-the-top structure generally associated with today's high-profile architecture. In fact, Zaha Hadid's design is in many ways the antithesis of the Blockbuster Building, which may be part of the reason that critics have been falling all over themselves to praise it. Benjamin Forgey is impressed with the building, if not with the hype, and says that the museum will reflect well on its hometown. "For the city itself, which contributed money along with the state and private donors, the architecture is a coup. The building will become an "early Hadid," a period piece folks will fight to save from the wrecking ball in a half-century or so." Washington Post 06/01/03

Waterhouse Masterpiece Found In Colorado "A voluptuous Victorian masterpiece by John William Waterhouse [depicting a sultry Cleopatra reclining on a tiger skin,] which had disappeared for more than a hundred years, has turned up in a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The discovery was announced yesterday by Christie's, just days after the news that another lost Waterhouse had been tracked down by Sotheby's to an Icelandic trawler owner." The Guardian (UK) 05/31/03

Public Art And Civic Pride It seems as if the Sculpture Garden may be to this era what the large-scale mural was to an earlier time: a relatively cheap, attractive way to feature art in a public place, and a method of urban beautification which doesn't require the razing of neighborhoods or the construction of hundred-million-dollar buildings. Denver has had a sculpture garden since 1997, but it has sat empty for most of the period since it was built. Kyle MacMillan says that Denver needs to start branding itself, art-wise: "So far, at least, no single acquisition has become a signature work that is widely identified with the city, one that art aficionados would come to Denver specifically to see." Denver Post 06/01/03