art – News Stories About art - Page 26

Apr 3, 2008 5:50 PM CDT

Not a Great Time to Be an Artist

Top financier predicts sharp downturn in market

(Newser) - The exploding art market may be about to deflate: New York’s flurry of contemporary art fairs last week had surprisingly good sales in light of the economic times, reports Portfolio, but the president of one of the nation’s most active lenders against art predicts a sharp downturn from...

SF Museum Cancels
'Animal Snuff' Art Show

Mar 30, 2008 8:13 AM CDT

SF Museum Cancels 'Animal Snuff' Art Show

6 animals bludgeoned with sledgehammer in video clips

(Newser) - Following death threats, a San Francisco art museum has canceled a controversial exhibit that included video clips of animals apparently being bludgeoned to death. "We remain committed to freedom of speech as fundamental to this institution, but we have to take people's safety very seriously," said the president...

Beloved Brit Painting Once Owned by Hitler

Mar 28, 2008 11:17 AM CDT

Beloved Brit Painting Once Owned by Hitler

Venus image now in National Gallery also hung in his apartment

(Newser) - A nude painting of Venus on display in London's National Gallery for 45 years—one of the gallery's most popular works—turns out to have been once owned by Adolf Hitler. The whimsical Cupid Complaining to Venus, by German master Lucas Cranach, was given to Hitler by a prominent Nazi...

Art Funds Looking Far East

Mar 20, 2008 11:54 AM CDT

Art Funds Looking Far East

As West's growth slows, managers aim to buy, and sell, in China, Middle East, India

(Newser) - With major economies slowing and the US dollar near historic lows, art investment funds are looking to move away from the slowing Western art market, Bloomberg reports. Funds are sinking millions into works from China, India, and the Middle East. One leading fund has met its target for contemporary Chinese...

Lauder Gives Whitney
Museum $131M

Mar 19, 2008 11:52 AM CDT

Lauder Gives Whitney Museum $131M

Massive donation requires Whitney to stay in landmark building

(Newser) - New York's Whitney Museum announced yesterday that its chairman, the cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder, would donate $131 million to boost the institution's endowment. The gift is a transformational sum for the museum, which is devoted to American modern art, and one of the largest donations ever made to a museum...

Elephant Bubble Plans Popped

Mar 15, 2008 6:46 PM CDT

Elephant Bubble Plans Popped

Outcry bursts science center's plans to surround elephant with soap bubble

(Newser) - A California science center has ditched plans to surround an elephant with a giant soap bubble, reports the LA Times, after a thousand outraged emailers protested the plan and zoo professionals blasted it as a "Vegas-style sideshow." A "bubble artist" had planned to break a world...

Getty Lands a Morbid Gauguin

Mar 12, 2008 2:53 PM CDT

Getty Lands a Morbid Gauguin

LA museum buys painting of decapitation scene after 8-year search

(Newser) - The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired an 1892 work by Paul Gauguin the Los Angeles institution's curator calls "the most famous painting by Gauguin that no one has seen," the Los Angeles Times reports. Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)—bought from a Swiss collector for an undisclosed...

Whitney Biennial: Recession Art

NEW RELEASE

Mar 7, 2008 10:20 AM CST

Whitney Biennial: Recession Art

Survey of American art world strikes a modest note

(Newser) - This weekend sees the opening in New York of the Whitney Biennial, the always controversial survey of contemporary American art. The theme this time around is lowered expectations, writes Holland Cutter for the New York Times, and the result is a modest, low-key, sparsely populated affair. "A biennial for...

Get Creative at Top Artsy Hotels

TRAVEL

Mar 2, 2008 3:50 PM CST

Get Creative at Top Artsy Hotels

Pitched tent, disco balls enliven lodgings on Budget Travel list

(Newser) - A good hotel provides comfort; a great hotel ... inspiration? Artists touched up the staid look of these hotels, selected by Budget Travel for their fake-fur tapestry, psychedelic mazes, and speckled French graffiti:

The Winston, Amsterdam: This avant-garde hotel once displayed dead leaves; check out the Playnation room's trippy ceiling mural

...

Vatican Goes to Confessional in an Art Museum

Mar 2, 2008 9:36 AM CST

Vatican Goes to Confessional in an Art Museum

Church reveals Inquisition artifacts

(Newser) - Sure, thousands of accused witches and blasphemers were burned and tortured during the Roman Catholic Church’s centuries-long Inquisition in the Middle Ages—but, with the help of a new art exhibition, the Vatican hopes to show that it wasn't so bad after all, Newsweek reports. The “Rare and...

Scandal-Master Courbet Dazzles

NEW RELEASE

Feb 29, 2008 2:55 PM CST

Scandal-Master Courbet Dazzles

Major retrospective sheds light on realist painter

(Newser) - Parlaying scandal into success may seem a terribly modern ploy, but Gustave Courbet, the subject of a new retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum, mastered the art 150 years ago. Courbet, the realist painter and father of modern art, painted both gorgeous, subtle scenes and uglier, intentionally awkward tableaux. They...

Sonic Youth's Album Art for Sale

Feb 21, 2008 11:25 AM CST

Sonic Youth's Album Art for Sale

Painting that graced classic Daydream Nation cover goes up for auction

(Newser) - Music fans for whom Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation is an all-time classic will get a chance next week to bid on the painting that served as album-cover art, the Independent reports. Kerze (Candle), a 1983 work by German Gerhard Richter, is one in a series of still lifes based on...

Arts Nazis Stole Goes on Exhibit

Feb 20, 2008 1:07 PM CST

Arts Nazis Stole Goes on Exhibit

French/Israeli exhibit looks for owners of plundered paintings

(Newser) - Authorities in France and Israel are attempting to return paintings seized by Nazis during World War II to families to whom they belong, and have organized an exhibit of 50 “orphaned” works in Israel to solicit rightful claims. The tranquil themes of many of the works in the exhibit,...

Stolen Art Found in Parking Lot

Feb 19, 2008 6:55 AM CST

Stolen Art Found in Parking Lot

4 paintings snatched from Swiss museum recovered

(Newser) - The four 19th-century paintings stolen from a Swiss museum have reportedly been found in an unlocked car parked outside a Zurich psychiatric hospital. Although police have not yet confirmed the find, Swiss media are reporting that the $168 million worth of loot—one work each by Cézanne, Degas, Monet,...

$160M in Art Stolen in Zurich

Feb 11, 2008 9:10 AM CST

$160M in Art Stolen in Zurich

'Spectacular' heist nets 4 masterpieces by Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, and Cezanne

(Newser) - A gang of armed art thieves absconded with four masterpieces by Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, and Cezanne worth $160 million from a Zurich museum yesterday. The brazen daytime robbery follows a theft of two Picassos in Switzerland just two days earlier. The three masked thieves confronted a guard with guns,...

Thieves Snag 2 Picassos

Feb 8, 2008 2:28 PM CST

Thieves Snag 2 Picassos

German museum's paintings stolen from exhibition near Zurich

(Newser) - Thieves stole two Picasso paintings that belong to a German museum from a Swiss art gallery where they had been on display, the Guardian reports. The pilfered works, Tete de Cheval and Verre et Pichet, were on loan from the Sprengel Museum. Combined, they're worth $4.5 million, AFP reports.

For Jasper Johns, Gray Matters

OPINION

Feb 8, 2008 1:56 PM CST

For Jasper Johns, Gray Matters

Monochromatic Met show opens to raves

(Newser) - Visitors to the major Jasper Johns exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York might find the art a bit colorless. But that's precisely the point: The renowned American artist has filled the galleries with 119 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures executed in shades of gray. The nearly monochromatic show...

LA Museum's Extension Has Split Personality

Feb 7, 2008 1:00 PM CST

LA Museum's Extension Has Split Personality

Tug of war between benefactor and director evident

(Newser) - Critics are assessing Los Angeles's newest art institution, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, housed in a building by Renzo Piano on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It's a strange mix of public and private: The new building—to open Feb. 16—was funded by billionaire...

Russians Smash Records at Sotheby's Sale

Feb 6, 2008 1:22 PM CST

Russians Smash Records at Sotheby's Sale

Recession-defying London art auction brings in $230M

(Newser) - Sotheby's held its most successful sale ever of modern and impressionist art in London last night, with Russian collectors leading a buying frenzy on a day stock markets tumbled. The auction house sold 67 lots worth $230 million—topping high estimate, Bloomberg reports. "There was a lot of buying...

Kara Walker's Art Shocks, Awes

Feb 3, 2008 7:33 PM CST

Kara Walker's Art Shocks, Awes

Exhibit at the Whitney has 'nightmarish quality'

(Newser) - American artist Kara Walker stirs up “a toxic stew of race, sex, power and history” with her work—now enjoying a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York—exploding antebellum stereotypes about black bodies, Rosalind Cumming-Yeates writes in Ebony. The youngest artist ever to receive a Macarthur “...