The Week That Was

The Art World Week in Review is a roundup of the top international visual arts stories to break over the previous week. The column will run every Friday on ARTINFO.

Conflict, construction, and cultural property loomed large last week. New York proved again that art and real estate are inevitable, if uneasy, bedfellows. Lawrence Salander of the Salander O'Reilly Galleries, which declared bankruptcy last fall in the wake of multiple lawsuits, is looking to sell the Manhattan town house he bought for $4.75 million four years ago. Today’s asking price? $25 million. (The gallery will also sell 35,000 art books and catalogues, which cost Salander more than $4 million to assemble.) Five avenues over from the now-shuttered Salander O'Reilly, Sotheby's will buy its Manhattan headquarters on York Avenue and 72nd Street for $370 million; the auction house sold the property to RFR Holding Corp. for $175 million in 2002. RFR, owned by art collector Aby Rosen, will receive special terms on Sotheby's art sales. A few miles to the south and west, the Chelsea Art Museum may face foreclosure after a deal to sell the air rights above the museum for $8.5 million fell through.

Frank Gehry, whose space-agey building for Barry Diller is just a few blocks south of the possibly doomed Chelsea Art Museum, will design the next Serpentine Gallery temporary pavilion in London. A few days after L.A. collector Eli Broad confirmed that he will not donate his collection to LACMA, Zaha Hadid was chosen to design the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. And Steven Holl will design a set of buildings for a new arts complex for Princeton University. Holl, fresh off his success with the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, apparently suits Princeton’s need for, as executive president Mark Burstein put it, “an architect who thrives on a complex program.”

Italy celebrated the return of the Euphronius Krater, which until recently was in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and reached an agreement with New York collector and Met trustee Shelby White that ten objects in White's collection were looted from Italy and will return. A new book presents the theory that Chinese antiquities housed in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum were smuggled there illegally in 1930, sometimes in missionaries' luggage, by one Bishop White. United States federal agents stormed four California museums, furthering their ongoing investigation into the smuggling of Southeast Asian and Native American artifacts. Oskar Kokoschka's 1913 painting Two Nudes (Lovers), is the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the museum wants to keep the painting, which was sold during the Nazi occupation of Austria. Heirs of the Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov are asking the Russian government to compensate them on works Lenin seized in 1918, and which are now housed in Russian museums and currently on view at London's Royal Academy.
  
Christian Viveros-Faune, a regular art reviewer for the Village Voice, will no longer write for the paper, after blogger Tyler Green, in an interview with Faune on Green's site Modern Art Notes, brought up the matter of the possible conflict of interest arising from Faune's current positions as managing director and curatorial adviser of New York's Volta art fair and curatorial adviser to Chicago’s Next Art Fair. Three German scholars now believe that only a small minority of the preparatory drawings for the Sistine Chapel are by Michelangelo. One historian claims that a painting by Piero della Francesca could solve a 15th century murder.

"Art isn't meant just to press a happy button, pull the tragedy lever, turn the prettiness dial or ring the relevance bell. And it should do more than tick issues or be well-meaning. If it is any good, art deals with the complexity of being in the world,” wrote Guardian critic Adrian Searle in a review of an exhibition of work by Darren Almond. “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” says text, in neon, in thy eponymous 1967 artwork by Bruce Nauman, who has just been chosen to represent the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale.