The Week That Was (Feb. 22 – 29, 2008)

Photo by David M. Heald, © SRGF, New York

Tom Krens stepped down from his controversial directorship of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Damien Hirst Robert Rauschenberg Pablo Picasso Contemporary Market Bruised but Resilient After London Sales Overachieving Lots Drive London Imp/Mod Sales The Week That Was (June 13 – 20, 2008) Damien Hirst to Auction Own Works at Sotheby's Picasso Painting Breaks Sale Record in Australia

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Tom Krens stepped down from his controversial directorship of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, prompting blogger Tyler Green to remark, “I'm embarrassed to say that I'd actually forgotten that Krens was still around. The Gugg has become that irrelevant.” The move unleashed criticism of Krens's tenure (for example, “Now the [museum] can get back to business—the business of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting modern and contemporary art. Not the franchise business,” wrote Linda Yablonsky) as well as the usual speculation about a replacement (with names running from the relatively reasonable—LACMA director Michael Govan; the Hammer’s Ann Philbin—to the unlikely—Beyeler Foundation director and former Art Basel fair honcho Sam Keller?!?).

On the market front, the New York Times told us about the “Terrible Toll of Art Anxiety.” The subject here is not art world recession; rather it is “art paralysis,” a “widespread and often crippling malady, striking everyone from the new college grad in his or her first apartment to the super-rich banker, lasting anywhere from a few months to a lifetime,” aka, the terribly difficult crisis collectors can undergo when attempting to make a decision about what to buy.

But buyers had no such crises at the contemporary art sales in London this week. Sotheby’s and Phillips both saw spectacular results, and the art world breathed a sigh of relief. Also, Sotheby’s fourth-quarter results are up 46 percent from last year.

British museums are being pressured to deaccession underused artworks. (They’ve also been curating sloppily, according to Guardian critic Jonathan Jones.) Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo recounted the tour he made of U.S. museums for the express purpose of bidding sad farewell to some of his favorite objects that have been or are being reclaimed as cultural property of other countries, including the Euphronios krater, which recently left the Metropolitan Museum of Art to return to Italy. Continuing the trend, the University of Virginia returned two marble acroliths to Italy, and Italy, usually the beneficiary of restitutions, returned antiquities to Pakistan.

A museum in Basel rejected claims on 100 of its artworks by heirs of a Jewish art collector who, the heirs claim, sold the art after being persecuted by the Nazis. A judge rejected bankrupt art dealer Lawrence Salander's much ridiculed request to be rehired by his bankrupt gallery.

Robert Rauschenberg is suing a Florida gallery to keep it from selling his trash as art. Well, the times they are a’ changin’ (sort of). Seven years ago, you may recall, a janitor in a London gallery mistakenly cleaned up a very trash-like artwork by Damien Hirst. Participants at a discussion at the Museum of Modern Art last Saturday recalled an infamous moment in the aftermath of the sale of the Scull collection in 1973, when Rauschenberg nearly decked Robert Scull for making such a huge profit off his work.