The Week That Was (March 14 – 21, 2008)

NEW YORK—It was only a matter of time before the sub-prime crisis trickled down to the museum world. This week the L.A. Times reported that some California museums, including LACMA, are grappling with losses from the heightened interest rates on auction-rate bonds. Too bad they can’t ask Leonard Lauder to bail them out. The cosmetics mogul’s foundation is handing over a check for $171 million to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Also too bad they aren’t the fish-and-chip shop where Damien Hirst’s younger brother used to work, because if they were, they would now have a fish in formaldehyde that they could deaccession to the tune of £150,000! But sadly LACMA is not a fish-and-chip shop, and Damien Hirst’s brother definitely never worked there. So, you win some, you lose some.

You might not find a fish in formaldehyde, but there are sure to be other Hirsts available for sale at Art Basel in June. Have you reserved a hotel room yet? You haven’t? Well, Thomas Hirschhorn will install his 2003 artwork Hotel Democracy at the fair. It’s a real building with 44 rooms! You can’t stay in it, actually. But you can buy it — for $652,730.

A big price for Hirschhorn, then. And big prizes for … seemingly everyone! There were so many art prizes announced last week – the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography to Graciela Iturbide; the American Academy of Arts and Letters awards to Llyn Foulkes, Eric Holzman, Judith Linhares, Gordon Moore, Susan Smith, Charles Long, Anna Conway, Mark Greenwold, and Marc Trujillo; Altoids Awards to Ei Arakawa, Michael Patterson-Carver, Lauren Kelly, and Michael Stickrod; the Bell Award in Video Art to Stan Douglas — that critic Peter Plagens’s meditation on prizes in the March issue of Art in America magazine was perfectly timed. Plagens concluded, “The big philosophical problem with art prizes — I’ve no trouble with their economic aspect: Putting extra money in the hands of almost any artist is fine by me — is this: They posit by their very existence a hierarchy of artistic merit, then go to great lengths in their public pronouncements to deny that one exists.” That is very well formulated. Someone! Quick! Give Mr. Plagens a prize.

The Smithsonian got a prize of sorts, insofar as the institution has finally appointed someone — G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, to be exact — to the helm a year after Lawrence Small resigned when his spending was called into question. Meanwhile, the art fair Art Cologne is still looking for a new director…

And a French art dealer is looking for his pictures. Around 30 paintings by the likes of Cezanne, Monet, and Corot were swiped from the dealer’s house near Paris. By masked gunmen, at that.

Try to keep this straight: A 17th-century painting stolen by the Nazis from its original owner during World War II was recently discovered at Christie’s. The painting was returned to the heirs, who returned it to Christie’s, where it will go up for sale next month.

The Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College announced plans to open a Manhattan branch across from the New York Public Library. And the Morrison Hotel Gallery will open in the space formerly occupied by CB’s Gallery at 313 Bowery, the visual-arts arm of the famous punk rock club CBGB. As for the club itself, it is to become a John Varvatos boutique. Doesn't Varvatos do ads with the guitarist from Aerosmith in them? And isn’t Morrison Hotel’s first exhibition to be of photos of punk rock shows? We've come a long way from the real thing.

But there’s no use sitting around, playing old Ramones records and crying about the loss of legendary punk rock clubs. What are you, anyhow? An upholder of eternal values? “Critics are not the painting police nor the sculpture Swat team, not market regulators nor upholders of eternal values (there aren't any),” Guardian critic Adrian Searle wrote last week. “Those who think they have a role to play in this regard are as jumped up as they are unreadable.” Now, who’s up for a fish in formaldehyde? Going once, going twice.