The Week That Was (April 4 – 11, 2008)

NEW YORK—The week was less notable for announcements of artworks coming up for sale than it was for sales that were canceled. It's one thing when Sotheby's London removes an 18th-century plate of armor from an auction of Islamic art after Sikh leaders insist it was a sacred relic; it is quite another when Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York cancels an entire sale of Diane Arbus photographs due to a lawsuit brought by a previous owner against the current consignor. In his art world e-mail newsletter "The Baer Faxt," Josh Baer cast a suspicious eye on the news; Baer thinks the estimates may have been too high, and the house may have caved in the face of an excruciating spate of buy-ins. In any event, the London Islamic art sales did spectacularly well even sans armor, setting records for a Koran and a key to Mecca's Kabba, and the photography sales (and fairs) in New York were hardly worse for the loss of the Arbus material.

In New York, Ab Ex painter Mark Rothko’s children are suing to exhume his remains from a Long Island cemetery and move them to a Jewish one in Westchester, a group of young artists staged a series of renegade exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art’s bathrooms, and superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s work was feted at the Brooklyn Museum with a performance by rapper Kanye West. In Japan, superstar British artist Damien Hirst’s signature artwork featuring a cow pickled in formaldehyde hit a snag entering the country for a museum exhibition due to restrictions on British beef. In Munich, German artist Hans Haacke was awarded damages from the city for a controversial artwork that was removed from an exhibition in 1991 and subsequently lost. In Liverpool a topiary sculpture of former Beatle Ringo Starr was beheaded.

American collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel announced that they will give museums in 50 U.S. states 50 works apiece. British artist David Hockney gave the largest painting he has ever made, a landscape, to London's Tate Britain and, at its unveiling, urged more artists to give works to the museum. "More artists should donate. They should think about it. You can’t quite trust collectors who say they’ll give to the Tate and often don’t," he said, then added that prices for contemporary art have “gone a bit mad." British megacollector Charles Saatchi will again showcase the keen eye for young British artists that made his name in the early ’90s with a show of the newest crop of YBAs at his new Saatchi Gallery next summer. But his inaugural exhibition for his new gallery this summer will be “The Revolution Continues: New Art from China.” Contemporary Chinese art continued to fetch astronomical prices at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, where a sale brought in nearly $18 million against an estimate of about $12 million. (Traditional Chinese art also sold well.)

And the Guggenheim-Hermitage museum in Las Vegas will close, though the two partner museums will have exhibition space in a new Zaha Hadid-designed museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, it was announced this week. Of the Las Vegas venture, the Vegas Sun reported that "the final hint came in February when Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the man responsible for expanding the Guggenheim, including to Las Vegas, stepped down." One wonders how well this bodes for Krens's other ongoing project, the planned Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi.