The Weeks That Were (April 25 – May 9, 2008)

NEW YORK—All other news of the past two weeks (apologies for skipping last week: Art World Week in Review was on vacation) seemed to sink to a plateau of inconsequentiality in light of lion Robert Rauschenberg’s death at 82.

Still. Most of the market news seemed to come from the East. Christie’s fourth sale in Dubai raked in over $20 million, with 77 percent of the buyers from the Middle East and Iran, and it was revealed that the Qatari ruling family has been on a major shopping spree including Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) and Francis Bacon’s Study from Innocent X, which went for $72.8 million and $52.7 million, respectively, at Sotheby’s New York a year ago. Christie’s, meanwhile, is sending an Andy Warhol Mao painting to Hong Kong and expects to sell it for a cool $120 million. Chinese artists, however, are none too happy about the sale of the Estella Collection, a group of works that recently sold for high-flying prices at Sotheby’s. The artists say the original purchaser (they are now being sold by a group of investors), New York dealer Michael Goedhuis, told them their art was going to a collector who had earmarked some of them for donation to a museum. New York gallery PaceWildenstein announced that it is opening a large branch in Beijing.

While recently appointed Art Basel co-director Cay Sophie Rabinowitz’s departure fueled the rumor mill — why did she "resign" after mere months on the job? — two former Art Basel employees went to work for Art Forum Berlin, that city’s annual contemporary art fair. In other Berlin news, two dealers — New York’s Friedrich Petzel and Cologne’s Gisela Capitain — are the latest to start a branch (together) in a city whose market may be heating up.

One museum director was feted — members of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s board pledged donations totaling $20 million in honor of incoming director Madeleine Grynsztejn – and another faced opposition — a group is forming in London to object to Nicholas Serota’s reappointment to the directorship of Tate Modern. Good news for Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad came in the form of Syria returning over 700 artifacts stolen since the fall of Saddam Hussein, though anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 looted objects are still missing.

Concerns about fakes run high in the Russian art market, according to one study. It seems Russian-born artist Ilya Kabakov has friends in high places — Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov will give $2 million toward Kabakov’s four-venue Moscow retrospective in September. One of those venues is the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, to which the Russian government just announced that it will give more than 4.2 billion rubles ($177 million) for a restoration to be completed in 2012. Also slated for completion in 2012 is the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new, 185,000-square-foot Renzo Piano-designed branch in downtown New York, for which the museum is planning a $680 million fundraising campaign.

Anonymous street artist Banksy’s “Cans Festival” opened in London. The Web site Gawker speculated on Banksy’s identity. Seven German artists had their scalps infested with lice for an exhibition in Israel, and Takashi Murakami made Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential People list. A sculpture by Antony Gormley is Britain’s most readily identifiable landmark, according to a recent study. Artist Brian O’Doherty will ceremonially bury his altar ego, Patrick Ireland, whom he adopted in 1972 in response to the violence with British military forces.