The Week That Was (June 27 – July 4, 2008)

NEW YORK—The week’s auctions in London continued with such eye-popping figures — $34.4 million for a Francis Bacon painting, $23.5 million for a Lucian Freud painting, $25.7 million for a Jeff Koons sculpture — that the New York Times reporter Carol Vogel speculated about the London market beginning to really rival New York's. The high results prompted Andrew Johnson of the Independent, on the other hand, to ponder the gender gap — the discrepancy between prices realized by men and women artists.

Op artist Victor Vasarely's daughter-in-law was accused of stealing his artworks from a storage facility in Chicago. An Indonesian curator got jail time for helping to steal a group of ancient Buddhist statues. “It was a big mistake... I very much regret it and accept this sentence,” the 70-year-old curator reportedly said. Would that all thieves were so contrite!

Meanwhile, a window onto the intended fates of stolen pictures opened up when a French citizen living in Cooper City, Florida, was arrested for negotiating the sale of four paintings, including one by Monet, stolen from a museum in Nice, France, last year. (The paintings were recovered last month.) And the Israel Museum in Jerusalem paid a Polish family so that it could hold onto two ancient medallions that were discovered to have been stolen from the family by the Nazis during World War II.

Mixed blessings for Brit art provocateuse Tracey Emin: Her first full-scale mid-career retrospective is to open in Edinburgh in August... but a sponsor has yet to step up to the plate. And her first public work was discovered to have been stolen and then, on the very day she issued a public plea that it be returned, was left at the site of the crime with a note of apology from the thieves.

Film director Peter Greenaway finally got the green light from Italy to project a light show onto Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan. “If Leonardo was alive now... he would be handling high-definition cameras,” Greenaway speculated.

The Cleveland Museum of Art unveiled the first part of a $350 million expansion and renovation project (of which $145.5 million still needs to be raised). Meanwhile the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced that it has reached a fund-raising goal of $500 million, much of which will go toward its $345 million expansion. “Nonprofits never move entirely out of the fund-raising mode,” director Malcolm Rogers told the Boston Globe. In an interesting detail, $2.1 million came from museum staffers. That would raise hackles on the other side of the pond, where British Museum employees went on strike over what they called an “inadequate” pay raise. This during the same week that the museum reported record attendance figures for its Chinese Terracotta Army exhibition, and its director, Neil MacGregor, was reportedly approached about a job heading up the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“[O]ur civilization is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests,” wrote Martin Bernheimer in the Financial Times. “Audiences, not judges, select winners.” No surprise, then, that the Brooklyn Museum of Art just opened a “crowd-curated” exhibition. On the West Coast, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight argues that the exhibitions that really shouldn’t be in museums are those of private collections. Of the exhibition  “Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection,” which just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he points out that “the show doesn't even have a curator.” He concludes, “A no-private-collections rule at LACMA, like the ones at MoMA and the Met, is long overdue.”