Star- Studded UK Contemporary Art Tour

January 22, 2009

Star-Studded £125M Contemporary Art Collection To Make UK-Wide Tour (London, UK)
The travelling exhibition, announced at Tate Modern yesterday, will include many of the 725 cutting-edge artworks given by... Anthony D'Offay to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland last year, on proviso that [they]... be displayed across the nation rather than hidden away in the vaults... and occasionally wheeled out for an urbane London audience.
The Independent (UK)

In Lawsuit, Artist Richard Prince Accused Of Lifting Images (New York)
French photographer Patrick Cariou has launched a lawsuit against Richard Prince, claiming that the artist improperly lifted images from Cariou's photographic survey of Rastafarian culture for a recent series of paintings. The suit, filed in New York, also names as defendants Larry Gagosian, Prince's dealer who displayed the series in a recent show titled 'Canal Zone', and publishing house Rizzoli, which co-produced the catalogue.
The Art Newspaper

Cheap, Imported Pictures Threaten Paris Street Painters (Paris, France)
Street painters are part of the romantic lure of Montmartre. ... Today, some 300 officially licensed artists work here. Almost all of their customers are tourists. They may not produce great art but they are skilled painters. And now they say their livelihoods are at risk because many of the souvenir shops in the area are selling cheap, mass-produced paintings from China and Eastern Europe.
BBC

Portrait Of Firth As Mr. Darcy Fetches £12,000 At Auction (London)
A portrait of actor Colin Firth as Mr Darcy has fetched £12,000 at Bonhams in London, double its estimated price. The oil painting, a prop from the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, received a number of advance bids. The painting was accompanied by a signed letter from Firth, in which the 48-year-old star claimed Mr Darcy 'has weathered better than most of us'.
BBC

When Art Doesn't Age Well, Does The Artist Owe The Buyer? (Issues)
Art is long and life is short, according to the old Roman saying, but sometimes art doesn't hold up its end of the bargain. The canvas warps, the metal bends, the paper turns brown.... [I]t's not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold.
Wall Street Journal

At The Scene Of The Crime: The Bergen-Belsen Memorial (Berlin, Germany)
Nothing about [the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial] dramatizes information for visitors the way, say, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington apparently feels it needs to. Divorced as it is from the sites of persecution, it turns relics of genocide like a Zyklon B canister and a cattle car that transported Jews to Auschwitz into props. Bergen-Belsen has the camp as evidence, or what's left of it.
The New York Times

It's Time America Rethinks Its Approach To Infrastructure (United States)
So much is made of the nation's neglect of infrastructure, yet the U.S. actually is spending record sums on it. We don't make progress because the nation fails to lay out new communities so they can be efficiently served by means other than the auto. A start would be to group people-intensive colleges and commercial centers as hubs along corridors served by transit and walkable streets.
Bloomberg