Art News Galore

Gallery’s record on art damage is poor

Filed under: Art News — Alan @ 8:49 am

A new set of documents shockingly proved that hundreds of sculptures, paintings, and other pieces of artwork have been damaged while under the supervision of the leading galleries and museums in the UK.

Among the works damaged are pieces by Tracey Emin and Andy Warhol and include dinosaur bones and a doll house.  In one specific case a complete steam engine was destroyed by accident.  A few items were damaged to the point where they had to be scrapped, while others required thousands of pounds worth of renovations.

The National Galleries of Scotland were responsible for eight damaged pieces of art, including the Andy Warhol painting Mark of the Beast and the Tracey Emin piece My Uncle Colin. The Tate Modern damaged Ishi’s Light, 2003 by Anish Kapoor when a film cameraman hit it.

Paintings were also damaged by poor supervision at the Tate, which saw damage twice in one year to Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon: once when a child left fingerprints on it and another incident in which it was dented by a child.

For the most part, the documents found that incidents were most likely to occur while a painting or work was being taken down or installed by staff.  For instance, at the London National Gallery Domenico Beccafumi’s painting Marcia was broken in two when being removed from the wall.  An adhesive failure was blamed for the incident which led to repair costs.

The Victoria and Albert Museum also damaged a 15^th century Christ figure while removing it at the cost of £1,600 in repairs.

Nude 10 year old Brooke Shields Pulled from Tate

Filed under: Art crime — Alan @ 7:26 am

“Spiritual America,” a Richard Prince exhibition at the Tate Modern London, was delayed from opening Thursday after Scotland yard issued a warning to the museum that a photograph taken of Brooke Shields in the nude at age ten, may violate obscenity laws.

The Prince exhibition was set to be part of the program at the gallery entitled “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” but did not open after press reviews about the display and the Shields feature drew police attention.
The photograph was first seen in 2007 at the Guggenheim Museum.

It was a photograph that was authorized by Shield’s mother and was printed originally by Gary Gross.

Tate Modern released a statement saying, that for the moment the exhibition will remain closed, and that all items in the catalog are also not for sale at the moment.

Tate Modern Andy Warhol ‘footnote’ exhibition

Filed under: Exhibitions — Alan @ 8:59 am

The Tate Modern is premiering a new exhibition entitled Pop Life that is based around the premise that all art since the 1980s is nothing more than a ‘footnote’ to the works created by Andy Warhol.

The exhibition will contain some of the 2008 Damien Hirst Sotheby’s auction as well as some of the explicit works from Jeff Koons’s collection in which the artist is seen with his ex wife La Cicciolina in some porn-esque settings.

The common thread among all the pieces in the show is that most of good art has its roots in good business.

Of course, the viewpoint is highly controversial given that the entire collection could be described as commercial given the fact that the work by Hirst collected 110million quid at auction.

Koons defends his pieces however as well as the entire theme of Pop Life by stating that artists do not primarily think about making money, as that is just a simple part of life, but instead it is the power of creating art that draws artists in the field.

He stated that artists have always made money and gained political as well as economic power since the time of the monarchs and churches and that to see any type of non-commercial art you have to look back prior to the 19th century.

Pop Life will open on Thursday to the public and also contains work from Cosey Fanni Tutti who for a short time was a pornographic model as part of her artistic expression.