The Metropolitan Museum is being sued and could face tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue.  According to a complaint filed November 14th, the “recommended” admission violates the Met’s lease terms with the city.  “The Met has engaged in deceptive practices”, according to plaintiffs Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson.  Admission and membership fees ($64.8 million in last fiscal year) account for more than a quarter of the Met’s operating revenue. The Met asserts that the lawsuit is frivolous, because the city had approved the policy.  (more…)

Exiled Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda acquired many masterpieces, including Picassos and Van Goghs, 146 of which are unaccounted for, according to The Philippine government. Andres Bautista, head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, told AFP: “The Marcoses were art aficionados and they spent millions of dollars buying up these paintings.” By all estimates the missing paintings are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. (more…)

Sotheby’s Russian Art Evening sale in London on Monday, November 26th, 2012 achieved £11,471,250 ($18,386,120), within its presale estimate. The sale saw sell-through rates of 89.3% by lot and 84.3% by value, with six new artist records. (more…)

Russian art sales got off to a rocky start in London on Sunday. MacDougall’s offered 45 lots but only sold nine in its Russian Art sale. Christie’s, however, fared somewhat better with £10.5 million – perhaps because of more realistic estimates. Just 68% of lots sold at the Christie’s sale.  £67.8 million worth of art was offered in total from all of the auction houses combined. (more…)

Ryan Gander, Imaginez l’Imaginaire, installation detail 2012, All images courtesy Palais de Tokyo

Ryan Gander‘s Esperluette, the first exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo‘s series “biboliothèque d’artiste,” explores and interprets the concept of the ampersand (&) as a symbol of the network of connections made by the human mind when solving a puzzle. Through a variety of images of everyday objects, sound installations, and books, Gander invites viewers to create their own stories based on the reactions and associations which occur in their own minds.

Ryan Gander, Imaginez l’Imaginaire, installation detail 2012

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The Leopold Museum has consigned three Egon Schiele drawings with a presale estimate of $17.6 million to Sotheby’s for their London sale in February. The sale of the works will pay for a restitution settlement of a 1914 Schiele painting which the museum purchased at auction in the 50s, years after it had been looted by the Nazis. The museum has settled on payments with 3 rightful heirs of the work to keep the painting. The founder of the museum, Rudolf Leopold, felt that the institution was not subject to Austria’s restitution law; however his son arranged to settle all outstanding claims after his father passed away in 2010.  (more…)

China’s recent auction results may indicate a maturing market, despite lower sales revenue than in 2011. A slowing economy is believed to be responsible for a decrease in sales, but demand is up for quality work by major 20th century Chinese artists. Christie’s sales totaled HK$783 million (USD$101.6 million), or 78% of lots sold, including art and wine. Poly Auction, the third-largest auction firm in the world, saw revenue of HK$518 million last week, with 64% of lots sold. (more…)

Critic Jerry Saltz says: “I love art, but I hate the astronomical prices it sells for.” So, last year he posted a request on Facebook for artists to make him a faux Richter painting, and describes his reaction to the final product: “All of the paintings seemed Richterian, but many had an Impressionistic, un-Richterian prettiness. Many looked too thought-out. Accidents looked intentional rather than discovered … then I understood that only when Stanley stopped thinking he was making a Richter could he make one.”  He has ordered more faux pieces by various artists. (more…)

Wayne Thiebaud, Cafe Cart (2012),courtesy Acquavella Galleries

Wayne Thiebaud’s most recent retrospective is currently on view at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. The exhibition is organized into different rooms under the simple headings, ‘places, people and things’, which express the fundamentals of his landscapes, figures and still lifes.

Wayne Thiebaud, Two Kneeling Figures (1966) , courtesy Acquavella Galleries (more…)

Lisa de Kooning, only child of artist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and illustrator Joan Ward (1927-2005), died on Friday, November 23rd, 2012 at age 56. The cause of death has not yet been determined. Johanna Liesbeth (“Lisa”) de Kooning was born in New York in 1956. She was raised in Manhattan and lived primarily in The Springs, East Hampton, near her father’s studio. She created a foundation in her father’s name and a Trust for her personal collection of his work. She was known as an active and prominent philanthropist, and worked devotedly to preserve the legacy of her father. She maintained her father’s studio as he had left it, forming an invaluable resource for research and study. Lisa was a sculptor herself, and championed a variety of philanthropic causes, from animals to children to art. She is survived by her three children.  (more…)

London auction houses will offer $108 million worth of Russian art this week. The number of Russian and former C.I.S. nationals residing in London is estimated to be around 500,000, and auction houses hope to capitalize on that market. (more…)

In The New Republic, art critic Jed Perl discusses the cult of Warholism in context of the “Regarding Warhol” exhibition at the Met: “If we are all Warholians, then even our distaste for Warhol is a Warholian act… I would be perfectly happy never to see anything by Andy Warhol again”, he says, and asks: “Could it be that Warholism is by its very nature irreconcilable with discrimination? … Warholism as a faith ought by now to be in ruins, although you certainly wouldn’t know it from the prices that Warhols are reaching in the auction houses”. (more…)

Christo is reportedly creating what he calls the world’s largest permanent sculpture, which will be installed in Abu Dhabi. The Mastaba, which is made out of 410,000 oil barrels, has an estimated production cost of $340 million, making it the world’s most expensive as well. An “art campus” is planned to be built near the structure, along with a luxury hotel and restaurant. (more…)

An increase in lawsuits against those who authenticate artwork is forcing experts and artists’ estates to ramp up liability insurance and in many cases, stop authenticating altogether. Art lawyer and author of “The Expert and the Object”, Ronald Spencer, says scholars are “nervous about taking a $500 fee and getting sued for $10 million”. (more…)

Richard Artschwager – Exclamation Point (Chartreuse) (2008), courtesy The Whitney Museum

As the work of Richard Artschwager dances in and out of familiarity, taking the commonplace forms of our everyday existence, the artist reshapes them into something foreign – just outside of the viewer’s descriptive vocabulary.  Now, after four decades of work in sculpture, painting and drawing, Artschwager’s work is the subject of a large-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York City. (more…)

Rachel Cohen, author of “A Chance Meeting”, and of the forthcoming “Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade”, writes about the dual history of art and investment banking over recent centuries: “There is more than a shadow of resemblance between the purchase of the Hirst skull in 2007 and the mortgage-backed-securities debacle that made of Lehman Brothers in the following year one of the great public pictures of vanitas we’ve had. And, when you look further into these intersections, you often find that what is really at stake is a change in the way we feel and understand time.”  (more…)

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Anish Kapoor’s video, “Gangnam for Freedom”, supporting Ai Weiwei’s quest for free speech, relied on major participants such as Southbank Centre director Jude Kelly and writer Hanif Kueishi, with contributions by institutions such as the Guggenheim. “Our film aims to make a serious point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression”, said Kapoor. (more…)

On Jan. 30th, 2013, Christie’s offers the “Rockefeller Madonna,” a devotional panel by Botticelli whose provenance includes the collection of John D. Rockefeller Jr., a family name that has been known to add marketing heft to auctions.  The auction house is catering to new international collectors showing particular interest in 14th – 16th century works. “While [the estimated $5-7 million painting] is one of the most expensive works in the Renaissance sale, it seems like a bargain, when paintings by Warhol and Kline brought more than $40 million apiece at Christie’s last week.” (more…)

Roy Lichtenstein, Oh, Jeff… I love you, too… but.., 1964, courtesy Tate Modern

The Tate Modern is holding a retrospective of work by master of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein, which consists of 127 works and runs through May 2013. The exhibition, the first major one since the artist’s death in 1997,  is said to attract more visitors than Damien Hirst’s 2012 show that brought people from all over the world through the doors of the Tate.

Lichtenstein was born in 1923 and passed away in 1997; he was considered to be the founder of Pop Art along with other preeminent artists such as Andy Warhol. His signature comic-book-inspired works that are brought to life with Ben-Day dots were the beginning of art based on popular culture. Images adopted from the media were rearranged and juxtaposed with unrelated material to relate to contemporary life.

Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!  (1963), via Tate Modern

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Stolen artwork is simply difficult to unload. “Nine times out of ten, when individuals commit a robbery like that, it is done by individuals or criminal organisations which have the ability to do a burglary, but they don’t usually have the ability to sell paintings,” says Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI’s art crime team and author of the memoir Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures. (more…)

Brian Donnelly, known as KAWS, discusses his Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon and his history as a toy-maker. The character, “Companion”, is in a retreating pose, hunched and covering its eyes. “I was thinking, God, if I had to sit there all day and have a million people pass me and stare, I’d be mortified”.  (more…)

A massive Antony Gormley sculpture, his largest to date, will go on view at White Cube next week. It is so enormous that visitors enter through one of the sculpture’s feet.  It is a direct response to the space afforded by White Cube’s South Galleries at Bermondsey.  (more…)

Ai Weiwei’s “Gangnam Style” video unwittingly focused attention on two relatively low-profile collectors and museum founders, Jens and Luise Faurschou. They own a major collection of postwar and modern artwork and recently opened a privately funded art museum in Copenhagen, Foundation Faurschou. (more…)