ART TIMES | HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ART NEWS
Highlights from the International Art Media BALLOONS TO TRANSFORM HADRIAN’S WALL INTO WORLD’S LONGEST WORK OF ART. INDEPENDENT (UK) Artists will use 450 balloons and thousands of light emitting diodes to turn the 2,000-year-old Hadrian’s Wall into the world’s longest work of art. New York digital arts collective YesYesNo has been invited by organisers of the London 2012 festival to transform the wall, built by Roman invaders to guard the northern frontier of their empire. “Connecting Light” will suspend hundreds of white weather balloons above the 73-mile wall, which snakes across hill and dale in northern England just south of the Scottish border. The balloons will be fitted with lights and networked so they can communicate with one another. Viewers will be able to submit short messages which will be transformed into pulses of colored light that pass along the wall in patterns reminiscent of Morse code. HAVE PUSSY RIOT SPARKED A NEW WAVE OF GRRL POWER? GUARDIAN (UK) The Pussy Riot trial sparked global protest. Will it mobilise artists, too? Laura Snapes meets music’s angry young women Laura SnapesIt’s a Thursday night in Leeds and people are gathering outside the gay bar Queens Court for a march in support of Russian punk collective Pussy Riot. Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova are due to be sentenced the following day, the culmination of their trial on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. (For performing their 40-second, Putin-denouncing “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February, they will each receive two years in jail.) In the meantime, this solidarity march is one of many taking place around the world. LOVING HOME WANTED FOR SAATCHI COLLECTION. THE ART NEWSPAPER What will happen to Charles Saatchi’s collection? Two years ago, the high-profile British collector offered the cream of his holdings to the nation, under a grand plan to bring works such as Tragic Anatomies, 1996, by the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin’s 1998 piece My Bed to the people. But culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that the Arts Council accepts Saatchi’s bequest has stalled according to the Daily Telegraph. A spokesperson for Tate, meanwhile, reportedly said that it had not wished to intervene in ongoing discussions with the Arts Council, leaving Saatchi’s collection homeless. MAYFAIR’S ART GALLERIES UNDER THREAT FROM DEVELOPERS. GUARDIAN (UK) Cork Street gallery scene, hub of London art world for almost 90 years, could be broken up by luxury apartment deal.Nearly a third of Cork Street’s galleries will be forced out if £90m property deal goes ahead, including the Mayor Gallery which opened in 1925. As one of the country’s most important art hubs for nearly 90 years, the exhibition spaces of Cork Street have launched the British careers of many major modern artists – with the Mayor Gallery alone giving Paul Klee, Francis Bacon, Max Ernst and Joan Miró their first London shows.But now seven of the 22 galleries, including the Mayor, will have to leave the Mayfair location as early as next year in what owners fear could be “the death of the whole street”. AUSTRALIAN LAWYER DOESN’T REMEMBER STEALING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF ART. HUFFINGTON POST By Lucas Kavner: It’s the oldest criminal defense in the book, heard in courtrooms and on soap operas the world over: the old “I don’t remember doing it” defense. Well, this time it actually worked.Michael Gerard Sullivan, a lawyer in Sydney, Australia, was accused of stealing two paintings from the Katoomba Fine Art Gallery in December 2008.
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He was dining in the gallery’s restaurant, “in between courses,” when he decided to pop upstairs on the fire escape, enter the gallery, and steal two paintings under the watchful eye of the security cameras. ABC News in Australia recently aired the security footage from the incident. At one point, Sullivan lines the paintings up in the gallery and assesses them before deciding to head out, seemingly oblivious to his crime. ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION: LIBERATING OR CHEAPENING? MEMEBURN: Talita Calit. Walter Benjamin famously wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.” Since then (and even more so today, much more) people have become accustomed to seeing copies of original artworks reproduced as posters, album covers, calendars, books and endless other mediums. In Benjamin’s context, mechanical reproduction referred to copies of photographs and film for example. Today digital reproduction can reproduce and manipulate thousands of photographs, songs, artworks, videos etc. Think of scanners, fax machines, downloading and copying songs. The number of things that are being digitally reproduced today are beyond quantifying. ART COLLECTOR’S HOPES FOR A VAN GOGH REST ON ONE RED HAIR THE GLOBE AND MAIL: MICHAEL KESTERTON: “A human hair that may have belonged to Vincent van Gogh has been removed from a painting in an attempt to prove or disprove whether he painted the work of art,” The Daily Telegraph reports. “In a bid to settle one of the mysteries of the art world, the three-inch-long[(8-centimetre] red hair was lifted from Still Life with Peonies and DNA samples taken from it will be compared with those from van Gogh’s living relatives. If confirmed as a van Gogh, the painting could fetch … £39-million [$61-million].” ROBERT HUGHES: THE GREATEST ART CRITIC OF OUR TIME Guardian (UK) Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74, was simply the greatest art critic of our time and it will be a long while before we see his like again. He made criticism look like literature. He also made it look morally worthwhile. He lent a nobility to what can often seem a petty way to spend your life. Hughes could be savage, but he was never petty. There was purpose to his lightning bolts of condemnation. That larger sense of purpose can best be seen in his two classic books on art, The Shock of the New and Nothing If Not Critical. MR BRAINWASH: BANKSY’S STREET-ART PROTÉGÉ AND HIS LATEST BRAINWAVE INDEPENDENT (UK) The master of hype arrives in London for a blockbuster new show. Matilda Battersby meets him Mr Brainwash first came to the world’s attention as the star of Banksy’s Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. The film was so extraordinary it was met with a storm of hoax accusations. It followed the then Thierry Guetta, a perfectly ordinary (well, ordinary-ish) French-born owner of a vintage clothes shop in Los Angeles, who had an obsessive hobby for filming things. With a camcorder permanently attached to his face and no need for sleep, Guetta began turning his lens on other nocturnal creatures: street artists.
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