DID SAATCHI BOOST BOOK TO BESTSELLER LIST WITH AIDES' BUYING SPREES? Of course he (allegedly) did Elisabetta Grillo testified in court that she took taxis around London buying his book from a number of shops across the city, as many as four times a week. "Charles had written a book, and he wanted it high in the list," she told the court. Grillo and her sister Francesca <http://tinyurl.com/lcm9eqc> were both assistants to Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson during their marriage. The two sisters stand accused of using the couple's credit cards to spend more than $1.1 million on themselves. According to Grillo, she was instructed to withdraw cash from the credit card accounts in order to make the book purchases. "He doesn't like me to go with the cards to buy the books," Grillo said. "Maybe because it was Conarco [Saatchi's company] and they would find out it was him." Advertising executive and art impresario Saatchi and his ex-wife Lawson, who divorced in July, have been embroiled in the high-profile fraud case. An e-mail Saatchi sent to Lawson, which became part of the case, said she and her daughter were "so off your heads on drugs" that the Grillo sisters were allowed to spend whatever they liked. Grillo testified that Lawson used cocaine regularly and have said they were covering up for her drug use in exchange for use of the couples' credit cards. Lawson has denied the allegations. The television chef, who has admitted only to using the drug once during her 10-year marriage to Saatchi and a handful of times with her first husband, says she was reluctant to testify in the case and that Saatchi threatened to "destroy" her if she did not. Saatchi's most recent book, "The Naked Eye," was published in the U.S. in November._Carolyn Kellogg_LATimes JAY Z AND BEYONCÉ STILL HAVE SUCH PASSIONATE SEX THAT THEY DAMAGE ARTWORKS It’s right there on “Drunk in Love,” the third track of Beyoncé’s surprise new eponymous album. >From the guest verse by Jay Z: Foreplay in the foyer fucked up my Warhol Slid the panties right to the side Ain’t got the time to take drawers off, on sight Béy shares the scene in the morning: We woke up in the kitchen saying “How in hell did this shit happen?” Oh baby Drunk in love we be all night Last thing I remember is our Beautiful bodies grinding off in that club Drunk in love Going to recommend that you download the album immediately. Work in the The Observer office is at an absolute standstill._GalleristNY >>> LAUDER, FIANCEE CALL IT OFF Billionaire Leonard Lauder is a single man again._NYPost >>> NIGELLA LEFT COCAINE ALL OVER HER HOUSE, EX-AIDE TESTIFIES Nigella Lawson left a trail of cocaine through her house — with the white powder turning up in the bathroom, bedroom drawers and even on CD covers, an ex-personal assistant testified Thursday. The British celeb chef used the drug “like every three days . . . regularly,’’ Elisabetta Grillo, 41, told a London court, contradicting Lawson’s earlier claim that she had taken the drug only seven times. “I was cleaning the house, and I noticed little packets on top of the loo, the toilet,’’ Grillo testified, describing one of the many occasions she claims to have found white powder in homes Lawson shared with both her late husband, John Diamond, and ex-husband, high-powered art dealer Charles Saatchi. Grillo said she found “white stuff’’ on CDs and a credit card, and once opened a drawer to find money, including American currency, “rolled up with white stuff.’’ But pressed on whether she had ever actually seen Lawson do cocaine, Grillo answered, “No.” Grillo and her sister, Francesca, 35, are on trial for allegedly bilking more than $1 million from Saatchi and Lawson, using the couple’s credit cards to buy themselves designer clothing and other extravagances. The sisters have said the couple let them spend whatever they wanted, as long as they didn’t reveal Lawson’s alleged drug habit. Lawson has said the fraud trial — and the claims that she’s a cokehead — were concocted by Saatchi because she left him._NYPost >>> 17 TIMES THIS WOMAN TURNED HER NAILS INTO ACTUAL WORKS OF ART <http://tinyurl.com/kvvnvxc> >>> MARK FLOOD PAINTINGS WERE ON TELEVISION LAST NIGHT In case you were wondering, yes, folks, that was Zach Feuer’s gallery in last night’s episode of CBS’s Elementary. Maybe you were clued in by the text and lace paintings by Mark Flood?_ArtInfo >>> KALASHNIKOVS AND STRIPTEASE: INSIDE THE REAL RUSSIA Head behind the scenes of Sochi, the subtropical city that will host the 2014 Winter Olympics ... <http://tinyurl.com/lnlyye3> >>> HOW IS IT THAT SO MANY ARTISTS ARE STILL SO MARGINALIZED BY RACE, ETHNICITY, AND EVEN GENDER When many celebrity artists are women and people of color? When Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith are given solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum or the Museum of Modern Art, why is it still necessary to have exhibitions such as the recent Les Papesses in Avignon or institutions like the National Museum of Women in the Arts? To give another example, when Subodh Gupta shows with Hauser & Wirth and Anish Kapoor creates a public sculpture for London costing over 30 million US dollars, why does nearly every presentation of an Indian artist in the United States appear in the context of a “contemporary art from India” exhibition? Do these groupings of artists by demographics rather than technique, subject matter, or formal concerns inadvertently limit the artists’ narratives to their biographies rather than their artistic accomplishments?_Hyperallergic >>> HERE ARE 10 WORKS OF ART THAT MAY GET YOU THROWN OFF FACEBOOK <http://tinyurl.com/krvlva8> >>> GOOGLE OPEN GALLERY LAUNCHES, PROVIDES FREE VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS Google has launched a new online tool to allow museums, galleries and individuals to create online art exhibitions. Google Open Gallery <http://tinyurl.com/kurho5p> became available for public use this week, though potential users must request an invitation from Google to use the free service. The new application will allow galleries, museums and other individuals to upload content and create virtual exhibitions and tours. It also enables organizations to publish a new site or add on to an existing site. In addition, the service provides users the capability of adding background information that visitors would normally see at an actual exhibition. Google Open Gallery featured 45 exhibitions from institutions and individuals around the world. Google Open Gallery is being launched as part of Google Cultural Institute, which has partnered with major art organizations around the world to put content online. Another service, Google Art Project, allows museums to upload high-resolution images of artwork for public viewing._LATimes >>> THE BRITISH LIBRARY PUTS 1,000,000 IMAGES INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, MAKING THEM FREE TO REUSE & REMIX Earlier this week, Oxford’s Bodleian Library announced that it had digitized a 550 year old copy of the Gutenberg Bible <http://tinyurl.com/mznae3q> along with a number of other ancient bibles <http://tinyurl.com/ld4ytc4> , some of them quite beautiful. Not to be outdone, the British Library came out with its own announcement on Thursday: "We have released over a million images <http://tinyurl.com/md5fvff> onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images <http://tinyurl.com/layjpkk> were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of." _OpenCulture >>> RIJKSMUSEUM WELCOMES TWO MILLIONTH VISITORS SINCE REOPENING On December 3 the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Wim Pijbes, bouquet in hand, welcomed Netta Maman and and her friend Verdit Aftabi<http://tinyurl.com/jwr2sau> , the institution’s two millionth visitors since it reopened on April 13, 2013,_ArtInfo >>> A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT THE RIJKSMUSEUM'S RENOVATION FROM HELL Was it that bad? Well, it certainly wasn't smooth.<http://tinyurl.com/lkfpj88> >>> AN ART GIFT IDEA: SPONSOR A SKULL AT THE MÜTTER MUSEUM! A Philadelphia museum has the perfect holiday gift idea for the person who has everything, including a love of science and a dark sense of humor. A $200 donation buys the preservation of one of 139 skulls dating back to the 19th century in a collection at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Subtle vibrations from footsteps of museum patrons have caused the skulls, which have been on continuous display for more than 100 years, to lose or crack their teeth, said curator Anna Dhody._Reuters >>> SHORTLIST FOR 2014 HUGO BOSS PRIZE ANNOUNCED The shortlist for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize has been released. Paul Chan, Sheela Gowda, Camille Henrot, Hassan Khan, Steve McQueen, and Charline Von Heyl are contenders for the prize,_Artforum >>> THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS MISSING PAINTING It's a century since the man who stole the Mona Lisa was finally caught, two years after vanishing with the masterpiece. Today it's easily the most famous painting in the world, but it took a theft to cement its status. Vincenzo Peruggia was not the kind of criminal mastermind that makes up the majority of art thieves in Hollywood films. He was not a genius catburglar. He managed to walk into the Louvre in Paris and walk out with the Leonardo painting after minimal preparation. But his theft created a sensation. La Joconde - as the French typically dubbed the Mona Lisa - vanished for more than two years. It was recovered on 10 December 1913, when Peruggia was caught after handing the painting to Alfredo Geri, an antique dealer in Florence. "This was the single most famous property theft outside war time," says Noah Charney, author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting. t's easy to assume that the case was big because the Mona Lisa was already "the world's most famous painting". It wasn't. Its status was dramatically enhanced by the affair. <http://tinyurl.com/oewbcvo> _BBC >>> THE LATEST LEONARDO DEBATE The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo never fails to stir up the experts, the press, and the public. There are, after all, only 15 to 20 paintings—finished and unfinished—that are generally attributed to him. In early October, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported the existence of a painting closely resembling Leonardo’s colored chalk and pastel drawing of the noblewoman Isabella d’Este in the Louvre. One scholar has “no doubts” that this painting <http://tinyurl.com/k98nk7t> is a Leonardo, but another calls the attribution “not serious.”_ARTnews >>> LEGAL WIN FOR CALIFORNIA FAMILY SEEKING TO RECOVER PISSARRO PAINTING A Jewish family from San Diego that has been seeking to recover a painting <http://tinyurl.com/klslmaq> by Camille Pissarro that a relative sold during the Holocaust has received a legal victory from a panel of judges who ruled this week that the family can pursue the case, reversing an earlier court decision that had favored the painting's present owner._LATimes >>> SUN MAY SET ON THE COLLECTED WORKS OF A WESTERN ICON The work of the late Harry Jackson ran the gamut from abstract expressionism <http://tinyurl.com/kp4zhma> , inspired by his friend Jackson Pollock, to the Western art <http://tinyurl.com/mpmehe2> for which he was best known. His sculpture of a hard-riding John Wayne <http://tinyurl.com/l2btx9c> was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1969. Most of Jackson's life work is still at his studios in Cody, Wyo. But unless a major donor steps forward, it will be sold piec emeal to pay the bills._NPR >>> THIEF WALKS OFF WITH COURTHOUSE ART; '3-DIMENSIONAL' PICTURES WORTH $5 EACH, TOPS It’s not every day that a Columbia County Board committee meeting includes a report of an art theft. But that’s what happened Wednesday, when the County Board’s judiciary and property committee met. It was an afterthought, the “one more thing” that Clerk of Courts Susan Raimer appended to the end of her monthly report to the committee. About a week before Thanksgiving, Raimer said, somebody walked off with three pictures that had decorated the walls of the Branch 2 jury room — a second-floor room that is used not only by deliberating jurors, but also by attorneys conferring with clients, or courthouse employees seeking a table to eat their lunches. The framed 5-by-7-inch pictures are worth $5 each, tops, according to Raimer. They’re scenic images — a tree, a lighthouse and a landscape — rendered in such a way that they look three-dimensional, and with images that can change depending on the angle from which they’re viewed. For example, the tree picture has leaves if viewed from one angle and is bare from another angle._PortageDailyRegister >>> IF THE DEFENDANTS ARE FOUND LIABLE by Donn Zaretsky The Wall Street Journal has an update on Marguerite Hoffman's strange, "self-defeating" lawsuit for breach of a confidentiality provision in an agreement for a Rothko she sold. The trial starts in Dallas next week. The agreement provided that the parties would makes "maximum effort to keep all aspects of this transaction confidential," and the claim is that the buyer breached that promise, not by talking about the transaction to anyone, but instead by selling the work at auction, where, although "the Sotheby's catalog and website didn't name Mrs. Hoffman as a prior owner," the "publicity surrounding the auction ... outed her as a previous seller."_ArtLawBlog >>> FORMER KNOEDLER DIRECTOR SETTLES DEFAMATION LAWSUIT The former director of the shuttered Knoedler gallery, Ann Freedman, settled a defamation lawsuit against the gallerist Marco Grassi yesterday, 12 December. As quoted in Freedman’s defamation complaint, Grassi said: “It seems to me Ms. Freedman was totally irresponsible and it went on for years… A gallery person has an absolute responsibility to do due diligence, and I don’t think she did it. The story of the paintings is so totally kooky. I mean, really. It was a great story and she just said, this is great.” In his retraction, Grassi said: “Regretfully, I made these comments without having full knowledge of the facts about Ms Freedman’s diligence, including the many years of research conducted about the provenance of the works or the many scholars, museums, conservators, and dealers to whom she had shown the works. I therefore retract my comments and apologise for any harm they may have caused.”_ArtNewspaper >>> ACCOMPLICE IN SELLING STOLEN INDIAN ARTIFACTS AND FAKING OWNERSHIP CONFESSES by Marion Maneker Aaron Freedman <http://tinyurl.com/ls4gbnd> suffers from MS and is in a wheelchair. He says the condition made it difficult to get work at a reputable gallery so, instead, the 41-year-old helped sell and falsify ownership for stolen Indian artifacts. Freedman has now admitted this in court, according to the New York Post late last week: "Freedman worked at the now shuttered Madison Avenue gallery Art of the Past for twenty years and helped Subhash Kapoor, 64, create fake ownership histories and peddle the valuable idols to leading museums and private collectors all over the world. […] Freedman admitted he helped Kapoor steal and hide a $15 million sandstone statue stolen from India of the goddess Yakshi gracefully standing beside a tree. The Princeton NJ resident also confessed to selling and shipping a $5 million statue of the Hindu deity Shiva to the National Gallery of Australia in 2007."_ArtMarketMonitor >>> SWISS BILLIONAIRE SUSPECTED OF AVOIDING TAXES ON $85M IN ART The Dolder Grand in Zurich has a large art collection that is now the subject of a Swiss investigation: "The owner of the establishment, Urs E. Schwarzenbach, the subject of an investigation by the Federal Customs Administration. According to preliminary information gathered, the billionaire collector and would put him in his hotel 45 works of art valued at about 75 million francs. And this without paying the 8% tax on the value added due to the Swiss state. "The famous gallery Gmurzynska based on Paradeplatz in Zurich, is also under investigation: officially, the paintings were imported by the gallery, which allows, according to the Customs Act, to temporarily escape taxes. Counsel for the parties concerned have not responded to our requests. As the investigation is ongoing, customs do not speak about the case. "Oliver Brand, chief of criminal cases to the Federal Customs Administration, says that “tax fraud in the field of art has increased sharply in recent years” in Switzerland._ArtMarketMonitor >>> CHRISTIE’S STORAGE HIT BY SECOND LAWSUIT OVER STORM DAMAGE StarNet Insurance Co, the insurer for the LeRoy Neiman Foundation and the artist’s estate, filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court claiming that the storage company’s negligence caused more than $10m in damages to Neiman’s art <http://tinyurl.com/kh7ch92> . StarNet says it paid the foundation and estate up to the limit of their insurance coverage and is now seeking that amount from Christie’s Fine Art Storage Services. Neiman, who died last year, was one of America’s most popular artists, best known for his brightly coloured sports scenes and largely ignored by critics. In August, AXA Art Insurance filed a similar suit, claiming $1.5m in damages to art collected by the late cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and stored at Christie’s Brooklyn warehouse, which they say was left unprotected on the ground floor during Sandy._ArtNewspaper >>> THIRTY PAINTINGS STOLEN FROM STATE MUSEUM SEIZED IN SIMULTANEOUS RAIDS Police have seized 30 important paintings stolen from state museums during a raid this week, daily Radikal reported Dec. 7. The seized material included works of prominent Turkish and Ottoman painters such as Fikret Mualla, İbrahim Çallı, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Hoca Ali Rıza. A total of 302 pieces were stolen from the State Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Ankara, according to an inventory of approximately 5,000 works of art carried out by the Culture Ministry in 2010. The report claimed that 256 of the paintings were completely missing while 46 had been replaced with fake replicas. The authenticity of 30 more art works was also described as "highly suspicious," according to the report._HürriyetDailyNews >>> SOTHEBY’S SUED BY WINDEX-MAKER S.C. JOHNSON OVER FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT DESK AND CHAIR One week before its important 20th century design sale, Sotheby’s was hit with a suit concerning its featured items: a rare desk <http://tinyurl.com/mwe3rc6> and chair from the S.C. Johnson and Son Administration Building, designed in 1938, and widely held to be one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic architectural works. Like the building, the furniture that was designed for it exemplifies American Modernism. But according to the complaint filed yesterday in federal court in New York by S.C. Johnson and Son, Inc. (S.C. Johnson) the company that manufactures Windex and Pledge claims the desk and chair set for next week’s sale are stolen goods. While S.C. Johnson does on limited occasions, as per the complaint, loan furniture and objects designed by Wright to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its policy is not to otherwise transfer, sell, loan, or gift, them. “Accordingly,” reads the complaint, “the removal of the Desk and Chair from the Administration Building was not authorized.”_ArtInfo >>> TRADE LET DOWN BY COURT RULING German auction buyers beware. Salerooms in the country have almost no liability when works bought at auction turn out to be fake or miscatalogued, provided that due diligence checks have been undertaken and that there is no proof of intent or gross negligence. Protection for buyers is only marginally stronger elsewhere, although both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, for example, offer a five-year warranty on works they sell that are subsequently proved to be inauthentic (although the terms and conditions are carefully worded in their catalogues)._ArtNewspaper >>> IMAGES OF A THREE-PENNY WAR by Blake Gopnik These <http://tinyurl.com/n8c9kzq> are two pages from “War Primer 2”, a gripping artist’s book by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin that I saw in the New Photography 2013 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The book is an intervention into another volume: Bertholt Brecht’s own “War Primer”, which he published in German in 1955. It consisted of press images from World War II paired with four-line poems that cast light – and doubt – on the photos’ meanings. Broomberg and Chanarin have simply taken Brecht’s pages (in their 1998 English translation) and collaged on images of our recent “War on Terror” that they found on the Web. It’s sad, but I guess inevitable, that over more than 50 years the issues and imagery have stayed so much the same. The artistic strategies have too, which is much more surprising. When they work this well there may be no reason to change them. _Newsweek/DailyBeast Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Art for Cars: art4carz.com Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
