December 3rd, 2008 by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento in
Free Speech
An Art Basel Miami installation has been denied by Miami City officials.
Miami officials have barred the installation of artist Cooper’s Roman-style, black-ink-spewing Dark Fountain, which was commissioned for the fair, from a public park. “The ink stains,” says Max Sklar, the city’s tourism honcho.
Cooper says his work dramatizes the increasingly toxic state of the environment. “This isn’t Disney pretend,” he says. “This is real, live public art. You can look at it and enjoy it.
Sklar isn’t budging. “We’re not asking him to change the very nature of his work,” he says. “Just to accommodate it to a public setting.”
See full story at New York Magazine.
(Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on my Mind). One of 95 artworks in dispute).
In today’s NY Times, an interesting story regarding the legal dispute over famous Mexican artworks.
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November 23rd, 2008 by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento in
Criminal
Giuseppe Concepcion, a prominent New York and Miami art dealer, has been arrested on charges of selling forged paintings bearing the names of artists including Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Tom Wesselmann. Concepcion was arrested in Miami on Friday on wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property charges brought in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
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A Manhattan judge has allowed art collector Guido Orsi to pursue his lawsuit against Christie’s auction house for allowing a purported Basquiat painting it allegedly knew was a fake to be sold anyway. Christie’s auctioned off the untitled work in 1990 for $242,000, crediting it to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
We covered this story earlier this year, and now, the legal battle over Martín Ramírez’s drawings and art work continues to gain attention. The Guardian picks this story up today.
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Peru has reportedly approved a plan to sue Yale for thousands of Inca artifacts excavated by a U.S. scholar at Machu Picchu.
On a related note, officials from the Simferopol Art Museum in south Ukraine told Germany’s Foreign Ministry the museum [they] “had no plans to give up” the 87 paintings thought originally to have belonged to the Suermondt- Ludwig Art Museum in the German city Aachen.
Seems like this is the age of institutional censorship and curatorial alterations. That, or another clear example of what happens when political correctness becomes the overriding and fundamental factor in cultural production, to the extent that institutional critiques takes second-fiddle to issues of insensitivity, marking a clear path to a type of fascist appeasement to the lowest common denominator.
November 15, 2008
According to the Boston Globe, the New York Civil Liberties Union has demanded that New York City officials explain why they ordered a private art school to remove a banner displaying an image of Josef Stalin.
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