Last week a group of sticky-finers broke into a Stockholm museum and stole five art works by Warhol and Lichtenstein (that’s Roy). They’re reportedly not worth much, at least not by today’s standards, but still a hefty $500,000 and $670,000. Carina Aberg of the family-run Aberg Museum, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “They knew exactly what they were doing. They had been here and planned the whole thing.” Ahhh, yeah genius, who attends a museum exhibition and in a heat of spontaneity decides to steal artwork? More.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve heard reports of job applicants who are not extended employment opportunities due to pictures of the applicants on Myspace and Facebook. You’d think today’s youth would have added up this simple math and kept their dirty laundry to themselves. However, we just learned of another added feature to social networking sites–criminal prosecution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Heather Loring, a Clancco faithful, for this heads-up:

Artist Takashi Murakami is asking a Japanese court to stop a collector from selling his work. Murakami’s production company, Kaikai Kiki, managed to get a sculpture by the artist pulled from Christie’s London evening sale of postwar and contemporary art on June 30, 2008.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the NY Sun comes a story concerning London gallery Albion Gallery and their lawsuit against James Turrell. The lawsuit asks “a federal judge order Mr. Turrell to get to work on an uncompleted series of installations.” The series at issue, titled Tall Glass, involves projections of “a light field” within a room, according to legal papers. Donn Zaretsky has a retort to this story here.

After much confusion about the current status of film and photo shoots in NYC, we have what seems a clear answer (from Canada’s CBC no less).

Read the rest of this entry »

is not necessarily good for the gander. An article in Sunday’s NY Times asks what many a contemporary artist has asked: what do we do when a corporate conglomerate appropriates (read: steals) our artwork? More poignantly, what is a contemporary artist who herself steals or appropriates from mass media to do?

“I don’t consider what I do stealing,” says Christian Marclay. “I’m quoting cultural references that everyone is familiar with. I make art that reflects the culture I live in. […] I’m not trying to sell phones” (speaking of an i-Phone commercial).

This may be true. But…

Read the rest of this entry »

We should just make “The Deaccessioning of a Museum’s Collection” a permanent link. Every month a U.S. museum unloads a number of its gifter artworks from its collection, usually claiming that it needs to expand its mission by acquiring significant artworks (read: artworks with higher monetary value). We could argue the spectral benevolence of this gesture, but the fact remains that most of the time donors gift their artworks to an institution because they want it housed there, and because they want it viewed by its immediate community, regardless of its monetary value. According to Carol Vogel of the NY Times, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo sold 207 artworks at Sotheby’s for a total of $67.2 million. She applauds this gesture.

Read the rest of this entry »