– THE BIG STORY –

Somebody call Steven Spielberg. A party of German scientists and scholars has set out to delve deep into a derelict silver mine near the Czech-German border in search of a buried treasure of Nazi-looted art that Adolf Eichmann personally ordered to be seized from Jewish industrialist and collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany—a trove that is believed to contain $800 million in Cézannes, Monets, Manets, and hundreds of other works. Guided by dusty Wehrmacht documents that Viennese historian Burkhart List says places the Havatny collection in two massive underground galleries carved into the mine, which a two hours drive from Dresden, the expedition has been heartened by testing that shows manmade structures to be present some 180 feet down. In pursuing the art, the group is following in the footsteps of the Monuments Men, the U.S. Army team that searched out looted artworks across Europe after the war ended—an immense undertaking that will receive a fresh spotlight at the U.S. National Archives this week, where newly-discovered material related to Hitler’s massive pillaging will be revealed.

– QUOTE OF THE DAY –

“I’ve pretty much withdrawn from the commercial art world. But I also feel that I have a responsibility to continue to engage the art world, at least as long as my work circulates within it and as long as I continue to teach. And I do think there is a lot to it that is worth fighting for. The struggle is to find ways to participate that don’t simply reproduce aspects of the art world that I find abominable, like its structure as a winner-take-all-market and its symbiotic, if not parasitic, relationship to extreme wealth and inequality.” – Artist Andrea Fraser, a pioneer of institutional critique during the 1990s, on her conflicted feelings about being involved with establishment events like the Whitney Biennial, which currently features her work.

– MUST READ –

A New Train for Old Train Tracks? – The Friends of the High Line are hoping that one of the elevated former rail’s generous patrons will be willing to buy them Jeff Koons‘s quixotically expensive Train sculpture, a giant chugging choo-choo dangling from an enormous crane that LACMA has estimated will cost $25 million—a price tag that has thus far prevented it from being installed at that not-so-cash-strapped museum. (NYT)

Republican Tries an “Anti-Hope” Poster – Christopher Knight takes a moment to hilariously eviscerate a right-wing illustrator’s painting of President Obama holding a burning copy of the Constitution, writing that the provocateur “failed” as an artist because he wasn’t able to accomplish his stated goals with the work. (LAT)

Don’t Invite Mondrian to Go Camping – Martin Gayford takes a charming look back on the Paris-based painter’s time in London, where he revealed a distaste for nature and dismissed his native Holland as “too many cows and too many fields.” (Bloomberg)

Body Politics in the Ukraine – The Kiev art scene has been energized by a protest against the Visual Culture Research Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy after the school’s president shut down an exhibition called Ukrainian Body—featuring such provocative political art as a piece comparing the country’s Parliament to a vagina—telling the media that “the exhibition is not closed, it is just locked.” (NYT)

An Art Show Worthy of John le Carré – Real-estate developer and New York tabloid sensation Janna Bullock, a former Guggenheim board member who rode a motorcycle across Russia with the polarizing onetime director Thomas Krens, has put on a show of her own art criticizingPutin‘s government, but Bullock and her Russian husband’s relationship with the Kremlin seems rather complicated. (NYT)

– ART MARKET –

A Glimpse Inside the Shark Tank – Emails released as part of a recent lawsuit suggest that the Gagosian Gallery went to unsavory lengths in order to make a $1 million commission off a $2 million Lichtenstein painting sale on behalf of a desperate consigner. (NYT)

Card Players Sketch Was Up Collector’s Sleeve – A long-lost watercolor study Cézanne made for his famous group of paintings has emerged in a Dallas collection and is now set to be auctioned at Christie’s in May for as much as $20 million—a price no doubt helped by the reported recent sale of a finished Card Players painting to the Qatar royal family for $250 million. (NYT)

– IN & OUT –

Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery has appointed Gaëtane Verna as its new director, hiring her from her post as director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette. (Artforum)

The artist Anita Steckel, whose erotically suggestive paintings and collages set women loose on male-identified landscapes like the phallic skyscrapers of New York (she wanted her “Mom art” to be a response to Pop art), has passed away at age 82. (NYT)

– VIDEO –

Watch the artist Gillian Wearing dance to an imaginary soundtrack of pop hits in a Peckham shopping center in 1994. (Guardian)

Posted on: March 27th, 2012 by Andrew
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