Month: January 2014

Federal Court Judge Rules That “$7.00” Renoir May Return to Baltimore Museum of Art

Irina Tarsis, Esq.'s avatarCenter for Art Law

On January 22, 2012, Robert Scott Cook, a Madison Avenue art dealer, was charged for allegedly defrauding a client of 16 artworks by Picasso, Manet, Matisse, Renoir and others worth more than $4.2 million. Cook, a principle of Cook Fine Art (2005-2011), sold watercolors, drawings and photographs to galleries and auction houses behind the owner’s back for years.  Sales took place over a course of six years and they were done without owner’s consent or to his benefit as proceeds were never shared. According to the F.B.I.’s assistant director in charge in New York, Janice K. Fedarcyk, “Mr. Cook is a crook.” If convicted he faces a maximum of 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

Cook’s attorney, James Eisenhower, was reported as saying that his client was trying to raise $1 million to repay the consignor and “that Cook hoped to avoid being prosecuted.”
 

Source: New York…

View original post 6 more words

“Fire Rages in Norway Heritage Village”

This is a great tragedy; our hearts go out to Norway today 😦

“Fire Rages in Norway Heritage Village”

via “Yahoo News“

“Oslo (AFP) – A large blaze on Sunday raged through a historic village in western Norway, destroying many of its famed 18th- and 19th-century wooden houses and forcing the evacuation of local residents, police said.

The fire in the riverside village of Laerdalsoyri, some 200 kilometres (miles) northwest of Oslo, began in a house on Saturday evening.

Fanned by strong winds, the blaze raged out of control overnight and it took firefighters until Sunday afternoon to extinguish it.

Laerdalsoyri is located in the West Norwegian Fjords area, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Police said 23 buildings including 16 homes were destroyed in the town, and hundreds of residents had to be evacuated. . . . .”

Additional Resources

“Art Exhibits for the Selfie Set”

“Art Exhibits for the Selfie Set”

by Richard Morgan via “Wall Street Journal“

“Carmelle Fernandez came down to Chelsea from the north Bronx with her cousin to stand in front of a pair of 18-feet-tall wooden characters. She asked a fellow visitor to Mary Boone Gallery to photograph them in similar poses as the sculptures—a shot destined for Instagram, Ms. Fernandez, a 30-year-old office assistant, said.

“It just makes you feel like you’re part of it,” she said. “It’s just fun. I think a lot of people take these photos. It’s hard not to.”

The exhibit, of sculptures and paintings by the artist KAWS, isn’t . . . .”

Out of curiosity, how long until the selfies themselves are considered works of art? I fully expect an exhibition to appear within the next 1-2 years focusing on the “best selfies” or “selfies that tell a story” theme.   It is a surprisingly important part of modern culture–the obsession with oneself and one’s own interaction with the world as opposed to merely appreciating the works and experiences of others. That being said, this is a great way to involve otherwise un-interested audiences in the arts.

“The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real”

“The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real”

by Patricia Cohen via “New York Times”

“To many people, the art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz seemed like an enviable man.  He came to the United States from Spain with his Mexican inamorata, Glafira Rosales, some 30 years ago, barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a few words of English at his command. Soon, he was living life on a grand stage. He bought a fine house in a wealthy New York suburb, opened an art gallery with Ms. Rosales and maintained auction accounts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.He boasted of a friendship with Andy Warhol, an audience with the pope and his daughter’s violin performance at the Clinton White House. He created a charity that helped the poor and the sick in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and won awards for his humanitarianism.

Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks. The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. . . .”

I’ll just bet he’s out of the country; I can’t imagine having the cahoney’s to pull something like this off. And it begs the question of how well Knoedler & Co. were investigating the works they processed. Where are the provenance records, the testing process results, etc.? Were those forged as well, or were they not included in the sale? In this day and age, how were so many forged items passed of?

“3,200-Year-Old Gold Artifact Transferred From L.I. Estate To German Museum”

Remember the post from back on Oct. 18? Well here is the result of that lawsuit. . . . 

“3,200-Year-Old Gold Artifact Transferred From L.I. Estate To German Museum”

Via “CBS New York”

“A 3,200-year-old Ishtar Temple gold artifact has been returned to a German museum that lost it during World War II.

The Assyrian gold tablet is a little more than an inch long.

As WCBS 880′s Sophia Hall reported Wednesday, some say it’s worth more than $10 million. Others say the artifact is priceless . . . ”

Related articles