Indian Government Announces $14.3 Million for National Film Museum

03.19.10

India’s central government plans to set up a national museum for Indian cinema by 2013 to commemorate the centenary of the film industry, writes the Press Trust of India.

“We are committed to the national heritage mission and will be celebrating one hundred years of Indian cinema in 2013 for which we are setting up a national museum of Indian cinema in Mumbai.... We have already allocated Rs 650-crore [about $14.3 million] for the same,” the nation’s minister for information and broadcasting Ambika Soni said today.

In order to enhance the technical aspects of the Indian film industry and to increase the trend of animation and gaming, the ministry also has plans to set up a national center for animation and gaming industry, she told reporters.

LACMA Curator Heads to Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

03.19.10

Hyonjeong Kim Han, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been named curator of Korean art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Kim, who will assume her new duties July 1, will be responsible for one of the most comprehensive overseas collections of Korean art at one of the largest Asian art museums in the Western world.

At LACMA, Kim was instrumental in last year’s reinstallation of the Korean art galleries—the largest such galleries outside of Korea. She joined the museum in 2006 and has served as associate curator of Chinese and Korean art and as the department’s acting head and curator.

“During her four years at LACMA, Hyonjeong has carried the collection and the display of Korean art forward in a major way, capped with the reopening of the substantial galleries in the Hammer Building,” says Nancy Thomas, LACMA deputy director.

Among Kim’s accomplishments, says Thomas, was negotiating the rare loan of the late-sixth century bronze “Pensive Bodhisattva,” a Korean national treasure. In San Francisco, Kim will head the Korean department and oversee a collection that contains approximately 800 objects including sculpture, ceramics, paintings, textiles, and metalwork, and spans 2,500 years.

Folding Plug Wins Brit Insurance Design Award

03.19.10

A graduate who became fed up with carrying round the world’s thinnest laptop with what felt like the world’s biggest plug, on Wednesday, won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year award with his simple solution, according to The Guardian.

Min-Kyu Choi has invented the folding plug, which could replace the clunky three-pin British plug that has changed little since its inception in 1946.

His design beat off impressive competition from across the world—an eclectic mix that included fashion, newspapers, aircraft, and flatpack furniture—to win the award. He won a trophy and the title but, of course, it could now be much more. “It works, it looks good, and I’m sure it will make him a wealthy man if it is marketed right,” said Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, which organizes the awards.

“He’s showing that design can be about doing everyday simple things really well and in this case transform something that is universal and brutally ugly.”

Lawrence B. Salander Pleads Guilty in $120 Million Fraud Case

03.19.10

Art dealer Lawrence B. Salander pleaded guilty on Thursday to a $120 million fraud scheme, admitting he sold paintings he did not own and at least once sold fractional shares of a painting that added up to more than 100 percent, the New York Times’s James Barron reports.

“I am deeply ashamed and sorry for my actions,” the sixty-year-old dealer said after acknowledging that he had defrauded clients including the tennis star John McEnroe; Roy Lennox, a hedge fund manager; and Earl Davis, the son of the painter Stuart Davis.

Salander’s gallery, the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, had occupied a townhouse on the Upper East Side, where it rented for $154,000 a month. It shut down in 2007. The gallery had displayed paintings as varied as English landscapes by John Constable and modernistic scenes by Robert De Niro Sr., the actor’s father, who died in 1993.

At the State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Thursday, Salander read an eight-page statement, admitting to twenty-nine charges of grand larceny and scheming to defraud investors. Among other things, he said he had bilked McEnroe out of about $2 million and the estate of De Niro out of more than $1 million.

Salander had been promised a prison sentence of six to eighteen years, although Justice Michael J. Obus of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan indicated that in making a final decision, he would consider how much money had been repaid to Salander’s former clients.

Sophie Ristelhueber Wins Deutsche Borse Photography Prize

03.18.10

French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has won this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography prize, reports the BBC. Ristelhueber won for her retrospective exhibition which was shown at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, last year.

For the past twenty-five years, Ristelhueber has examined the impact of human conflict upon architecture and landscape in places such as Bosnia and Iraq. She was awarded the $48,000 (£30,000) prize at the Photographer’s Gallery, in London, by film director Terry Gilliam.

The international prize is awarded to a photographer for their work in Europe through either an exhibition or publication over the past year.

Ristelhueber was shortlisted from more than one hundred submissions alongside Anna Fox (UK), Zoe Leonard (USA), and Donovan Wylie (UK), who each receive approximately $4,800 (£3,000). This year’s jury was made up of Oliva Maria Rubio, director of exhibitions at La Fàbrica, Spain; Gilana Tawadros chief executive of Design and Artists Copyright; Anne-Marie Beckmann, curator of the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany; and artist James Welling.

Brett Rogers, nonvoting chair of the jury and director of the Photographers’ Gallery said, on behalf of the jury: “Sophie Ristelhueber’s fragmented images explore the terrain of the real and imagined, addressing urgent issues of trauma, loss, memory, and conflict. Devoid of drama, her surgically precise images, radically installed, push the boundaries of the photographic medium.”

All the shortlisted works are on show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London until April 8.

624 Works Misplaced at Tel Aviv Museum of Art

03.18.10

According to Haaretz, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has misplaced 624 works from its permanent collection, the Tel Aviv municipal comptroller revealed in a recent report. The museum employs outdated techniques in monitoring its collection, the report found, raising the likelihood of artwork going missing.

Museum administrators were unable yesterday to say which, if any, of the works have been lost, or whether they had simply been overlooked due to a registration error.

“We are currently working to identify the works in question,” a museum official said. “As for the misplacement of pieces, every museum curator knows the location of artworks under his authority at any given moment.”

The museum is required to conduct an inventory every eight months, but records show none has been made since 1992. Before that, the last count was performed in 1975. A comparison between the two inventories turned up a discrepancy of hundreds of works, among them 485 original pieces.

Comptroller Haia Horowitz wrote in the report, released in January, that the museum continues to use antiquated registration methods rather than the computerized systems common in many museums today. Horowitz found that thirteen sculptures in the museum’s collection are currently unidentified, their descriptive tags having been misplaced.

A statement from the museum said it is currently conducting a full count of its collection.

FBI Recovers Stolen Juan Gris

03.18.10

A dramatic six-year-long case of a stolen art work is nearing its end following an FBI sting operation, according to the Art Newspaper. The FBI has announced that a Juan Gris painting, stolen in 2004, has been recovered in Florida and a suspect, Robert Dibartolo, has been charged with transportation of the stolen art work.

According to the criminal complaint and affidavit, the painting was taken by unknown thieves who forcibly broke into the home of Clifton Hyatt in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2004. The Juan Gris untitled canvas, a 1926 still life valued at around one million dollars, was hanging in the front entryway of the house.

The FBI started investigating the case and then finally in November 2009, Dibartolo spoke to an undercover agent about selling the painting, according to court documents. Just last week, on March 1, the defendant met with the agent at a hotel in Jupiter, Florida and produced the Gris, wrapped in a blue packing blanket. After the undercover agent determined that the painting was authentic, Dibartolo was taken into custody, and the painting was later identified by its original owner.

Denver’s Biennial of the Americas Faces Cutbacks

03.17.10

According to a recent article in the Denver Post via Artnet, plans for Denver’s Biennial of the Americas remain ambitious, despite the fact that the organization is still scrambling to raise some $3.5 million in capital from private donors (with two million dollars in seed money originally given by the Boettcher Foundation). The festival had originally been set to have a seven-week run, but had to be scaled back. Also, its focus on contemporary art has been considerably softened, with organizers now pitching it more as a “hemis-fair,” a mix of political meet-up and world’s fair, centering on panels featuring political luminaries, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, and former Latin-American leaders like Vicente Fox, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Alejandro Toledo.

The event does still include some fine art content. Mexican curator Paola Santoscoy, a 2009 graduate of visual and critical studies at the California College of the Arts and former associate curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, was hired in January to put together the contemporary art programming—a staggeringly short time frame in which to organize a major show. Her exhibition, dubbed "The Nature of Things/La Naturaleza de las Cosas," focuses on four categories mandated by the organizers: innovation, sustainability, community, and arts. Artists so far selected include Brigida Baltar, Santiago Cucullu, Jeronimo Hagerman, and Gabriel Acevedo Velarde.