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  • May 19, 2002 at 12:30pm

    The World's “Preeminent Garbage Artist”

    Despite many public commissions and exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, the voluble and often funny Mierle Laderman Ukeles remains best known for her singular role as the New York City Department of Sanitation's first and only “artist-in-residence.” She assumed this unsalaried position in the early 1980's, but she actually earned it while doing a conceptual piece called Touch Sanitation, for which she spent eleven months crisscrossing the city day and night to shake hands with every one of its 8,500 sanitation workers, telling each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

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  • May 17, 2002 at 2:45pm

    $1.4 Billion Worth of Stolen Art Destroyed

    For years Stéphane Breitwieser, a youthful-looking Frenchman, traveled through Europe working as a waiter and in his off hours visited out-of-the-way museums where he looked for opportunities to walk off with what he liked. But when he was arrested last November in Switzerland, his mother destroyed $1.4 billion worth of fine art, including works by Brueghel, Watteau, and Lucas Cranach the Elder.

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  • May 16, 2002 at 1:59pm

    Warhol and Richter Ride High at Contemporary Art Sale

    Contemporary art has been surprisingly healthy at all three major sales this week, with records set for established blue-chip names as well as emerging artists. Last night, however, paintings by Gerhard Richter, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art has drawn more than 300,000 visitors since it opened in February, brought the two highest prices. After that, the evening belonged to Andy Warhol.

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  • May 15, 2002 at 11:39am

    Duchamp Fizzles as Others Fly High at Auction

    Collectors sniffed at what some consider icons of modern art—Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel and snow shovel, his urinal and bottle rack—yet works by contemporary stars like Donald Judd and Edward Ruscha scored record prices on Monday night at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg.

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  • May 15, 2002 at 9:01am

    Car Art on the Move in Cuba

    Fed up with the fact that most art in Cuba is now sold to tourists, a group of artists have taken to the road with their work painted on their cars.

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  • May 15, 2002 at 8:07am

    Henry Moore Sets Aussie Record

    Though the sculpture failed to sell last week, on Monday a Sydney collector bought Large Slow Form, a 1968 bronze abstract sculpture by famed British sculptor Henry Moore for $490,000, an Australian record for a work offered at auction.

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  • May 14, 2002 at 12:24pm

    A Pop-Up Film Festival

    The resounding success of the first TriBeCa Film Festival has proved that, as one of its founders, Martin Scorsese, said in his opening address at the award ceremony on Sunday, “a major film festival, pulled together in four months” can be made to happen.

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  • May 13, 2002 at 11:32am

    Cybersleuthing Artwork at New Museum Taken Offline

    An Internet-based artwork in an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York was taken offline on Friday because the work was conducting surveillance of outside computers. It is not clear yet whether the artists, the museum, or its Internet service provider are responsible for blacking out Minds of Concern: Breaking News, created by Knowbotic Research, a group of digital artists in Switzerland, but the action illuminates the work's central theme: the tension between public and private control of the Internet.

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  • May 13, 2002 at 11:25am

    Santiago Calatrava in Milwaukee

    The new Milwaukee Art Museum, argues The Boston Globe's Robert Campbell, is so extraordinary, so astonishing, so breathtaking that it deserves our attention and maybe even a special visit. Designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava, its new Quadracci Pavilion is a dreamlike riff on nautical motifs.

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  • May 13, 2002 at 11:13am

    Maurizio Cattelan's New York

    Those familiar with the work of Maurizio Cattelan might well have assumed that his current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York would feature some of his latest animal pieces. Perhaps a new twist on his horse hanging from a ceiling or a variation on the ostrich with its head in the ground or another play on Cheap to Feed, the dead dog curled up in a chair taking a nap. Instead, the Italian neo-Conceptual artist has presented Frank and Jamie, a pair of life-size wax New York City policemen propped upside down along a wall.

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  • May 10, 2002 at 2:36pm

    Brancusi Sells for Record Price

    A sculpture by Constantin Brancusi has broken the world record auction price for a sculpture, going for $18,159,500 at Christie's in New York. An anonymous telephone bidder smashed the record to obtain Danaïde, the 1913 gold-leaf sculpture of a woman's head.

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