The Week That Was (May 9 – 16, 2008)

NEW YORK—The long shadow of Robert Rauschenberg's death hung over the week's news, with all the glowing obits prompting Slate's Jack Shafer to grumble that "you're more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than in the arts section." (Of course, Shafer, or his editors, had to add an addendum after spotting the acid-penned sendoff on the New Republic's Web site: "I cannot see that there is any poetry or power in Rauschenberg's work" was about the mildest of Jed Perl's comments.)

The week was otherwise dominated by reports of gangbusters auctions in New York that all but silenced any concerns that the market was heading for a downfall. The highlight: Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, which set the auction record for a contemporary artwork when it sold in Sotheby’s evening sale for $86.3 million. In the Times of London, Ben Hoyle wrote about why pieces by Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose painting of an overweight civil servant set a record for a work by a living artist at Christie's when it sold for $33.6 million, are fetching such high prices. He quoted Sotheby's Francis Outred: "[T]he particular interest in Freud and Bacon is related to their pushing of the contemporary-art envelope. In comparison with a lot of contemporary artists, their work carries on the tradition of the great figurative painters whilst reflecting the philosophy of contemporary life. That's why they are so desirable right now.”

The market’s continued robustness is good news for the new Dubai-based private equity company Daman Investments PSC, which just launched a 50 million dirham ($13.6 million) fund to buy Middle Eastern art.

In a strange turn of events, Asian antiquities expert Roxanna Brown, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Thailand's Bangkok University, was indicted on charges of federal wire fraud for signing off on appraisal forms that inflated the value of artifacts so that collectors could cheat on their taxes; several days later, Brown died in a federal detention center, apparently of a heart attack. An Australian art thief was sentenced to five years in prison. And Yuri V. Samodurov, director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow, has been subpoenaed on charges of inciting religious hatred, another sign of the censorship that Samodurov claims he was protesting in his exhibition "Forbidden Art – 2006," which featured pornographic images offensive to the Russian Orthodox Church. (Coincidentally, in the U.S., the Indianapolis Museum of Art this week joined a civil rights group in suing over a law that would require businesses selling pornography to register with the state). In short order, rights groups objected to Samodurov's treatment. Meanwhile, Moscow will get a new contemporary art exhibition space, to be inaugurated in June with a performance by provocative British songbird Amy Winehouse.

No sooner were the Turner prize nominees announced, than British bookmaker Ladbrokes put the odds on Mark Leckey. The award generates about the same amount of love-it-because-we-hate-it vitriol in the press as the Whitney Biennial, and the Telegraph's Richard Dorment was quick to weigh in: "the four shortlisted artists struck me as unusually — and irritatingly — similar," he wrote, and added of Cathy Wilkes's installation art that "It's the kind of modern art that pundits pay deference to and that deep down nobody really likes."