There have been a string of art thefts lately.  A Picasso sketchbook, a Magritte, eleven Warhols, and (allegedly) $80m worth of art.  Is this a sign of the recession?  Or just crafty thieves taking advantage of unprotected art?  Luckily, Interpol has launched a new online database of stolen works of art.  Hopefully the new free database will make it harder for thieves to shift stolen pieces of art.

Just wanted to update you all and let you know I’m literally in the middle of moving (writing this in the airport) and so coverage of the fall sales might be a little slow. I’ll try my best, though!

The Dutch government will return 13 paintings to descendants of Jewish owners from whom they were looted during Nazi occupation.  Twelve paintings (including “Village in Wintertime” by Jan van Goyen) will be returned to the heirs of Hans Ludwig Larsen and one painting (“Portrait of a Man” by Thomas de Keyser) will be handed over to the heirs of Richard Semmel.

You can read Catherine Hickley’s account of it at Bloomberg’s Muse Arts.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Planning Council rejected a design last week for a new entrance to Kensington Palace.  Daniel Moylan of the Council described the design as ““decoratively overelaborate and almost embarrassingly ‘twee’  ”.  What’s incredibly interesting is that the design was supported by the Prince of Wales’ architecture charity, The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.  Prince Charles has often been accused of interfering in architecture projects around London that do not fit his aesthetic views, so this is a turn of the tables for him.

Back from my tour of the eastern and midwestern United States.   Things obviously happened while I was away.

For instance, the India Art Summit was held from 19-22 August.  Interestingly enough, I seemed to hear more about how M. F. Hussain wasn’t at the Summit than about what was shown.  Short article on that from NYTimes Arts Beat.

Also, the first non-government biennale opened in China.  Beijing’s 789 Biennale was mostly arranged by Chinese art journalist and seems to have had its share of problems.  However, it’s good to see that private citizens are starting to take a major role in the Chinese art fair scene.  Here’s an article on the 789 Biennale by Chris Gill from The Art Newspaper.

Two posts in as many days?! Inconceivable, right?  Well, I’ve started waking up at the crack of dawn again and I must say it does wonders for my daily productivity.

Anyway, finally getting some time to catch up on my ArtTactic emails from the past few weeks.  For those not in the know, ArtTactic publishes an Art Market Confidence Survey every six months.  Their confidence indicator fell 81% in December 2008, so it’s good to see that’s it’s on the rise and art market stakeholders seem to be “cautiously” optimistic about the market’s recovery.  Always good news.

Also, ArtTactic has recently been releasing Podcasts on the art market.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to them all, but the ones I have heard are pretty interesting.  I’m currently listening to the June 17th edition in which Adam Green interviews Randall Willette from Fine Art Wealth Management about the state of the art investment fund industry.  Very informative and interesting.  I really wish ArtTactic would put these up on iTunes so I could easily download them to my iTunes/iPod/iPhone without having to go around the long way.  I’m lazy, I know.  But it would be nice to be able to get these on the go with my iPhone than to have to download them to my computer before uploading them to iTunes. I just got an email from Anders informing me that there is, indeed a “Subscribe on iTunes” button on the podcast page.  I obviously need to put on my glasses sometimes seeing as I managed to subscribe to the RSS feed but totally missed that iTunes button.  Oops!

And, kudos on a really good interview, Adam.  You keep it flowing, have good questions, and keep it interesting.  Well done!

Two very interesting articles in yesterday’s NYTimes.  The first that caught my eye was about NY arts institutions trying to slow down a bill in the New York State Legislature that would regulate deaccessioning of pieces in collections.  Regulation of deaccessions is common in Europe, but virtually unheard of here in the States.  However, with the economic troubles that arts institutions are now experiencing, many are trying to deaccession pieces in order to pay the bills.  The State Legislature sees this trend as a problem and believes masterpieces shouldn’t be sold off to pay for bills.  I must say that I’m rather split on this issue.  On the one hand, I don’t think the New York Historical Society should be selling off works to pay its air conditioning bills.  On the other hand, endowments are down and I don’t see the State Legislature stepping in to help out.  The bills have to be paid somehow.

The other article is along the same vein: it talks about the recent layoffs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Ninety-five employees took retirement packages and another 74 were laid off.   The Met Museum also closed 15 satellite merchandise stores around the country, laying off 127 merchandising employees.  Earlier in the year, the Museum had said it needed to cut its staff numbers by 10% to make ends meet, but more employees chose to retire than were expected.  So the staff was actually cut by 14%.  That’s an incredibly large number for such a prominent institution.  It just goes to show how much this economic turmoil has really affected large institutions and their endowments.

It’s that time of every second year again: time to hop in a water taxi and check out the pavilions at the Venice Biennale.  The vernissage was held on the 6 June and it makes me very proud as an American to say that the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to the United States for Bruce Nauman’s Topological Gardens.  Nauman’s exhibition is broken into three differing but corresponding themes that are on show at three different sites in Venice.  For more information on Topological Gardens, visit the official website here.

For a complete list of winners of Lions for 2009, visit the official Biennale di Venezia site.

In case you don’t scour the web and newspapers looking for news of the art market, I thought I’d point you in the direction of a post by Robert Frank in his The Wealth Report blog for the Wall Street Journal.  It’s from the beginning of this month, right after the Sotheby’s and Christie’s Spring Impressionist and Modern sales.  Frank does a great job of sifting through the flattering hype spewed by market insiders to say that the sales really weren’t all that great.  Masterpieces didn’t even reach their highest estimate.  The sales were a let down compared to those of the past few years.

However, I will take one issue with Frank’s post: the final sales figure for Christie’s, while much lower than the Spring sale last year and the Yves Saint Laurent sale in February, were still comfortably within the overall estimates for the auction.  While this isn’t the amazing, over-the-top figures we’ve seen the last few years in the art market, it does show that there are buyers out there who are steadily willing to pay good money for good works of art.  The art market seems to have nicely self-corrected from its excesses and is still in good form.  Market correction is needed for further growth, afterall.

Again, apologies to anyone who still reads this and has been waiting for updates.  These past months since moving back to the States have seen me heavily concentrated on my family, friends, and finding a job.  This means I’m not checking all the art blogs, papers, and websites as often as I used to.  It’s actually really hard to stay on top of the art world when you’re no longer in the center of it!  But, I’m going to start trying harder and devoting a bit of time each week to keeping up on all the news (and gossip, obviously!). 

A little bit of museum news for everyone: it should be no surprise that Japan once again drew the biggest crowds for exhibitons in 2008.  Though it’s interesting to note that some museums are having a hard time selling high-priced tickets to “must see” blockbusters because of the current economic situation.  Maybe this will cause museums to reconsider what types of shows they will hold in the future.