Recent News from Art and Art History | Monday 22nd February 2016

A forged catalogue that Drewe swapped with an original 1950s catalogue in the National Art Library. The forgery lists three Giacomettis, including forgeries by Myatt, one of which is illustrated. NAL: 38041010206480 © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

An image of the forged catalogue that Drewe swapped with an original 1950s catalogue in the National Art Library. The forgery lists three Giacomettis, including forgeries by Myatt, one of which is illustrated. NAL: 38041010206480 © Victoria & Albert Museum, London

A fascinating blog from the V&A on the issues about conserving John Drewe’s fraudulent exhibition catalogues, which were forged and then planted in the National Art Library to create provenance’s for forged works of art.

“How should we treat these fraudulent documents? Now they are in our collections and requested for exhibition are they artefacts in their own right? … As I looked at the catalogues with our lovely book conservators it dawned on us that if we were to be true to the history of the objects then we couldn’t actually do any work on them. The potentially damaging rusty staples, which we would ordinarily isolate or replace, should stay like that. John Drewe had worked hard to rust the staples, stain the pages and generally age and degrade the catalogues.” Read the full article here on the V&A website.


The big news late last week was the cancellation of the Melbourne Art Fair. The cancellation was announced Friday and was apparently due to three major galleries deciding not to participate (Anna Schwartz, Roslyn Oxley and Tolarno Galleries). The fair has run every two years since 1988 and the organisers have not ruled out that it will rise again in the future, but it’s off the calendar for 2016. Read more in this report in the Guardian - website.


The tussle over the proposed move of the Powerhouse from Ultimo to Western Sydney continues with celebrities throwing their weight behind the campaign to keep it where it is. More in the Sydney Morning Herald - website.


An article from The Conversation on mental health in the arts based on a recently completed report with some pretty shocking findings, though perhaps not entirely surprising to anyone who works in or around the arts. “The sector’s employees have three-times the level of sleep disorders than the general population. This causes serious flow-on effects on their relationships with family and friends. Arts workers also experience symptoms of anxiety ten-times higher than the general population, and depression symptoms five-times higher.” You can read the full article on The Conversation website.


Philip Kennicott on a current exhibition drawn from the collection of Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen muses on the problems with such exhibitions. “Collecting art isn’t morally neutral. It may seem more enlightened, and cultured, than collecting rock-and-roll memorabilia (another of Allen’s hobbies) or airplanes (ditto). But private collectors with deep pockets — Allen is worth about $18 billion, depending on which side of the bed the market got up on today — drive up the cost of art for everyone. That puts many of the works in this exhibition beyond the means of public institutions, where audiences could have regular access to them and where curators could study them and incorporate them into robust scholarly exhibitions.” Read the full article on the Washington Post website.