Guard at Carnegie Museum of Art Slashes Painting He Doesn’t Like

Timur Serebrykov, 27, of Pittsburgh, a guard at the Carnegie Museum of Art has been charged with slashing Vija Celmins’ “Night Sky .12” a painting he apparently didn’t like, damaging it beyond repair.

The museum’s surveillance camera caught the vandalism on May 16, police said Thursday.

The 31-by-37½-inch oil-on-canvas painting of a black starlit night had a large vertical gouge in the middle and was damaged beyond repair & valued at $1.2 million according to a police affidavit.

Court documents indicate Serebrykov used a key or other implement to damage the painting because he disliked it.

Artist Starves Dog to Death

Sneaker blog SlamXHype blogged about this a few days ago.

“Last year, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, in the name of art, took a dog from the street, and starved him to death. Endorsed by the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American, Habacuc has been invited to repeat this unbelievably cruel act again in 2008. We at SlamXhype stand with Arkitip Intelligence in boycotting this ‘artist’ and urge you to sign this petition to end this right now.”

National Gallery of Victoria buys a Van Gogh…err a Rubens? Wait is it a Gavin Turk?

Head of a Man is the name given to a $5 million Vincent Van Gogh portrait that was purchased in 1940. Only thing is now no one belives it is a Van Gogh. The Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum performed a 10-month investigation by scholars and has found the portrait was probably painted by a fellow student of Van Gogh in Antwerp or Paris in the mid 1880s. They are absolutely sure though that it is not a forgery since the work makes no attempt to directly mimic or pass itself off in a documented or established way as a Van Gogh. [Read more]

Discussion of Make You Notice at San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery

Bad at Sports contributer Patricia Maloney will be leading a brown bag lunch discussion of her most recent curatorial project Make You Notice at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery this Tuesday April 15 from 12 – 1pm. San Francisco listeners should come check out the great work.

Make You Notice features video, photography and ephemera by four contemporary women artists who utilize performance in diverse practices, seamlessly integrating collaboration, activism, irony, and optimism into their work. The exhibition features the artists Lisa Anne Auerbach, Kate Gilmore, Laura Swanson, and Jenifer Wofford.

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is one of many organizations currently showcasing artwork by women. Other exhibitions are:

The Way That We Rhyme, YBCA, March 29 – June 29

We Interrupt Your Program, Mills College, January 16 – March 16

Small Things End, Great Things Endure, New Langton, January 17 – March 15

Conduits of Labor, Queen’s Nails Annex, January 18 - February 24

Women, Power, Politics, International Museum of Women, March 8 – December 31

Ebay Art Scam Broken Up In Chicago

Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Andy Warhol were among artists whose works were counterfeited by seven people indicted for two art-fraud schemes that reaped a combined $5 million.

Those charged include three Europeans and residents of New York, Florida and Illinois, Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said today in a statement. They sold thousands of fake prints in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan and Europe, he alleged.

“Most of us have never owned a work of art signed by Picasso,” Fitzgerald said today at a press conference. Some people who believed they did, he added, “bought fakes.”

Some of the prints in the scam were sold on EBay Inc., the world’s largest online auctioneer, Fitzgerald alleged. Others were funneled through two art dealers in Northbrook, Illinois, prosecutors claimed. [Read more]

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