Feds sue art dealer for $26.5M

The owner of one of the world's largest art dealerships and his partners in a company formed to purchase contemporary paintings were sued by the federal government on Wednesday to recover $26.5 million in alleged back taxes and penalties.

The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, is aimed at recovering taxes from art deals carried out by Contemporary Art Holding Corp (CAHC), formed by gallery owner Lawrence Gagosian and others including magazine publisher Peter Brant.

Prosecutors alleged that CAHC, which was established in 1990 to buy 62 works of contemporary art, was at the heart of a complicated scheme in which art was transferred between defendants to evade millions of dollars in taxes.

Read more here and here.

Visiting the birthplace of penicillin

Dozens of Petri dishes and test-tubes litter the surface of the 12ft wooden bench. An archaic Bunsen burner and microscope stand beside a small, dirty sink. A few medical textbooks lean against the green ceramic tiles that line the room, while a copy of The Times dated September 3, 1928, lies to one side. These are the unassuming conditions in which one of the great scientific discoveries was made 75 years ago.

This is the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, in the very room where the Scottish bacteriologist made his chance find. The museum, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, is one of London’s best-kept secrets. . .

Ten years ago the hospital decided to recreate the cramped and chaotic conditions under which Fleming worked, and assembled as many original or contemporary instruments, books and specimens as it could find. There’s one inaccuracy, however. “In reality several of the Petri dishes would have been overflowing with cigarette ash,” Kevin Brown, the museum’s curator, says. “Fleming had a 60-a-day habit and the laboratory would have been filled with smoke because he refused to open the windows.”

Fleming’s hygiene standards would shock a modern hospital administrator. He liked to create what he called “germ paintings”, by using spores of pigmented bacteria to form brightly-coloured scenes, and would often leave culture dishes lying around unwashed for weeks. It was this very lack of order, of course, that proved fortunate.

On September 3, 1928, Fleming returned to the laboratory after a fortnight’s holiday and grudgingly decided to do some washing up. He noticed, however, that in one of the dishes the bacteria in the agar culture had been killed in a ring around a clump of mould. “That’s funny,” Fleming remarked — a typically understated response from a man of few words. He first called the substance “mould juice”, although it was soon renamed when he discovered that the bacteria-killing enzyme was from the Penicillium notatum strain. . .

Medical practices advanced greatly during the Second World War and in 1945 Professor Fleming was given a tour of a modern, and very clean, new laboratory. “It’s very nice,” he told a journalist, “but I could never have discovered penicillin here.”

From the Times of London.

Anti-Semitism in France

A rather disturbing article in this morning's New York Times -- echoes of Germany in the 1920s and '30s. And it seems what measures are being taken are too little, too late:

France's education ministry last month launched a campaign to stamp out anti-Semitism and other types of racism in schools. Education Minister Luc Ferry acknowledged that verbal insults are becoming common.

"There is a real danger — all the greater because today anti-Semitism is of a new type, coming from parts of society that are more acceptable than the extreme right: from Arabs and Muslims," Mr. Ferry said on state radio last month.

I'm still not quite sure how to interpret that "more acceptable", but perhaps it is an infelicitous translation.

He introduced 10 measures to combat the problem, including the creation of a monitoring committee in Paris, the appointment of a team of mediators for the worst cases and the publication of a booklet to be distributed around schools.

Mediators? Reminiscent of the soft-headed approach to bullying I experienced as a boy, where bully and victim were brought into an office to "talk out their differences" ("Well, it seems you want to beat me up, and I don't want to be beaten up. I guess we'll have to compromise and you'll just slap me around a bit, OK?"). Apparently protecting the victims and punishing their attackers would be an unacceptably simplistic approach.

Oldest human sacrifices found?

More news from Arslantepe, courtesy of La Repubblica (in Italian). This time it is a tomb from c. 3000 BC, a royal burial accompanied by four adolescent victims, three girls and a boy, between 14 and 16 years old.

Medieval church tiles sold by mistake

A proper mess in Norfolk:

They should have been among the finishing touches to the remarkable renaissance of a Norfolk church. Instead, the priceless mediaeval pamments which once graced the floor of St Mary the Virgin are at the heart of a dispute between the church trustees and Breckland Council.

While in storage, the tiles were sold by the local parochial church council for £160 (which would suggest that they have either been reused, or have gone into the antiques market).

Iraq and terrorism

While we watch history in the making, here (and here) is a good summary of how "regime change" in Iraq ties into the struggle against terrorism.

Things go better with. . . .

A company in Peru is developing a sweet made out of a mixture of caramel and cocaine.

The company, from Carmen Alto, says the Cocamel will help people relax from the stress of daily life.

I imagine so. From Ananova.

Art and artifact theft

'Why would anybody steal a stuffed gorilla from the Australian Museum?" is the lead-in for an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Reporting on art: Times taken to task

A rather savage critique of the NY Times spotted in ArtNet:

Chelsea art dealers are up in arms at the New York Times, but of course, out of fear, they won't go on record.

The reason? In its Friday editions, the Times routinely banishes reviews of first-run Chelsea shows to a few tiny lines in its "guide" section (and even here, barely five percent of Chelsea shows are ever mentioned), while Times critics overwhelmingly feature little known exhibitions in out-of-the-way, esoteric spaces in the main Friday reviews section, long a source for rich Manhattan collectors as to what shows to see.

Why is this so? Because most galleries do not advertise in the New York Times. In fact, most contemporary art galleries advertise in one periodical only, Artforum, whose circulation of 38,500 hardly matches the 1.8 million readers of the Times. . .

For the New York Times is a hyper-capitalist vacuum which sucks in high commodity advertising targeted to its wealthy readers, covering it with a pathetic, neosocialist editorial slant, designed to disguise its plutocratic raison d'etre: handbags for the rich and editorials for the poor. . .

Also, with the appointment of a new, younger editorial culture staff at "the paper of record" (bogus editor Howell Raines, age 60, is yapping about how much he loves Eminem), it's amusing to watch hidebound Times art critics squirm to preserve their jobs.

Since the Times carries a few pages of local museum advertising, Michael Kimmelman, who hasn't been spotted in Chelsea since he rented a car there in 1988, is presumably "safe"; his is just the kind of lazy, phony mind, a la Frank Rich, that they love in suburban mansions.

Holland Cotter has carved himself a place as "Mister Ethno-virtuosity," seeking out obscure shows in gyms and saloons across the metropolitan area, perfect for the Times' pandering zeitgeist.

Bowling for Columbine: a documentary?

Michael Moore has a great gift for making his targets look bad. Yet even those who share his point of view acknowledge that he plays fast and loose with facts (the UC Berkeley School of Journalism rejected his nomination as a commencement speaker out of hand last year, on the grounds that his manipulation of sources was antithetical to the fundamental standards of journalism).

I have friends from across the political spectrum, but one thing that almost all share is certainty. They believe what they have always believed, and what their friends believe. Knowing the answers, they ask their questions accordingly.

I tend to have more questions than answers, which is one reason Cronaca is heavy on links and light on commentary. It is also the reason I find misrepresentations of fact so objectionable, whether in historical dramas (JFK, Mississippi Burning) or in "documentaries" such as Michael Moore's Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine. Serious questions demand serious treatment, honest treatment.

Bowling for Columbine has recently been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary -- a categorization ably dissected here (hat tip to Instapundit). Some of my friends aren't bothered by reports of its dishonesty, which I find profoundly disturbing: the blithe acceptance of falsification as a means to a higher Truth is not so much a slippery slope as a leap into the abyss.

AND NOW, months later, some transatlantic recognition of what Moore is all about, in the Times of London (as far as I know, the adulation in France is still quite untempered).

UPDATE: Spinsanity, a nonpartisan and quite evenhanded critic of spin in all its forms, has a new post (September 2) on the changes made in the Bowling release on DVD. This includes a summary of the key issues regarding the theatrical release, as well.

Early medieval burials in northern England

From the BBC:

A total of 80 Dark Ages skeletons have been found in the grounds of Bishopsmill Special School in Stockton, Teesside. The cemetery dates back to between the 7th and 9th centuries, with the bodies buried east to west - which marks the graves out from earlier pagan burials that faced north to south.

Peter Rowe, sites and monuments officer for Tees Archaeology, said the dig could reveal how and when Christianity took hold in north-east England. He said: "This is one of the best finds in recent years. We have had other very early Christian burial sites in cathedral towns such as York and Ripon, but this is the furthest north."

Medieval watermill found

Archaeologists have uncovered one of the first well-preserved medieval timber watermills to be found in Britain during a dig in Staffordshire. The watermill, on the banks of the River Sow in Stafford, was today described as one of the most exciting archeological discoveries in the town.

The structure, believed to date from the 14th or 15th century, was unearthed by Birmingham University's field archaeology unit on the site of a 19th century watermill at the junction of Tenterbanks, Mill Bank and Water Street. . .

The discovery comes two months after an ancient garde-robe, believed to be part of Stafford's old Royal Castle, was discovered during a dig before construction work began to redevelop the town's Sheridan Centre.

It also comes a fortnight before the borough council's archaeology department is closed permanently as part of a raft of cost-cutting measures.

Read the full story here.

Hoard of medieval Hebrew manuscript fragments in Spain

A Spanish historical archive has found what may constitute the largest collection of ancient Hebrew manuscripts in Europe on discovering fragments of medieval texts stuffed inside the covers of books.

"It's too early to say just yet as we're not sure how many there are but it could be the most important in Europe," said Josep Matas, director of the Provincial Historic Archive of the northeastern town of Girona where the documents were found.

Girona was one of the most important Jewish population centers in Spain prior to the expulsion of all non-Catholics in 1492 by the Catholic rulers Isabel and Ferdinand. Matas believes the town once had some 700 Jews.

Read more at Ha'aretz.

The conquest of Baghdad

This article at Discovery News states repeatedly that an American occupation of Baghdad would be the first such conquest since the Mongols' in 1258. Oddly enough, none of the experts quoted mention that the British took control of all of Iraq back in 1941.

Sir Thomas Lawrence double feature

An art market oddity from England:

An advertisement in the Antiques Trade Gazette has brought to light a remarkable coincidence – that . . . two paintings . . . clearly depicting the same subject, are both to be auctioned on the same day by two different auctioneers at opposite ends of the country.

What flags to fly?

The International Herald Tribune reports:

As U.S. troops roll toward the Iraqi border this week, they have been given orders on two matters of decorum: no throwing candy to Iraqi children, and no displaying flags regimental, state or even the American flag.

The candy orders make good sense (not for fear of cavities -- you don't want to lure children into the middle of traffic), but I'm not sure about the directive about flags. The desire to appear as an army of liberation, not conquest, is admirable, but the absence of flags could still be misread. Wouldn't it have made more sense instead to fly the pre-Baathist Iraqi flag alongside American or regimental flags? That would much better express who the fight is for.

Here is more on the flag used from 1959 to 1963; the flag used before the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958 is described here.

Bill of Rights seized by FBI

From CNN:

The FBI has recovered a valuable copy of the Bill of Rights that had been missing for 138 years, officials said Wednesday. . .

According to legend, it was stolen from North Carolina by a Union soldier at the end of the Civil War. . .

The document was recovered by the FBI in Philadelphia Tuesday in an undercover operation when an individual attempted to sell it, officials said.

The copy is believed to have been in North Carolina in recent years, but officials were uncertain where it had been for most of the past 138 years.

What is curious about this story is the absence of information about the document's possessor. Though the FBI is clearly milking this for all it can, this hardly seems to be a conventional recovery of stolen goods from a culpably knowing trader. I wouldn't be surprised if the would-be seller turns out to be some poor ignorant antique dealer who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself hauled off by the Feds.

Russia to return wartime art loot to Bremen

Russia is going to return items from the so-called “Baldin collection” to Germany, Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi told reporters. When asked what Russia would get in return, Mr. Shvydkoi said: “If your purse is stolen and then returned, you can give back a quarter of its contents or just say, ‘Thank you’ in gratitude, it is up to you.”

The Minister noted that the restitution bill did not apply to this collection, because it was not taken from Germany on the orders of the Soviet military command. Viktor Baldin, a Soviet Army captain, took 362 paintings from the Bremen museum in a suitcase. For three years he kept them under his bed in his home in Zagorsk near Moscow. In 1948, Mr. Baldin presented the collection to a state museum, and in 1991 it was transferred to the State Hermitage Museum.

Read the full article here. A more extensive account is here. The paintings include works by Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Delacroix, Manet, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Durer, and Goya.

Surfing the Severn: tidal bores

From the BBC:

Thursday 20th March sees the first of this year’s large Severn Bores -- a spectacular natural phenomenon which attracts sightseers and surfers from near and far. . .

The bore exists in the Severn because the estuary is just the right shape for funnelling the incoming tides of the Bristol Channel. . .
When conditions are favourable. . . the surge of water is sufficient to form a wave as much as two metres high, with a speed of 14 knots.

Cool. But this is what I want to see:

The biggest bore in the world is to be found in Hangzhou Bay south of Shanghai. The characteristic narrowing, increasingly shallow Bay and large tidal range combine to produce a bore that on the highest tides, can attain a height of over seven metres and a speed of up to 15 knots. It is said that the roar of the advancing bore can be heard at a distance of more than 20 kilometres.

Yeah, but it is rideable?

Fight in Dresden over flood-prone storage

The director-general of Dresden’s 12 museums, Martin Roth, is refusing to return Old Master paintings from the reserve collection to the refurbished store of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister which was flooded last August when the River Elbe and its tributaries broke their banks.

Dr Roth’s stance puts him on a direct collision course with the regional government of Saxony which is spending several million euros on refurbishing the damaged store beneath the museum which houses the city’s Old Master collection. Dr Roth announced his decision in London at the opening of the Royal Academy’s “Master-pieces from Dresden” exhibition (until 8 June).

Dr Roth insists that the only long-term solution is for a new store to be built, ideally in the internal courtyard of the Albertinum.

Good for him! In the long annals of the shortsightedness of politicians and bureaucrats, a more egregious case is hard to find. The existing storerooms were flooded only last year, and already they are trying to put them back into use!? Read the rest in the Art Newspaper.

Out, out, damned bot

I've been maintaining websites since 1997, but it's only recently that I've come to realize the ever-growing prevalence of obnoxious robots and spiders. These are basically software applications that act like automated browsers, following links and downloading whole sites in order to extract information for their owners. Not a big deal when the bots are sent out by legitimate search engines such as Google, and when they obey the standard instructions webmasters use to control what is to be catalogued and what is off-limits. Many bots, however, are programmed to ignore these instructions, and their purpose is often less than benign -- the worst being the spambots, sent out to find email addresses for spammers. Bots can also suck up large amounts of bandwidth, bandwidth that site owners have to pay for, and since they often masquerade as ordinary browsers, they can also distort the traffic statistics of a site -- which is how I first noticed their pernicious presence at Cronaca.

You will have more options if your site is hosted on a Unix server. A good intro is available here; an article devoted to the .htaccess file is here; articles on building bot traps are here and here; and once you get your defenses up, you can test them at Wannabrowser. You can keep up to date through the forums at WebmasterWorld, and with this very long thread devoted to blocking bots (free registration required; highly recommended).

For those using IIS, options are more limited; I've found this but haven't yet had time to test it.

Temple tablet broken

From the Guardian:

An ancient stone tablet some experts believe may date to the 9th century B.C., providing rare confirmation of biblical narrative, broke in half while being moved to an Israeli police station, officials said Monday.

An antiquities collector turned in the shoebox-sized tablet in Tel Aviv on Monday morning. Police bringing it to Israel's Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem broke it even though it was wrapped in two layers of bubble wrap and inside a box, said Amir Ganor, the head of the authorities' anti-theft division.

Officials didn't say how the break occurred, but a spokeswoman for the Antiquities Authority, Osnat Guez, said it could actually help scientists studying the tablet, since they will be able to check the inner layers to determine how old the stone is.

The weird thing is that the tablet (previous posts here and here) appears to belong to Oded Golan -- the owner of the so-called James ossuary, which was also broken in transit. In both cases the packing methods appear to have been amateurish and grossly inadequate.

Thomas the Tank Engine's inspiration

The train station that inspired the Thomas the Tank Engine stories is to get a £1.2m facelift and a new museum. Talyllyn Railway in south Gwynedd has received a substantial Heritage Lottery grant to redevelop the station at Tywyn and improve visitor facilities.

A purpose-built museum will exhibit original drawings by Rev Wilbert Awdry, the author of the timeless children's classic. Rev Awdry based his stories on his experiences as a volunteer working at Talyllyn in the early 1950s. . .

The picturesque narrow gauge railway runs between the seaside town of Tywyn and the village of Abergynolwyn in the heart of Snowdonia National Park.

Hadn't realized that Thomas and friends were Welsh. From the BBC.

Shipwreck conservation conference

An upcoming event at Texas A&M University will explore the intricacies of analyzing and conserving important shipwrecks.

“Shipwreck Weekend 2003,” scheduled from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 5, is free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Texas A&M’s Nautical Archaeology Program and will feature lectures and tours.

Read more here.

Aiming at a moving target

A Belgian man is about to have the last of nine operations which he hopes will make him look like Michael Jackson.

Read the rest here, not that it matters.

Mummies in ancient Britain

Mummification was practised by prehistoric Britons, according to a discovery made by archeologists from Sheffield University who have found the skeletal remains of two mummies buried under the floor of a 3,000-year-old house on the Hebridean island of South Uist. . .

The archaeologists realised that something was unusual about the skeletons when tests revealed the individuals had died up to 500 years before they had been interred. Detailed forensic tests then showed they were mummified using peat as a preservation agent.

From the Independent.

Rob Roy a traitor?

He is one of Scotland’s enduring legends — a Highland hero whose independence, strength and pride captured more than most the spirit of the nation. But according to a new biography, Rob Roy MacGregor was in fact a fraudster and a paid government spy who betrayed his Jacobite allies to the hated Hanoverians.

Rob Roy: The Man and the Myth, by David Stevenson, a former professor of Scottish history at St Andrews University, reveals that during the 1715 Jacobite rising MacGregor supplied intelligence to the Duke of Argyll, later the Hanoverian commander-in-chief.

His account poses a serious challenge to MacGregor’s place in the pantheon of Scotland’s most celebrated freedom-fighters, and to the image portrayed by Liam Neeson in the biopic Rob Roy. “The sources for his life are remarkably rich — but many have been overlooked or ignored because writers about him have tended to be hero worshippers with a habit of overlooking inconvenient events,” said Stevenson.

From the Sunday Times.

AND NOW there's a similar piece datelined November 3 at the BBC. Better late than never.

Rare movie poster deliberately destroyed?

A bizarre sequence of events surrounds the cover lot of Christie’s South Kensington’s Vintage Film Posters sale scheduled for March 4, a six-sheet première poster featuring Jane Russell in a famously sultry pose for Howard Hughes’s film The Outlaw.

The poster, which is 6ft 9in (2.05m) square, was catalogued as “the only known copy to exist”, but it later became clear that the owners, Robert and Patricia League, had another copy in their possession.

In a signed statement to Christie’s, the Leagues admitted discovering the second poster after consigning the original for sale. “Having considered the various options open to us, we have made the determination that we would destroy the second copy, and can confirm that this has been done,” the statement adds.

You can read more about the outraged reaction here.

Executioner's diaries

Last month, 14 notebooks containing the gruesome diaries of Anatole Deibler, France’s last public executioner, were sold in Paris at Beaussant-Lefèvre (17.94% buyer’s premium) for €85,000 (£55,600). With their neat handwriting on lined paper within drab beige covers, the 2000 pages recount in chilling detail the last moments of 400 souls – their crimes, trials, attitudes to death, behaviour and even the weather at the moment of execution – all noted down by the man who dispatched them from this mortal world.

Of one prisoner, guillotined in 1930, Deibler wrote: “After smoking a cigar and several cigarettes, and consuming two glasses of cognac, he let himself be shackled with docility and walked with a firm step to the guillotine.”

The diaries are soon to be published by a French firm. Read the full article in the Antiques Trade Gazette.

Bermondsey antique market shrinks

From the Antiques Trade Gazette:

Bermondsey Market, a London institution since the 1950s, is to change its current format, downsizing from three to two separate trading areas next month. . .

Recent congestion charges and the implementation of additional parking controls were cited as the reasons behind the council’s recent announcement, but the decreasing size of the market was clearly also an issue.

“Ten years ago I used to get myself lost in this market,” said Jo Scutts, Senior Street Trading Officer, “but times have changed. To move the dealers into a smaller space will give the appearance of a busier, more compact market, rather than the skeleton it has become.”

Though I regularly buy in London, I haven't been a Bermondsey regular for many years now. Part of this is my increasing reluctance to drag myself out of bed before dawn as I get older, but it is unquestionable that the markets aren't the buying opportunity they once were. The impact of eBay and other Internet venues is the most important change, but even before, dealers were increasingly bringing interesting finds to the various London auction houses before putting them out for public sale.