International News Digest
POPE CALLS, ARTISTS COME—AND RECEIVE PAPAL BLESSING
Pope Benedict XVI invited 260 cultural figures—artists, architects, singers, filmmakers, and writers—for a talk last weekend in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Henning Klüver reports that many of the guests were Italian cultural figures, although others answered the papal call from abroad, including Bill Viola, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Terence Hill, and Peter Greenaway. In his talk, the pope—citing Dostoyevsky, Georges Braque, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and even Augustine—noted that the search for beauty could become a “rediscovery of the transcendental.” Thanks to their talents, artists could reach “the heart of humanity” while “inspiring and creating trust.” According to the pope, as far as the artists’ aesthetic endeavors are concerned, the church “is with you.” Gianfranco Ravasi, who is known as the cultural minister of the Vatican and who organized the meeting, took the occasion to confirm that the Vatican will indeed have its own pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Amen.
FRENCH COURTS BLOCK SALE OF PRESS-EDITION PHOTOS
French courts have made a major decision regarding the sale of press-edition photographs. As Le Monde’s Claire Guillot reports, works by a host of photographers—Annie Leibovitz, Gilles Caron, Martine Frank, Robert Capa, Raymond Depardon, and others—were up for sale at the Hôtel Drouot auction house. The prints are small format and were given by the photographers or by their agencies to magazines for the purposes of publication. Most prices at the sale ranged below twenty-eight hundred dollars per print. But the French courts decided that the prints were never given but only loaned to the magazines in question.
The photographs come from the archives of the Italian press group Rusconi and were sitting in its archives for the past three decades, until the French publishing concern Hachette bought Rusconi. “The problem,” writes Guillot, “is that these press prints were entrusted, and not given away, to the magazines.” Magnum agency, which represents seventeen photographers in the proposed auction, acted to block the sale and was joined by other photographic agencies, including UPC, Freelens, and SAIF. At the trial, lawyers for the photographers argued that it used to be a common practice before digitalization to send a press edition to the magazine where the image would be printed. Yet as the stamps on the back of these photographs attest, the press prints remained the property of the agencies and the photographers. The lawyer for the auction house argued that Rusconi and then Hachette preserved the prints at their own costs for thirty years and thus had earned the right to treat them as property. The lawyers even offered to return one print that still bore the stamp “Magnum Photos. Please Return.” But the judge preferred to suspend the sale of all the photographs. The decision may have an impact on the sale of press print editions, which have increasingly appeared in auctions. In 2000, the New York Times sold press editions from its archives at Paris Photo. An “outraged” Henri Cartier-Bresson managed to get one of his own prints back. This decision could lead more photographers and agencies to reclaim their works, as “hundreds,” if not more, are lying in magazine and newspaper archives around the world.
PRAGUE’S NEW MUSEUM
The recent celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic have brought a more long-term celebration for the arts. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, Prague has a new art museum—the MuMo—with a moniker that recalls MoMA’s but is in fact an abbreviation of “Muzeum Montanelli.” The initiator of the MuMo is the art collector and patron Dadja Altenburg-Kohl, a Prague native who immigrated to West Germany in 1973. The inaugural exhibition features painting, graphics, sculpture, photography, and installations by international contemporary artists, including Rebecca Horn, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Marie-Ange Guilleminot.
ZKM HEAD TAKES ON KUNSTHALLE DÜSSELDORF
The art historian and exhibition manager Gregor Jansen has been named as the new director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The forty-three-year-old follows Ulrike Groos, who is taking on the directorship of the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart. Since 2005, Jansen has been the director of the Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum for New Art) at the Karlsruhe Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (the Center for Art and Media Technology, or ZKM for short). Jansen, who has curated exhibitions in Aachen, Cologne, Maastricht, and Seoul, will begin his new job on January 1.
“FAKE” BEUYS TO BE DISMANTLED
A series of standing blocks inspired by a Joseph Beuys intervention will be dismantled at the museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany, where many of Beuys’s works and his archives are kept. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the forty-eight basalt standing blocks were inspired by Beuys’s 7000 Oaks intervention and were erected in an avenue in front of the Moyland castle for its opening in 1996, ten years after the artist died. The standing blocks were installed in alternation with oak trees. No word in the report whether the dismantling has come about through a legal order. Currently, Beuys’s widow, Eva Beuys, is contesting the rights of Moyland both to own and to preserve its Beuys collection, which is the largest in the world. Meanwhile, Beuys’s former secretary, Heiner Bastian, is taking issue with Moyland’s preservation of the artist’s works. For earlier coverage of this story on Artforum.com, click here.
TASCHEN’S HELMUT NEWTON BOOK TEMPORARILY SHELVED
Sales of Taschen’s fresh edition of the Helmut Newton Sumo book have been temporarily put on hold. Citing an article in Boersenblatt, the Art-Lawyer’s Jens O. Brelle reports how a Cologne judge ordered an interim injunction on the sale of Taschen’s Sumo in its current form. When Sumo was originally published as a limited edition ten years ago, the Newton homage was dubbed the world’s most spectacular book in terms of both size and cost. While the reissued Sumo still maintains the original L size, the price tag has shrunk from approximately $14,000 to a mere $140.
The legal petition to halt the sales came not from a collector but from a rival German publishing house, Schimer/Mosel. The problem? The design and layout suggest that the latest Sumo is identical to the first Sumo published ten years ago, although many images in the latest edition have been changed. The temporary injunction on the sale of the book was decided by the judge without hearing Taschen’s position.
EASYJET RECALLS MAGAZINE WITH HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL FASHION SHOOT
British discount airline EasyJet has recalled some 280,000 copies of its in-flight magazine after complaints about a fashion shoot staged at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, daily Financial Times Deutschland reports. The November edition of EasyJet Traveller, which features a fashion section with models in provocative poses amid the pillars of Peter Eisenman’s somber monument to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, in addition to shots taken at the city’s Jewish Museum, has sparked outrage in the British and Israeli press.
According to the paper, EasyJet issued a statement apologizing to anyone who may have been offended by the magazine spread, explaining that it had been produced by an external advertising agency. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe told the paper that the agency did not register to take the photographs at the site in central Berlin.
Foundation director Uwe Neumärker also said that only projects “that have a contextual reference to the memorial” are allowed to use the site, and commercial activities are strictly forbidden. The paper said EasyJet is now reviewing its relationship with the company that produced the photo shoot.