Lawsuit Against Louis Vuitton, LA's MoCA About Documentation "By bringing class-action lawsuits against Louis Vuitton North America and L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, a Los Angeles art collector and his attorneys say they are sounding an alarm on behalf of people who shop for art prints that can cost thousands of dollars: Let the buyer be savvy, and let the seller beware. The suits in Los Angeles Superior Court rely on an obscure chapter of the California Civil Code called the Fine Prints Act. Together Louis Vuitton and MOCA potentially are liable for millions of dollars." Los Angeles Times 07/03/08

Early Australian Tattoos Similar To Rock Art Of The Time "Body art was all the rage in early Australia, as it was in many other parts of the ancient world, and now a new study reports that elaborate and distinctive designs on the skin of indigenous Aussies repeated characters and motifs found on rock art and all sorts of portable objects, ranging from toys to pipes." Discovery 07/03/08

Record Numbers Flocked To British Museum In 2007 "More than 850,000 people viewed the attraction, giving the museum its highest attendance figures since the Tutankhamun display of 1972. The collection boosted overall visitor figures from 2007-08 to six million." BBC 07/02/08

The Art Market - A Robust Top End, But In The Middle? "Christie's and Sotheby's, the world's two top auctioneers, have just completed a series of summer sales in London that raised more than $1-billion, underlining how resilient the top end of the market is despite growing economic gloom. But falling share prices, inflationary pressures and rising costs of oil appear to be taking their toll on the middle market." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/02/08

Why Celebrity Museum Shows Are A Bad Idea "The negatives so far outweigh the positives that such shows hurt, rather than help, a museum's mission. The latest example is "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection," which opened recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The clumsy title is the least of its problems." Los Angeles Times 07/02/08

More Enthusiasm For The Art Market Monday's contemporary sales netted $171.87 million. "These enormous figures do not do full justice to the astonishing zest with which bidders jumped into the fray right from the beginning." International Herald Tribune 07/02/08

Renaissance Sculpture Damaged In Fall At Met Museum A glazed terra-cotta relief by the Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia came loose overnight from its perch above a doorway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and crashed to the stone floor below, suffering serious damage, museum officials said on Tuesday. The New York Times 07/02/08

Why Britain Hasn't Taken To Frank Gehry The odd thing is that the Serpentine Pavilion is Gehry's first English venture. "Probably the last, too," he says. "I don't think England likes me. The critics don't, that's for sure. I reckon I've got a couple of years in me, but I don't count on making a career in England." The Guardian (UK) 07/01/08

The Art Of Architecture "Artists are always the laboratory for the first ideas, the first emotions. Architects take emotions from the streets, the art galleries, the museums; they steal. Architects often wish they were artists, and Jean Nouvel is of the artier kind." The Times (UK) 07/01/08

Report: British Museum Director Turns Down Met Museum's Top Job? British Museum Director Neil MacGregor was approached to be the next head of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has preferred to keep his London job for another five years, the British Museum said. Bloomberg 07/01/08

Architecture's Surprising Green Revolution The green revolution in building design is "unleashing architectural inventiveness not seen in 100 years. Climate change has lent urgency to building-industry efforts that have simmered quietly for years." Bloomberg 07/01/08

Museums Group Condemns Art-Renting Practices "The Italian branch of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has just produced a paper denouncing the practice of charging money to lend a work. This is not about wide-ranging projects such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where the Gulf state is paying e1bn over 30 years into an endowment fund for French museums not just to lend works of art but effectively create a whole museum culture." The Art Newspaper 07/01/08

Curator: 1/3 Of Brooklyn Museum's Coptic Sculptures Are Fake "Its collection of late Egyptian sculpture was, until now, the second largest in North America. Brooklyn curator Dr Edna Russmann, who is concluding a study of the works, warns that other museums which acquired Coptic sculptures in the past 50 years are likely to face similar problems." The Art Newspaper 07/01/08

Report: No Signs Of Recent Archaeological Looting In Southern Iraq "An international team of archaeologists which made an unpublicised visit to southern Iraq last month found no evidence of recent looting--contrary to long-expressed claims about sustained illegal digging at major sites." The Art Newspaper 07/01/08

Bacon Portrait Sells For $34 Million, Koons' Balloon For $23 Million "Four tenacious bidders vied for his "Three Studies for Self-Portrait" from 1975 in what became the evening's longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up the price, even as it passed $30 million. The final tally was $34.4 million." The New York Times 07/01/08

A Need To Protect Historic Buildings "In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified 100 communities in 20 states where teardowns were taking place in architecturally significant neighborhoods. By 2008 the list had grown to around 500 communities in 40 states -- with about a third of those in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut." The New York Times 07/01/08

Art Shortages And The Art Market "If extreme scarcity makes it easier to exaggerate the merit of the remaining works by artists whose truly great pictures rarely come up at auction, it also leads to some real gems being overlooked. As art supplies shrink, so does connoisseurship - the most gifted connoisseurs are only as good as the sum total of what they have trained their eyes on." International Herald Tribune 06/27/08

Real Friends Of The Barnes "The most cogent argument for not hijacking the Barnes to Philadelphia wasn't that it shouldn't be changed at all, that Dr. Barnes wouldn't approve. He has been dead for 57 years. It was that the foundation represented a rare historical artifact, whose distinctive genius loci, like that of Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia, described a precious and irreplaceable historical context for novel innovations in art education." Philadelphia Inquirer 06/29/08

The New Cleveland Museum Unveiled "The reopening will mark completion of the first part of a $350 million expansion and renovation aimed at transforming the museum. By 2012, two new wings will rise to bracket the 1916 building and the 1971 education facility, joined by a huge glass atrium. The museum sees it as a project that will lift the city's fortunes along with its own." The Plain Deealer (Cleveland) 06/29/08

Chicago Finally Honors A Tiffany Masterpiece "In a global city where architecture is a constantly evolving art form on an ever grander scale, the Tiffany dome is more of a cherished family heirloom, one that nearly got tossed in the rubbish, but luckily escaped." Chicago Tribune 096/29/08

When Jazz Represented America To The World "The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Powell's insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn't match -- and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late '50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image." The New York Times 06/29/08

Boston's MFA Raises A Record $500 Million The Museum of Fine Arts has reached its $500 million fund-raising goal, the largest sum for a campaign by an arts institution in Boston history. Boston Globe 06/27/08

Man Caught While Trying To Sell Stolen Monet "A Frenchman living in Florida was charged with attempting to sell a Claude Monet painting and three other artworks stolen at gunpoint last year from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, France." Bloomberg 06/27/08

Prado: Famed Goya Painting Was Actually By Pupil "Francisco de Goya's arresting image of a brooding giant rising above a stampede of terrified people and animals has held pride of place for decades in Madrid's Prado museum. But in an announcement set to raise a storm in the art world, the museum said yesterday that the celebrated El Coloso was not by the Spanish master after all, and was probably painted by a pupil in his studio." The Independent (UK) 06/27/08

New York's Waterfalls Turned On New York City Waterfalls, Olafur Eliasson's $15.5 million quartet of temporary cascades dotting the New York Harbor, formally opened on Thursday morning with a ceremony at South Street Seaport. Officials billed "Waterfalls" as the city's grandest public art commission since Christo and Jeanne-Claude flooded Central Park with saffron-colored fabric panels for The Gates in 2005. The New York Times 06/26/08