How Much Money Is Really Being Spent In China's Art Market? That's Not Entirely Clear "Was the 2011 joint turnover of the Chinese auction houses $154.2bn, $148.5bn, $88.1bn - or much less?" The Art Newspaper 05/17/12

Showing Contemporary Art In An Old French Convent Supermarket magnate Michel-Edouard Leclerc "says that he hopes to transform the French public's perception of contemporary art by opening a new gallery in a former 17th-century convent in Brittany this summer." The Art Newspaper 05/15/12

Melbourne's Top Art Museum Still Won't Let People Sketch There - And Said People Are Angry "A groundswell of anger about [the National Gallery of Victoria's] restrictions on visitors sketching, painting or even taking notes has the gallery scrambling to amend and defend its guidelines. And a group of eminent local artists has joined a campaign to persuade those in charge to throw open its doors freely to those who want to paint before its great works." The Age (Melbourne) 05/16/12

Here's One Major Critic Who Really Likes The New Barnes Foundation Roberta Smith: "Against all odds, the museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old Barnes, only better. ... And Barnes's exuberant vision of art as a relatively egalitarian aggregate of the fine, the decorative and the functional comes across more clearly, justifying its perpetuation with a new force." The New York Times 05/18/12 (includes slideshow)

Finding The Politics In Joan Miró's Art "Miró's world of art was so special - with stars and moons, biomorphs and delightful dogs and sly monsters and wonderful color - that it has always been difficult to find much politics there." It's a matter of knowing where to look. Los Angeles Times 05/17/12

A Banksy Goes Down The Drainpipe (Actually, It's The Reverse) "A Melbourne builder has inadvertently destroyed a valuable piece of street art by British graffiti artist Banksy, by drilling a hole through it to put in a bathroom pipe." The Telegraph (UK) 05/16/12 (includes video)

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Preserving Outdoor Murals? "Art preservation is tricky even under ideal circumstances, which generally involve close controls for light, temperature, humidity and other hazards. Eliminate those and you have some idea of the challenge that street-mural preservation faces." The Wall Street Journal 05/17/12

René Magritte's Art Deco Sheet Music Covers (Who Knew?) The Belgian Surrealist "may have carved his place in art history as a master of mind-bending, advertising-influenced imagery at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy, but he also had a little-known early commercial career." Brain Pickings 05/14/12

The Master Paper-Cutter Of The New York Subways "In the congested world of subway performers, where dance troupes, conga circles and violin players blur, Ming Liang Lu, 57, is an alluring presence. A self-described 'master paper portrait cutter,' he has the ability to trim facial portraits out of frail paper within minutes, compelling some riders to willingly miss their trains." The New York Times 05/16/12

Evoking Monet's Giverny With Real Plants "Scott Pask made his entrance and spoke his first line: 'The green needs to be a bit more blue'." The Tony Award-winning set designer was at work at the New York Botanical Garden's Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, helping create the new exhibit "Monet's Garden." "The task: evoking Giverny, the Normandy estate that was manse and muse to one of Impressionism's founding fathers." The Wall Street Journal 05/16/12

Thom Mayne To Design Anchor Of Cornell University's NYC Tech Center The Pritzker Prize winner and his firm, Morphosis, have been named architects of the flagship structure of a major research center and high-tech business incubator planned for Roosevelt Island, the quiet strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. New York Magazine 05/13/12

New York's Museum Of African Art Delays Opening Yet Again "For the fifth time in three years, the Museum for African Art has been forced to delay opening its new home at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, in East Harlem, as it continues to work to raise the money to finish the project." The New York Times 05/16/12

Easter Island Statues Have Bodies Beneath Those Heads (Petroglyphs, Too) "When most people think of the renowned monolithic statues, they think of the heads only. But in October 2011, the Easter Island Statue Project began its Season V expedition, revealing remarkable photos showing that the bodies of the statues go far deeper underground than just about anyone had imagined." Yahoo! News 05/14/12 (includes slideshow)

Burma Shave's Legendary (And Long-Lost) Road-Sign Verse "In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower ... there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser's name, 'Burma-Shave'." Salon (Imprint) 05/15/12

Fire Breaks Out At Oslo's Astrup Fearnley Museum "Only months before its scheduled opening, a fire broke out at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art's new building in Oslo, designed by Renzo Piano. Monday afternoon, a fire went up on the top floor, but firefighters had it under control by around 4pm." The Art Newspaper 05/14/12

Syria's Embattled Artists Hang On Political artists, abstract artists - all artists who aren't strictly supportive of Bashar al-Assad's government are under tremendous pressure in Syria these days. Yet a group of them has managed to smuggle their work to a gallery in Beirut - where it sold. NPR 05/14/12

Australian Art Fraud Expert Has No Sense Of Humour "The leader of the University of Melbourne's art fraud unit has cancelled her attendance at an art forgery forum organised by Melbourne's Art Series Hotels following hotel management's decision to offer guests prizes of fake Andy Warhol pictures." The Australian 05/14/12

The Art Market's Irrational Exuberance "No one can doubt that those who run after art operate as if they were living on a different planet. This outburst of hubristic buying occurred less than a week after Sotheby's registered its highest score ever, $330 million, in a sale of Impressionist and modern art." The New York Times 05/12/12

Selling Man Ray's Legacy - From The Auto-Body Shop "Mr. Browner, now 86 years old, had only met Man Ray once before he and his brothers stepped in three decades ago to help their bereaved sister sort out the artist's affairs. Today, Mr. Browner manages 15,000 copyrights for the artist and oversees licensing contracts worth roughly $300,000 a year--from Mandarin Hotel headboards embroidered with Man Ray's images to Zara's taupe-colored Man Ray shirts. The trust's proceeds are split among a dozen heirs." The Wall Street Journal 05/10/12

What Do You Do With All Of That Art You've Collected? Build A Private Museum, Of Course "Over the past two years Wang Wei and her husband Liu Yiqian dropped a reported $317 million on their hobby. Now they need somewhere to display the collection they've amassed. The solution: a private art museum that Wang hopes will impart some class to China's flashy nouveau riche." MSNBC (AP) 05/13/12

The Problem With High Art Prices Isn't About The Art - It's About Inequality Christopher Knight: "The obscenity isn't in the astronomical sums art has been fetching, it's in the circumstances that make those prices possible." Los Angeles Times 05/10/12

That Time Magazine Breastfeeding Cover Has Some Art Historical Origins (Really) "Though the cover may make some readers squeamish, its imagery has a precedent deep in art history, where the image of a woman breast-feeding -- and even breast-feeding someone older than a child -- is less controversial." Washington Post 05/11/12

Thirty Years Of Looking At Cindy Sherman "Sherman's photographs evoke an idea of art as a mediated illusion, a grotesque and haunting chimera composed of different parts and pieces, of high-art and popular culture, of fantasies and uncertainties that are embedded and embodied in an array of visual cues that we encounter each day. These ideas have become our language about art and images since the late 1980s." The Smart Set 05/11/12

A World Of Painting And Text Artist Mira Schor: "The rectangle is a dynamic visual space, it is a dynamic compositional space, it is architectural, you have room to put something in and then something else in. ... Each painting is a short story, and the paintings together suggest a narrative though not necessarily an obvious one, but at the same time, the rectangle is an interesting abstract object." Hyperallergic 05/11/12

O'Keeffe Museum Curator Leaves Abruptly "Barbara Buhler Lynes has been recognized as the world's premier authority on Georgia O'Keeffe, about whom she co-authored the Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne (1999), and wrote the critical work, O'Keeffe: Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 (1989), which examined ways that O'Keeffe changed her painting after early critics insisted on reading depictions of female anatomy into her representations." AdobeAirstream 05/11/12