1.5 Billion Dollar Art Buyer

A wealthy sheik from Qatar who is the world's single biggest buyer of art has been dismissed as his country's art acquisitions chief after a disagreement with the emir of Qatar over his spending habits. Though the sheik, Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, has built up a large private collection of his own, he also had a mandate as chairman of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage to buy art for five museums being planned for Qatar"s capital.
Sheik Saud has spent close to 1.5 billion dollars on art in recent years. In a rare interview with The Art Newspaper last year, the sheik described his approach to buying art. "I go buy masterpieces," he was quoted as saying.
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Irish Art

Munch Art Recovered

Three works of art by Norwegian master Edvard Munch have been recovered, less than 24 hours after being snatched from a restaurant, say police. The thieves used crowbars to pry the artwork off the walls of the restaurant just after it had closed for the night. Several people - including known criminals - were arrested in Oslo. Munch's tortured tableaus have proven to be quite a draw for Norway's art thieves. In August, priceless Munch masterpieces 'The Scream' and 'Madonna' were stolen and have yet to be recovered. Munch died in 1944 at the age of 80, having produced some 1,700 paintings.
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Irish Art

Gin and Tate

For the Tate-founded Turner Prize, a contemporary art award set up in 1984 that has showcased works involving unmade beds, dead cows and elephant dung, Gordon's Gin has come forward as a sponsor, doubling the bounty to 40,000 pounds - 25,000 pounds to the winner and 5,000 each to the runners-up. Gordon's is spending 1 million pounds over three years for the right to associate its brand with the prize, and investing three times as much to get value for money out of its first ever arts sponsorship. Where's the link between gin and the Turner prize? "The same kind of people who would tend to go to the Tate were also the kind of people who were our drinkers.
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Irish Art

A Tale of Saatchi

Charles Saatchi is selling his collection of hyper-realist sculptures by Ron Mueck. For the shrivelled old man, Dead Dad, which was a star of the 1997 Sensation exhibition, he is asking more than 1 million pounds. The price reminds me of a conversation I had with Saatchi at his County Hall gallery. As he showed me round and we paused to contemplate Dead Dad, he told me how he first saw a work by Mueck in the studio of his mother-in-law, painter Paula Rego. Mueck, who was a simple model-maker, wanted a few hundred pounds for it. But Saatchi told him he was an artist and should charge more. He gave him 3,000 pounds, then persuaded leading London dealer Anthony d'Offay to give him an exhibition. At the show in 1998, four works were priced between 10-20,000 pounds, and Saatchi bought two of them. They were the last works by Mueck that he bought. "Why?" I asked. "They became too expensive," he sighed.
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Irish Art

Getting To Grips With Art

Sense & Sensuality, now at the Royal College of Art, London is the first in a planned annual art competition and exhibition open equally to sighted and unsighted artists and launched by the new charity BlindArt. Latex and cotton gloves are supplied, so visitors can touch the exhibits: one piece, The Laughing Record, will chuckle in response. Anyone fondling Pinky and Perky sight unseen, however, is likely to leap back in shock. The piece has two startlingly realistic latex pigs heads, flaunted as breasts by an antique tailor's dummy - the artist has offered to model them herself for special occasions.
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Irish Art