In today’s FOUND: What is Afrofuturism?, the 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest, and a primer on surrealism that you probably haven’t seen.
Christie’s Establishes its First Saudi Arabia Outpost
From ARTnews
Today, Christie’s became the first international auction house to establish a permanent commercial license to operate in Saudi Arabia.
Noor Kelani will oversee the new location in her recently established role as managing director of Chrisie’s Saudi Arabia. According to a press release, she will head up client services for the fine art and luxury secondary business to “build on long-established clientele in the Kingdom and engage with the next generation of collectors”. Prior to her appointment, she was responsible for operations at Ayyam Gallery in Jeddah and was an adviser for private collections.
When Provenance at Auction Makes a Difference in Price
From Bloomberg
In a lackluster market such as today’s, every little bit counts.
A Greek water jar that’s hitting the auction block at Christie’s in October was painted about 2,600 years ago.
What it was up to during its first couple of millennia is something of a mystery. But what’s much clearer—and of critical import to prospective buyers—is where it’s been for the past 175 years.
We know for sure that the British poet and socialite Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) added the jar at some point to his significant collection of art and antiquities. (This poet never starved, thanks to the banking firm he inherited from his father.) Rogers was a well-regarded aesthete, which adds heft to any objects he owned. “The taste of Mr. Rogers had been cultivated to the utmost refinement,” wrote the Scottish historian Alexander Dyce in the preface to his 1856 book, Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. “He retained that love of the beautiful which was in him a passion.”
Was Venice’s Famed Bronze Lion Statue Made in China?
From Artnet
A new chemical study reveals that the sculpture originates from copper ore deposits in China.
When Marco Polo returned to Venice from a place he called Catai in 1295, he brought back sublime tales of another world. Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World told of paper money, a burning black stone (coal), precious spices (pepper, nutmeg, cloves), and Kublai Khan’s sumptuous palace at Xanadu.
Contemporaries questioned the veracity of Polo’s accounts, a position echoed, for different reasons, by modern scholars. Still, Polo endures as a vital point of contact between Europe and dynastic China. New research conducted around the 700th anniversary of the Venetian explorer’s death, however, suggests fruitful exchange between the maritime city and China predated Polo.
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