Entertainment - ARTINFO

NEW YORK - The recently wobbly American furniture and folk art segment of the auction market received a big jolt of confidence on Friday when an 18th-century Chippendale block-and-shell mahogany desk attributed to Newport, Rhode Island, cabinetmaker John Goddard, sold for a whopping $5,682,500 at Christie's. Dating from circa 1765, the figured knee-hole desk — or bureau — rocketed past presale expectations of $700-900,000 and easily crushed the result made during its last auction appearance, when it sold for $940,000 at Sotheby’s New York in January 2005. Full Story »

PARIS - Last year was not a quiet one for Paris museums — with a still-unsolved theft of five paintings from the city's Museum of Modern Art, a debate over the same institution giving an X-rating to a Larry Clark retrospective, and the refusal of Avdei Ter-Oganyan to show his work in the Louvre's Russian exhibition despite Russia's withdrawal of its demands that the artist be censored. But the first brouhaha of 2011 has already produced results. Growing public discontent over the restrictive hours of city-run museums led the French newspaper Le Figaro to compare Paris-controlled museums to Soviet institutions earlier this month. Now, the city has announced a new plan for streamlining museum bureaucracy, though it will not go into effect until 2012. Full Story »

CAIRO - Crusading Egyptology tsar Zahi Hawass, the charismatic secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities who has had some success pressuring foreign museums to return disputed artifacts, now once again has big game in his sights: the bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been the cornerstone of Berlin's Neues Museum for nearly a century. Hawass has sent a letter demanding the return of the work, and Germany is mounting a defense.  Full Story »

LONDON - The mood was rather cheerful at the Business Design Center yesterday as the London Art Fair drew to an end. The fair's 23rd edition was the largest to date with 124 galleries participating, and attendance edged up by more than 1,000 visitors over last year, with 24,389 browsing the aisles. This is far behind Frieze's 60,000-plus visitors in 2010, but it's a figure for organizers to celebrate nonetheless. Unlike its behemoth competitor, the London Art Fair focuses primarily on Modern British painting and sculpture, though it also includes contemporary galleries, most of them based in the United Kingdom. Full Story »

PARIS - When MoMA acquired Tino Sehgal's "The Kiss" in 2008 — a performance work in which actors recreate iconic kisses from throughout history — director Glenn Lowry called it "one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we've ever made." A dozen people, including museum personnel and attorneys, had to be convened to memorize the artist's instructions, which he did not want consigned to paper. Now the purchase of Sehgal's "This Situation" is causing a different sort of problem for the Pompidou Center. French video artist Fred Forest is questioning the unusual terms of the acquisition and warning that it may not comply with French law. Full Story »

FORT WORTH - Last November Larry Gagosian paid $49 million for Henri Matisse's bronze "Back IV" at Christie's, setting a new record for the artist at auction. Now a Texas art foundation that owns four more sculptures from the series — which consists of 48 bronze casts of four numbered plaster sculptures, 43 of which were fired after the artist's death — has decided that they're too expensive to hold onto. They too will head to an auction house for a private Sotheby's sale.  Full Story »

YOGYAKARTA - The Prambanan temple complex was built in the 9th century and includes temples dedicated to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva with reliefs depicting episodes from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic. And, as if lifted from the pages of such a legend of destruction and rebirth, fears have arisen that powerful flowing volcanic mud produced by Mount Merapi, the volcano that erupted in October and November, could now destroy the historic structures. Full Story »

LOS ANGELES - Frank Gehry can hardly be called an academic architect. While other visionaries in his field have spent as much time publishing papers and heading up prestigious school programs, the steel-sculpting intuitive master builder has been too busy creating actual buildings around the globe, at a breakneck pace. But now, however, the 81-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect has made his latest foray into the world of academe, accepting a still-undefined post at the University of Southern California, from which he himself received his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954. Full Story »

LONDON - London's Wallace Collection, a storied repository of Old Masters that gained some notoriety for its recent show of Damien Hirst's critically-eviscerated paintings, has appointed a traditionalist curator Christoph Vogtherr to be its new director. Currently acting head of collections at the Wallace and its curator of pre-1800 paintings, Vogtherr will replace Rosalind Savill when she retires from the director's post this fall. "Having run a fully international competition, it is very satisfying to find the right balance of scholarship and leadership from within the Wallace Collection itself," John Ritblat, chair of the museum's board of trustees, said in a statement. Full Story »

NEW YORK - Hot on the heels of the announcement of a new Brooklyn-based art fair during New York's upcoming Armory Show week in March, a fresh contender is throwing its hat into the ring — one that is perhaps still more unlikely, and intriguing. The just-announced Moving Image fair is the brainchild of art dealer Ed Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov, a partner in Winkleman's eponymous Chelsea gallery. It aims to solve the longstanding problems of showing video art at a fair. Full Story »