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The Moloko Bar sits halfway down a shaded alley a short walk from Minsk's Victory Square. You know you're on the right road when you see the avant-garde mural, a mash-up of Renaissance-era paintings and graffiti, that runs along the pavement, ending at a matte white building with a black "?" by the door, the name of the attached art gallery. Such venues are around every corner in European cities like Berlin and Barcelona. But in the drab Belarusian capital, they are very much an exception.

Maria, a 29-year-old poet and journalist, told me over a milkshake that the bar/gallery complex is one of a handful of places in Minsk where brash, open-minded intellectuals can let off steam. Not too loudly, though: plain-clothes agents of the KGB (as the security agency is still called here) are known to stop by and eavesdrop. In their case, however, less plain would help. “Their clothes,” she says, “tell us who they are as soon as they walk through the door.”

The first time Maria and I met, "Casablanca" was playing silently on a flat-screen television mounted to the wall. In the smoky bowels of Rick’s Café Americain the Nazi Major Strasser was confronting Victor Laszlo, the Czech dissident. Coincidence? I couldn’t be sure. But the film was replayed as soon as it ended. As another activist would later assert, everything in Belarus is political when the context is understood.  read more »

Remembering Lucian Freud, a painter who brought realism to the nude ...  read more »

Around the world Kathryn Gustafson is feted as a leading landscape architect. But in Britain she is still the woman behind a much-derided memorial to Princess Diana. Michael Watts meets her ...  read more »

In our sixth instalment of Notes on a Voice, Robert Butler considers the distinctive prose of Joan Didion ...  read more »

How big is his market anyway?  read more »

It seems few sellers care to gamble on an auction these days, to the dismay of discriminating buyers ...  read more »

For decades the Meiyintang collection had been a source of mystery. Widely believed to be the finest trove of imperial Chinese treasures still in private hands in the West, it had rarely ever been seen in full. Little was known about the two brothers who had built it up—ultra-discreet Swiss businessmen with long-standing interests in the pharmaceutical industry in the Philippines and the Asian hinterland. They were, says Roger Keverne, a London dealer who occasionally sold to them, “interested, knowledgeable, passionate and possessed of impeccable taste and the utmost discretion.”
 
So when an initial selection of Meiyintang porcelain was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong last week, it was billed as the sale of the century—an opportunity to acquire works that might never find their way onto the market again. Even in the current overheated market for imperial Chinese wares, the Meiyintang sale was widely expected to achieve new records.
 
The reality, though, turned out to be quite different.
 
Of the 77 lots offered at the April 7th sale, 23 failed to reach the reserve price and did not sell. Half the “premium” lots—those with estimates of at least HK$6m—were also bought in, including the two most important pieces. An auction that had been expected to raise as much as HK$1 billion ($128.6m) fetched barely a third of that. So what happened?
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Christie's and Sotheby’s sold just under £248m ($399.3m) worth of Impressionist and Modern art in three days of auctions in London earlier this week. The total is one of the highest ever achieved for the February Impressionist sales in London, and seemed to prove that the recession that hit the art market in 2009 is well and truly over.

Both auction houses have been reporting an increase in turnover as confidence has returned and business expanded. Christie’s new chief executive, Stephen Murphy, also reports a sizeable rise in the number of new clients registering to bid in its sales in 2010; the year saw a 13% increase in new clients from continental Europe over 2009; a 24% increase in Britain; and a 32% rise in America. Despite this bullishness, the mood in the salerooms ranged from sluggish to euphoric during Impressionist week in London, indicating that sentiment in the art market is more complex than the figures might reveal.

Certainly, there is plenty of money being spent on art, but buyers are extremely picky. Trying to sell anything other than top-quality works that are new to the market and have an excellent provenance is still an uphill struggle. The week began on February 8th with Sotheby’s prestigious evening sale, when the auction house offers up its rarest and most expensive works.  read more »

Can an auction house successfully manage a living artist’s primary market? Perhaps not, on the evidence of the latest split between Christie's and Haunch of Venison, a contemporary art gallery it acquired in 2007.

As the article in The Economist reports, the rise in the value of work by living artists has put auction houses in a tricky position. When your job is to sell the previously owned work of the freshly dead or newly insolvent, you may lack the gifts to discern the work that will be important the first time around. Auction traders certainly don't busy themselves flattering artists in their studios—not when there are freshly widowed biddies to woo. As Damien Hirst said to the journalist of The Economist piece, "Auction houses have been around for a long time, but it seems like they are struggling to know exactly what their role should be.”

A cache of over 40 letters reveals the artist’s humour and imagination ...  read more »