Ating Pinas: 146 Marcos paintings still missing

Ating Pinas (Our Philippines) is a regular series on this site.  It is about anything and everything Filipino; featuring uplifting articles that inspire national pride as well as sobering essays to spur participation towards positive change.  

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According to the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), a total of 146 paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and other masters, which were allegedly bought with stolen funds by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, remain missing.

Marcos distributed his priceless collection of at least 300 artworks to cronies when his regime crumbled in 1986. Only about half have been recovered by Manila, said Andres Bautista, chair of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG).

“The Marcoses were art aficionados and they spent millions of dollars buying these paintings,” Bautista said.

The 146 paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and other masters like Renoir, Rembrandt and Cézanne “could be anywhere,” he added.

The PCGG drew up the list of missing paintings from art gallery receipts and shipment records left behind by the Marcos family, Bautista told Agence France-Presse.

Vilma Bautista, the former personal secretary to Marcos’ widow, Imelda, along with two nephews, was indicted in New York last week over an alleged conspiracy to sell a Monet that had belonged to the first lady.

The Monet, “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” and three other paintings seized by US authorities from Bautista were on the Philippines’ missing list, said Andres Bautista, who is not related to the accused.

Vilma Bautista and her nephews allegedly sold the Monet to an art gallery in London for $32 million, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

The PCGG’s Bautista said he had met the New York prosecutors to ask for the return of the four paintings to Manila.

“Now, whether we bring them back here to be exhibited, or we sell them there and remit the proceeds to the national treasury would be up to President Aquino,” he said.

The other artworks from the Marcos collection that had already been recovered by the Philippine government were either sold or displayed in local institutions or museums, according to the PCGG chair.

The PCGG was formed in 1986 to recover Marcos’ embezzled fortune believed to be worth up to $10 billion, after the bloodless Edsa People Power Revolution ended his 20-year rule and forced him into US exile. He died in Hawaii in 1989.

Read more here.

Monet’s “L’Église et La Seine à Vétheuil” (1881)

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Diff'rent Strokes: Fake art in the market

Diff'rent Strokes features excerpts from articles on Culture, Art, Music, Film, Books, and various pop and avant-garde creations  as published by various online periodicals.

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Fake Art May Keep Popping Up for Sale

By Patricia Cohen

The New York Times

As soon as Richard Grant, executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation, glimpsed the three drawings in an Upper East Side apartment several years ago, he knew there was a problem.

The artwork on the wall had been previously identified by the artist’s estate as fake Richard Diebenkorns. But here they were again, proudly displayed as Diebenkorns by a new owner who had no idea he had bought discredited drawings.

For organizations like Mr. Grant’s that are charged with protecting an artist’s legacy, the job of patrolling for fakes has become something like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

“You put it down, and then five, seven years later, poof!, and there it is again,” he said by phone from the foundation’s offices in California.

The resale of fakes is a persistent and growing problem without a good solution, say collectors, dealers, artist estates and law enforcement agencies. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation can seize forgeries in criminal cases, these represent only a tiny portion of the counterfeit art that is circulating.

“They churn through the market,” James Wynne, an F.B.I. special agent who handles art forgery cases, said of fakes.

There are no clear rules for what happens to phony art after it is identified. “It all depends what the facts are, what the art is, how many works are involved and how expensive they are,” he said.

Art whose authenticity is disputed occupies a special sort of limbo, as demonstrated by the settlement last month between Knoedler & Company, a Manhattan gallery that abruptly closed last year, and a customer who accused that gallery of selling him a forged Jackson Pollock for $17 million.

The F.B.I. is investigating whether that painting, known as “Silver Pollock,” might be part of a larger cache of forgeries. But no charges have been brought and the gallery maintains that the work is authentic. So what happens to a $17 million painting that some people consider a fake?

Given the publicity surrounding this particular case, a sale any time soon would be surprising, art lawyers and dealers agree. But nothing in criminal law would necessarily prevent the owner from selling it today as a Pollock. (Details of the settlement are confidential, including who owns the artwork now.)

When it comes to undisputed fakes, law enforcement officials try to halt resales by such practices as stamping works as fake or, in rare cases, destroying them. Each option has drawbacks, including the possibility of mistakenly destroying an authentic work.

Ultimately, though, both the police and buyers mostly rely on the art market to police itself.

Artist foundations and estates that find fakes on eBay or at small auction houses can inform the dealer or Web site, but they have no authority to seize or mark the work. Frequently, they say, counterfeits go underground only to re-emerge later, labeled as the real thing.

Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, said that during the years that it authenticated works by Roy Lichtenstein, he regularly noticed that collectors informed that they had a fake would later quietly sell it as genuine. “And then we’d find somebody else would send the same work to us six months later” asking for it to be authenticated, he said.

In France, Switzerland and other countries that recognize the “moral rights” of an artist, heirs or foundations like Lichtenstein’s can ask the courts for permission to destroy a fake. But Ronald D. Spencer, a Manhattan lawyer and editor of the art-law handbook “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” said he was glad that is not done in the United States. The notion is “an anathema,” he said, noting how frequently opinions about authenticity can change. Just two months ago, for example, three J. M. W. Turner paintings that had been dismissed as fakes were reclassified as genuine.

“Stamp it, by all means, so that any subsequent owner knows that it was considered a fake, but don’t destroy works,” Mr. Spencer said, echoing the view of many art dealers. If destruction becomes routine, he added, a genuine work will mistakenly be consigned to the shredder at some point.

Marking a work was the course taken in 2011 by the Dedalus Foundation, a nonprofit created by the artist Robert Motherwell, after it identified a putative Motherwell painting as forged.

As part of a civil settlement, Dedalus demanded that the work be permanently marked as a fake. Now on the back of the work, “Spanish Elegy,” an indelible stamp states that “this painting is not an authentic work by Robert Motherwell but a forgery.”

The effort to keep fakes off the market may be most hampered by the reluctance of those in the know to speak out. Art experts and institutions, most prominently the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Lichtenstein Foundation, have stopped authenticating artwork, or pointing out suspected fakes, for fear of being dragged into a lawsuit by the owner of a work they rejected.

Read complete article here.

Roy Lichtenstein - Pop Art - Genuine or fake?

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Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.

Thank you!

Diff'rent strokes: Brian Eno

A  Monday read featuring excerpts from articles on Culture, Art, Music, Film, Books, Architecture and various pop and avant-garde creations.

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Brian Eno on music that thinks for itself

Wired Magazine

When you think about it, recorded music is something of a historical oddity. Imagine telling a visitor from 1650 that we like to listen to the exact same performances, over and over again, without any variation -- they might well be baffled. Or, as Brian Eno once said, perhaps it is our grandchildren who will be the baffled ones.

Scape, a musical app developed by Eno alongside composer and programmer Peter Chilvers, is a kind of album that will never sound the same twice. It's a continuation of Eno's work with generative music, compositions which change every time they're played as the systems behind them introduce some kind of randomness. Starting with an empty screen, shapes can be arranged to create literal "soundscapes" where they each represent a different sound. Their positions relative to each other dictate their behaviour.

Eno, one of popular music's most important and influential figures, has used generative techniques to compose music for many years, popularizing the term with the album Generative Music 1 in 1996. Chilvers and Eno first worked together on the soundtrack to Spore, where the generative music matched the sandbox evolution of the gameplay. They then worked together on apps called Trope and Bloom, both more primitive versions of the "soundscape" idea behind Scape.

We're used to the ideas of live music versus recorded music, and the different expectations they bring, but generative music introduces the unpredictability of live playing to machines. The description of Scape as "music that thinks for itself" imbues computers with a kind of creative responsibility, which might seem a contentious notion. Can an algorithm be creative in a way that we would recognize?

Wired.co.uk met with Eno and Chilvers at Eno's studio in Notting Hill to discuss the development of Scape, and what it means for the future of generative music as a popular art form.

Wired.co.uk: You two have worked together before on similar apps, but this seems a much more elaborate setup -- to what extent is this a progression of those same ideas?

Eno: They're progressions from Spore, where we wanted to make music that wasn't repetitive or based on simple loops going around, but was based on the idea that any scene could have a sonic character -- but it wouldn't be exactly the same each time you visited. So we came up with this idea of loading the game with what we called "shufflers" -- now they're called "elements". There were simple rules for how those things combined and played out -- this thing only happens when these other two things are happening -- and so on. This worked quite well in Spore, and Bloom was one of the spinoffs from that. Bloom used one sound that we used in Spore. I think it was a big step forward, actually, that you could create a piece of art and not just an interesting technical curiosity. [Scape] is another step, to say, "what if we used a bigger family of elements?"

So where do you come up with those different elements, and how they interact with each other?

Chilvers: A lot of the sounds came out of a mixture of existing pieces by Brian, so there was already an existing combination that would sit well together. I think it's partly down to the nature of the kind of music that Brian has been creating that they actually sit well with most sounds in this universe.

Eno: That's right, it's a kind of universe of sounds that work well together, and they can have quite ambiguous tonal relations with each other. You couldn't imagine doing this if you took apart, say, a Clash album, and you took apart the drum parts, and the guitar parts, and the bass parts, and let them float freely and recombine. It probably wouldn't get you a very interesting result. But this music was made from the beginning in that way. It was made on the idea that the elements within it were not in a fixed relationship to each other, they didn't have to be in just one relationship. The discovery that we made was that you could take three or four of those elements from one piece and three or four from another piece and -- ah! -- they can work together. It's been treated like a composition process from the beginning really.

I've seen you talk about it generating its own compositions -- that it has its own creativity. Do you think that a machine can generate real music without human input that we would still value?

Eno: It's not without human input.

Chilvers: It's not realtime human input, I suppose. To come back to a metaphor that Brian often uses, it's more like gardening; we're providing a set of seeds more than anything else, but those seeds were already designed elsewhere and they were already given that initial kickstart of creativity there. It's a very unusual type of creativity, it's quite open-ended.

The interface adds to that. I don't want to call it messy, but it's not rigid. You can place things wherever you want. That's very deliberate I imagine?

Chilvers: In fact it's something I found slightly alien. We actually bent the rules slightly so you can place things just off the screen, so they're just spilling out over the edge.

Eno: It also gives you a different way into the composing process because you can compose a piece just by making a picture that you like, which I find quite interesting.

Chilvers: There's an interesting example of that actually. If I just load the very first one, "Icon", the name isn't a coincidence. We have a graphic designer, and he wanted some sort of suggestion of what the icon for the app would look like, so I mocked something up with Scape. All I was trying to do was get one of each type of element, and by the end of it we thought "that's a really nice piece". So it ended up becoming the opening. So this is a great example of something with no real sense of what the sound will be, just trying to do it naturally.

It's almost like a 21st century version of Oramics isn't it?

Both: [Laughter] Yes, yes.

Read more here.

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Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.  Thank you!

Art, meditation, and reverence

Malacanang Palace Museum

Resting the mind can be accomplished by meditation, and also by artwork, 
which allows the intuition to flow: the conscious mind recedes. 
Meditation and artwork at their best complement each other, 
and true things emerge. 

                                                                                Candace Loheed

Pinto Gallery, Antipolo City

In art museums and galleries, expect to see more slow looking and meditating. 

When I see it I plan to respectfully stay quiet and let it happen: I may try it myself. 

After all, for many of us, art galleries and museums are as close to church as we 

ever get. "With the eclipse of religion in the West," says David Greusel, an 

architect who specializes in the design of places where people come together, 

"the art museum has replaced the cathedral as the building type with the 

greatest architectural, social, and spiritual significance in a community."

                                      John Seed
                                                                             Professor of Art and Art History, 
                                                               Mt. San Jacinto College

Molave Abstract and Tiffany-style desk lamp

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things,

but their inward significance. 

                                                Aristotle

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Sharing with Photo Art Friday

Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.

Thank you!

Baji Through the Fire: All women art exhibit

Baji Through the Fire 

an Art Exhibit featuring

Bohol's female artists in celebration of

Women's Month

at Island City Mall Activity Center

March 4 - 30, 2012

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Related link:

Blossoming of the Baji

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Litratong Pinoy

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Panaw sa Alampat: National Art Month Exhibit by Boholano Artists

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Suggested read:

An Artist Defines Her Role

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Our World Tuesday

Watery Wednesday

Beyond Just Black and White

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Art Collective

"Art for a Vision" opens on February 10 at the Crucible Gallery.  It is a fundraising project that will benefit the Ophthalmological Foundation of the Philippines (OFPHIL), a non-profit organization dedicated to the prevention of blindness among the poor in the country.

Some 3.4 million Filipinos are visually-impaired and 62% of the cases are due to cataracts, with almost 500,000 blind in both eyes, according to the Ophthalmological Foundation of the Philippines. About 90% of people who suffer from blindness belong to poor communities.

“It is important to note that 75% of cases of blindness can be avoided through prevention and treatment. No person should be needlessly blind and we hope to reach as many people as possible who have no means for proper eye care,” said Dr. Felipe Tolentino, OFPHIL founder and president.

Gus Albor, Virgilio Aviado, Cesar Caballero, Valeria Cavestany, Igan D'Bayan, Ramon Diaz, Arturo Luz, Ramon Orlina, Impy Pilapil, Cid Reyes, Juvenal Sanso, Jaime Zobel and Betsy Westendorp had contributed to a selection of paintings and sculptures to be sold in this fundraising project that will benefit visually impaired indigents.

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There is a Vincent Van Gogh exhibition going on at the  Philadelphia Museum of Art  Entitled “Van Gogh Up Close,”  the exhibit has been organized by Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson, curators in Philadelphia, working with Ms. Kienle, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Cornelia Homburg, an independent scholar. It examines van Gogh’s relationship to nature at its most intimate.

Meanwhile, a biography of Vincent van Gogh call into question the long-accepted notion — central to the myth of the troubled artist — that he committed suicide.  Read New York Times article here.

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Christie's auctioned off this Roy Lichstenstein painting for $43.82 million.  It was one of the ten priciest art pieces sold by Christie's in 2011. This goes to prove the highly lucrative world of collecting art. See the others here.

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Artwork for Art in the Park 2012 - “Birth” by Pam Yan-Santos

This February 18, the familiar white tents of Art In The Park will once again dot the grounds of Jaime Velasquez Park in Salcedo Village, Makati.  From 2 p.m. to 12 midnight, art aficionados, collectors, or just the plain curious can pop into any one of the tents and, perhaps, come away with pieces that are not only beautiful, but easy on the pocket as well. In keeping with its tagline “an affordable art fair,” Art In The Park has capped its prices at P30,000. The majority of the pieces, however, are pegged at way less than this ceiling price.

Live jazz music will be provided by Soulful Mood, as well as progressive “chill” music from Diwa de Leon and his hegalong.  For refreshments, there will be wine from Straits Wine Company and a selection of food from Window’s Café, Nic’s Bakeshop, Golden Spoon, and Rafik Shawarma.

Art In The Park promises an enjoyable, cool Saturday.

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Related links:

Investing in Philippine Art

Elizabeth Taylor's Van Gogh goes for $15.9 million

Businessweek: The art of collecting art

Oprah.com: How to collect art

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Art Cafe at ChArts Resort

This is truly a cool cafe!  I've been passing by this place so many times, admiring its whimsical architecture, and saying to myself, "I have got to go in there and check it out one of these days."  And I did one morning.  

I had already eaten breakfast earlier and merely wanted to see its menu.  However, once I got seated on one of the tables out in the veranda, I just felt so cozy that I ordered a buko pandan shake to give me a legitimate reason to stay longer. 

When the shake was served, I pulled out a book to read a couple pages, but indolence was simply too engulfing.  I just wanted to kick back and relax; enjoy the surroundings and take in all the wonderful artworks around me.

Art Cafe serves an array of breakfast and lunch treats. It closes at 6:00 pm, hence, no dinner menu.  Nevertheless, I plan to drop by on weekend afternoons for snacks and WiFi.

ChArts Resort

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Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.

Thank you!

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