Isil began their campaign of iconoclasm in February with the destruction of Assyrian sculptures in Mosul Museum. They moved on to monumental works at Nineveh, and churches and temples in their expanding territories. On 18 August they decapitated 81-year-old Syrian archaeologist Khaled Al-Asaad at Palmyra. Al-Asaad’s special area of research was this beautiful and architecturally influential classical site, and before the town fell to Isil in May he was leading the campaign to take hundreds of sculptures from the site to a safe location. His family fled but he chose to stay and in July he was taken and tortured to reveal the location of the hidden antiquities.
Frederick Fales, who led the Italo-French archaeological campaign in Syria from 1994 to 1998, said: “In killing him they hit at three targets: he opposed the destruction of antiquity in the name of a pseudo-religion; he opposed the traffic in illegally excavated finds, and he was associated with the regime of Bashar al Assad”. Isil then proceeded to blow up the temples of Baal Shamin and Bel, as well as classical tombs at Palmyra.
Maria Böhmer, the minister of state at the German Federal Foreign Office and the chair of the Unesco World Heritage Sites Committee, said: “Palmyra has been on the Unesco World Heritage List since 1980. This crime is therefore also an attack on the cultural identity of Syria’s people and humanity as a whole.”
2014 The Metropolitan Museum enticed five British curators to New York. “Salaries in London museums are derisory”, said George Goldner, the chairman of the Met’s department of prints and drawings, “London is an expensive city…it’s not like living in Mongolia”. There is every likelihood that the situation will worsen after this November’s spending review, adding to the painful fall by one-third in UK national museum budgets since the Conservative coalition government came to power in 2010.
2013 The overlap between the art market and the theoretically non-commercial world of museum exhibitions and biennials was revealed as greater than ever before in a survey conducted by The Art Newspaper. This showed that nearly one-third of 600 solo exhibitions of contemporary artists held in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured names represented by just five galleries: Gagosian, Pace, Marian Goodman, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth.
This figure raised questions about the growing influence of a small number of galleries in a rapidly consolidating market, especially when they offer financial and logistical support. Robert Storr, the dean of Yale University School of Art, said: “Curators are abdicating their responsibilities… to more adventurous galleries, who, aside from the profit motive—and in some cases because of it—seem in many cases to be bolder and more curious than their institutional counterparts.”
Museums are missing the opportunity to steer the conversation by focusing too much on around 300 already established international artists and estates.
2012 The suspicion that there might be a large amount of forged 20th-century art around emerged with the scandal engulfing the now defunct Knoedler gallery over the sale of forged works by Abstract Expressionists. A complaint was filed in a Manhattan court against the gallery by the collector Pierre Lagrange, which alleged that the gallery sold a fake Jackson Pollock painting to him for $17m in 2007. There was a federal investigation into possible forgeries of works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. In May, it emerged that the Diebenkorn estate had alerted Knoedler to fakes before they were sold.
In Germany, Wolfgang Beltracchi, who was convicted of forgery and corruption in 2011, claimed to have forged between 1,000 and 2,000 works by around 50 artists such as Max Ernst and Fernand Léger.
Dangerously for scholarship as well as the market, the fear of lawsuits led to a growing reluctance among experts to take a public stance on authentication. For example, Francis Bacon scholars were wary to speak openly about a particular group of drawings purported to be by the British artist. The Warhol, Basquiat and Lichtenstein authentication boards and the Keith Haring Foundation announced that they would no longer authenticate their artists’ works.
2011 However unreliable the auction data from Beijing Poly and China Guardian that put its market in second place after the US, China’s new power in the art world started to be cited regularly by pseudo-pundits and art investors as the reason why the global market could not now collapse. Gagosian opened its gallery in Hong Kong with Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull, to be followed by Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and White Cube. The owners of Art Basel and Art Basel in Miami Beach bought a controlling stake in the Hong Kong art fair.
But Chinese demand remained strongest for Chinese antiques and Chinese painting, and ventured only speculatively into other fields such as Western or Chinese contemporary art, which has plummeted recently after a high in 2008. The state has, however, continued to invest in museums and design schools, and private museums opened all over the country, although some of them turned out to be ephemeral vanity projects.
The artist Ai Weiwei was arrested and detained for 81 days, ostensibly for tax offences, in reality for his defence of human rights.
2010 In the ten years after its opening, Tate Modern enlarged and enriched the role of museums more than almost any other. Its director, Nicholas Serota, wrote for us: “The museum of the 21st century should be based on encounters with the unfamiliar and on exchange and debate rather than only on an idea of the perfect muse—private reflection and withdrawal from the ‘real’ world...It has to have some anchors or fixed points for orientation and stability, but it also has to be a dynamic space for ideas, conversation and debate about new and historic art within the global context.”
Five years later, at the Art Fund annual dinner in July 2015, Serota warned that the first, revolutionary decade of outreach to the public was not being sustained by government: “The future is challenging. Already we have seen such substantial cuts in central and local funding that even effort and imagination by curators cannot ensure the continuation of all services. Museums have been hollowed out, with a pressure to abandon curatorial work, and there is a danger of cracks appearing that lead to collapse”.