Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art began to show Western paintings, bought during the deposed Shah’s regime, which had been hidden from the public for two decades of Islamic rule. This marked the start of a delicate thawing process in the country’s cultural relations with the West under president Mohammad Khatami.
In 2003, after an absence of almost 40 years, Iran took part in the Venice Biennale. Relations cooled while the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in power from 2005 to 2013, but have thawed again under the more moderate Hassan Rouhani. In August 2015, we reported that the Louvre’s director, Jean-Luc Martinez, is visiting Tehran for talks, while Italy is lending four classical sculptures to the National Museum of Iran.
1998 When Christie’s changed the datelines so that only art from the past 30 years would fit in its contemporary category, few people imagined quite how sky-high its market would soar. Its London sale on 22 April included works by well-established artists such as Richter, Baselitz, Beuys and Buren, but also the YBAs Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and so on, while older and perhaps more expensive artists were now moved to the 20th-century category.
Sotheby’s had also sold some contemporary works in New York, in May 1997. Since then, galleries and fairs specialising in super-contemporary art have proliferated, as have the prices for the latest and most desirable artists, and an entirely new breed of collector-investor has followed suit.
1997 We devoted an entire page to the opening of the new Guggenheim Bilbao museum—easily one of the most recognised museums in the world, designed by the Canadian-American starchitect Frank Gehry. This was a watershed moment for many reasons, but most of all because, for the first time, a museum single-handedly and almost instantaneously revived the economy of a dying industrial town.
Cities and towns around the world started a race to commission their own starchitect museums—buildings that are often better known than the collections they house. That trend is ongoing, especially in the emerging economies, as with the recent opening of Zaha Hadid’s spectacular museum in Baku, Azerbaijan.
1996 The issue of export licences for works of art, especially important ones, is a legal minefield in which each country applies very different rules. In 1996, the Paris court of cassation ordered the state to pay FF145m (£18.8m) to Jacques Walter, the former owner of Van Gogh’s Jardin à Auvers (1890). The state classed the work, which Walter bought in New York in 1955, as a “monument historique”, meaning that it couldn’t leave the country.
This damaged the work’s open-market value, and it sold at auction in Paris to a Frenchman for only FF55m—just over a quarter of its true worth. The state was therefore ordered to cough up the difference.
France’s export licence laws now require the state to buy any such classified work at full market value within 30 months, after which the work can be exported.
1995 From the 1960s to the 1980s, SoHo was New York’s edgy arts district, until the slump of the early 1990s forced many galleries and arts spaces out of business. The area was then redeveloped into a shopping district and only the established, high-end galleries stayed, because they could afford it. The area’s avant-garde artists and galleries started relocating to West Chelsea, a more-or-less abandoned industrial area with affordable spaces. But now this, too, has become one of the most desirable locations in Manhattan, and only blue-chip galleries can afford it. Once again, the younger, edgier galleries and artists have moved out, this time across the water to Brooklyn and beyond.
1994 Devised as a way of raising money for good causes, the UK’s National Lottery was inaugurated in November 1994. Between £75m and £100m was predicted to go towards the UK’s arts and heritage in 1995—surely good news—although critics of the scheme said that it would give the government an excuse to spend less in those areas. In fact, Labour spent large sums of money on art after this, up until the Conservative took over in 2010 and implemented multiple rounds of budget cuts.
1993 Valued at $70m (lower estimate) at the time, the Roman silver hoard, acquired illegally in the 1980s by a consortium that included the former Sotheby’s chairman Peter Wilson, the dealer Rainer Zietz and Spencer Compton, the Marquess of Northampton, was the centre of a lengthy dispute when they tried to sell it at Sotheby’s New York in 1990; Lebanon, Croatia and Hungary all claimed it had been removed illegally from their territory.
In 1993, a jury in New York ruled in favour of the defendants due to insufficient evidence, and so the treasure remained with the marquess. It was never offered on the open market again. In 2014, Hungary bought seven of the 14 pieces for a reported €15m. The Sevso Treasure case was a landmark legal moment that led to a growing awareness that illicitly sourced works of art should not have a market.
1992 The reunification of East and West Germany brought about some serious complication with regards to the redistribution of looted and confiscated works of art. We reported that a new German law was being drafted, stating that most of the movable works of art confiscated in East Germany between 1945 and 1990 would not be returned to their former owners—great news for East Germany’s underfunded museums. The presumed reasoning behind this was to not overburden an already stretched reunification budget. Thankfully for the former owners, this was turned into a 20-year moratorium that ended in 2014. Since then, many restitution cases have been resolved, although some are still pending.
1991 We published several lead stories on Iraq’s cultural heritage that year, as the allied air forces’ bombings were posing a serious threat to Iraq’s rich cultural history. We published a map identifying the cultural sites and their close proximity to military targets, and quoted Bob Hall, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, who said: “If Saddam Hussein puts a military target on top of a temple, that becomes a military target.” The country’s heritage was further damaged by the second invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and is currently faring no better at the hands of Isil.
1990 The Art Newspaper’s first issue led on the reunification of Berlin, where the museums and collections had been arbitrarily divided according to where they were at the end of the Second World War. The Museum Island has since been restored at great cost, but the other state museums are spread out across the city and there is little attempt to make the whole greater than the parts. The planned Humboldt Forum, advised by the outgoing director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, and drawing on these collections, will present the civilisations of the world on the site of the former royal palace.
• Tickets to our 25th anniversary celebration at the British Museum on 28 October, where eminent cultural figures will debate the question, "What is art for?", can be booked online now.