Monster Mash: Breaking news and headlines

-- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art wants your best shot of Chris Burden's "Urban Lights."

-- Thinking about going to theater in NoHo? Start collecting quarters if you're planning to drive there.

-- Economic concerns stall ambitious plans for an arts building boom in Cincinnati.

-- Broadway grosses were nearly $1 billion in 2008, while attendance was 12.32 million, just above the 12.29 million logged in 2007.

-- A Los Angeles muralist campaigns to save his "Resurrection."

-- "Memphis," the rock 'n' roll musical that had its start at the La Jolla Playhouse, moves on to Seattle. Next stop -- Broadway?

-- A bronze version of Edward Degas' sculpture "Little Dancer" will go up for auction in February at Sotheby's in London.

-- L.A. director and playwright Nancy Keystone to bring "Apollo," her epic about space flight, to Portland for its first complete staging.

-- Here's a casting call for only the most secure of those who are insecure about body image.

-- The cover of the Fleet Foxes' self-titled album, which features Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1559 painting "Netherlandish Proverbs," wins the Vinyl Art prize.

-- The Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was buried may have to close because of safety fears.

--  The Westport County Playhouse names new leaders.

-- Lisa Fung

Caption: Chris Burden's "Urban Lights" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times.

Comments

[Gary Arseneau]

January 6, 2009

Dear Editors:

All so-called sculptures in bronze, attributed to Edgar Degas, are posthumous -counterfeits-.

Edgar Degas was some three or more years dead (d. 1917) when those 2nd to 3rd-generation-removed counterfeits were posthumously reproduced in bronze with counterfeit -Degas- signatures applied between 1920 to 1936 or later.

The dead don't sculpt, much less sign anything.

This factual perspective is confirmed in the National Gallery of Art’s published 1998 Degas at the Races catalogue. On page 180 in Daphne S. Barbour’s and Shelly G. Strum’s “The Horse in Wax and Bronze” essay, these authors write: “Degas never cast his sculpture in bronze, claiming that it was a “tremendous responsibility to leave anything behind in bronze -- the medium is for eternity.”

Additionally, on the National Gallery of Art’s www.nga.gov/education/degas-11.htm website, it states: “By comparing the sculpture to stylistic changes in Degas' paintings and pastels, we are developing a chronology for the sculpture, which Degas did not date or sign.”

In the United States the Association of Art Museum Directors endorses the College Art Association's ethical guidelines on sculptural reproductions. In part, those ethical guidelines state: "any transfer into new material unless condone by the artist, is to be considered inauthentic or counterfeit and should not be acquired or exhibited as works of art."

Should the Royal Academy of Art be held to a lessor ethical standard, much less the auction houses?

Gary Arseneau
artist, creator of original lithographs, scholar & author