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THE NOSE KNOWS

Artnose In The News
The Guardian

De Morgen

ATG

Elgin Marbles Made by Englishman:
Shock report

British Museum director Neil MacGregor to be repatriated to
Scotland

Encyclopaedic Museum 'Starter Kit'

Van Gogh's ear to be sold at auction

Artist incarcerated in Fourth Plinth

Mars Bars "dearer than antiques," research shows

World's most expensive art bought by richest people, says shock report

British Museum boss turns down job at New York Mets

Sotheby's to sell drowned animals from private zoo

MacGregor: Empire and Conflict

Nude statue of Queen destined for Fourth Plinth

Hammer horror

Donald Trump to build world’s biggest auction rooms

By our Amazonian credit-crunch correspondent
Consuela Cambio-Wechsel

American billionaire Donald Trump today unveiled plans to transform hundreds of thousands of acres of unspoilt Amazon rain forest into the world’s biggest auction rooms.

The toupéed entrepreneur astounded environmentalists with his audacious plans to construct a $150 billion auction complex in the middle of nowhere at the very moment when the art market is heading into the doldrums following years of reckless speculation by Wall Street hedge-fund managers and other members of the vulture economy.

“Today’s collectors demand the best,” a perspiring Mr Tramp told a swarm of journalists at a hastily-convened breakfast briefing in his 100-acre marble-clad sauna in Trump Towers. “And so that’s what we’ll give them. They don’t care about geography or ecology or the global economy. The world is their lobster.”

The auction complex, which will be run by former Christie’s auctioneer Mr Juicy Pikkeledonions, will be served by its own NASA space station and will be powered by an electricity sub-station that will burn the entire career output of artists Richard Prince, Murakami and Zhang Xiaogang, all of whose canvases have lost 100% of their value since the credit crunch hit the primary market.

The complex will also feature the world’s first Michelin-star MacDonalds restaurant, a 100-hole golf course, a one-legged giraffe-racing track, an underwater show-jumping arena and a multi-storey Thomas Kinkade art gallery.

“The art market is not in recession,” Mr Trimp told reporters assembled around his 50ft George III Cuban mahogany breakfast table. “It's never been in ruder health. Damien has assured me of that.” Holding up a flagon of branded Deripaska vodka, the tricologically-challenged billionaire bellowed, “Tee 'em up! Let’s get pickled!”

C.C-W.

Out now! The new Artnose monthly magazine

Packed with exciting news and features, the first issue of ART CRISIS is now available from all good newsagents.

Keep abreast of the latest breaking news of how the credit crunch will affect YOUR over-priced art collection.
Read blow-by-blow accounts of how the financial tsunami is laying waste to prices for contemporary art and plunging many unfortunate collectors into negative equity.
Learn how to stay ahead of the curve on who the next victim will be in the great art meltdown.
Plus our monthly masterclass on how to hunt down and urinate from a great height onto the flaky art consultants who took you to the cleaners.
Our resident Wall Street psychiatrist is also on hand for those seeking psychological support during a difficult time in an uncaring world.

Issue 1 of this stunning new industry glossy out now at the introductory price of $10 (includes free Richard Prince nurse painting with every annual subscription!)

Banksy “not a real artist”, according to authentication body

By our urban art market correspondent
Lionel Turnbull

Banksy, the self-styled urban guerilla graffiti painter, is not an authentic artist, according to ‘Rat Poison’, a new body set up to police the ever-expanding boundaries of the art market.

Rat Poison is the latest in a lengthening list of 500 verification boards set up over the past year to authenticate works by the UK ’s most dismal and untalented stencil painter. Other bodies include Vermin, Pest Control, DynaPlod, Let Us Spray, CrapTrap, Wanksy, and Waste Disposal Skip.

“Banksy, is not an artist,” said Rat Poison CEO Marguerita Pizza. "He’s a plonker and an ingrate. People like him will be forgotten in a few years. He can’t compare with Masaccio. Now there’s a wall painter. Shit, that guy could paint a wall! Have you seen that Brancacci Chapel he did? Now that’s what I call urban art. Ohmygod, the way he climbed up there on that scaffold in the dead of night and worked his fingers to the bone with only a bottle of…”

At this point a team of white-coated mental health operatives led by former Met Chief Sir Tony Blair closed in on Ms Pizza and bundled her into the back of a white van which only a few moments earlier had been spray-painted by Banksy with a perfect reproduction of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano.

Christie’s Urban Art expert, Mr Juicy Pickledonion, 23, declined to comment. He was said to be sitting on his window ledge five storeys up, a copy of Christie's balance sheet quivering in his hand as the markets tumbled.

Artnose recruitment

An exciting new opportunity has arisen through one of our most valued clients who is a major player in the international visual arts arena.

The ideal candidate will be female, aged between 25 and 30, staggeringly beautiful and fluent in at least four non-European languages including Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Hindi. You will be educated to PhD level or beyond in art history (preferably from the Courtauld Institute of Art) with an MBA or similar business qualification. Knowledge of top-end budget planning and corporate accountancy would be a distinct advantage for this prestigious role, as would at least five years experience of dealing with mergers and acquisitions among high-level business clients in the corporate, public, private and government sectors. Willing to travel around the world at a moment’s notice, you will be confident, an excellent communicator and dynamic public speaker, a team player and a self-motivated innovating rainmaker able to push through the most demanding projects under pressure while maintaining a cool, organised demeanour. You will be in charge of a team of around fifty people working to round-the-clock deadlines requiring meticulous attention to detail.

Salary £15k pa. For application form, send blood sample and recent photograph to Typical Arts Recruitment, The Big Pillared Property in Mayfair, London WC1.

National treasure?

Damien Hirst to be nationalized as financial crisis deepens

By our art-crunch correspondents
Hanky-Panky Paulson and Banksy Bernanky

Damien Hirst, the wealthiest artist the world has ever known and a colossus of corporate finance, faces nationalization say City analysts.

As the financial meltdown edged ever closer to the core of the nuclear reactor that is the international banking system, there were mounting fears yesterday that Hirst – the diminutive giant of the global art economy – faces outright nationalization.

“It’s too early to say what might happen,” said a visibly shaken Treasury Secretary Ed Ballsup as he stood outside his office clutching a wrinkled donkey embryo fitted with swan's wings. “When the investments of millions of collectors around the world look so treacherously close to vaporization, the Government may need to step in, as we did with Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley.”

The prospect of hundreds of billions of pounds worth of pickled livestock cluttering up the corridors of power sent MPs into a gloomy funk as the reality of the situation began to dawn.

City analysts were drawing comparisons this morning between the teetering self-certified ‘buy-to-let’ mortgage market upon which so much of Bradford and Bingley’s business was built, and the shaky foundations of the ‘buy-to-flip’ art investments made by millions of gullible collectors who saw crap contemporary art as an “asset class”.

Speaking from his wheelchair at Lumbago Heights, a Los Angeles residential care home for the elderly, presidential nominee John McCain, 108, told reporters, “Art is no more an asset class than Sarah’s arse,” referring to his vice-presidential nominee. “And believe me, her ass is class and an asset to my campaign.”

Hanky-Panky Banksy Bernanky

Children responsible for looting Iraqi cultural heritage, says leading archaeologist

By our Near Eastern correspondent
Tom Baroli

Children armed with buckets and spades are responsible for the global black market in illicit Mesopotamian cultural heritage, according to a leading Iraqi archaeologist.

Dr Zainab Al-Hosepipe of the Vauxhall International Alliance of Gullible Reporting Agencies says, "Children are descending on important archaeological sites all over Iraq, digging up irreplaceable examples of our cultural patrimony, and then selling it to rich collectors and other trustees of leading American encyclopaedic museums in New York, Chicago and elsewhere."

Dr Al-Hosepipe insists that the international community have exaggerated the looting. "There used to be a very small, teensy-weensy bit of looting once upon a time, but now it's finished, over, gone, dried up, ironed out, resolved, terminated, closed down, done and dusted - history."

The controversy first surfaced in a spectacular report by the world's most illustrious arts journalist Martian Bypass in the world famous cultural journal The Mart Newspaper.

"The Mart Newspaper can now reveal," The Mart Newspaper revealed last month, "that we can now exclusively reveal that the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq never actually happened, but was a figment of the imagination and, what is more, The Mart Newspaper can also reveal that we can now exclusively reveal that the Iraq War never happened either."

Under a new law passed this week by the Iraqi Parliament, any children found looting will have their hands chopped off and will be sent to bed with no supper.

Tom Baroli