Links from the Sphinx: Liz Taylor's Van Gogh, Salander O'Reilly and Sotheby's, Another Art Blog Round-Up, Another Proposal for Taichung Museum

---Cleopatra (aka Liz Taylor) gets to keep her van Gogh: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the claimants' appeal, the Associated Press reports. The lawyers who tried to pry loose Taylor's "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" are the same ones trying to separate Andrew Lloyd Webber from his Picasso, "Angel Fernández de Soto." Both suits against celebrities involved questions about the artworks' Nazi-era pasts.

---Both the NY Times and Bloomberg reported yesterday that Sotheby's is one of the aggrieved, litigious creditors in the Salander O'Reilly mess. This brings to mind my earlier post, Are Art-Backed Loans Part of the Current Credit Crisis?, in which I quoted Sotheby's description of its Finance Segment:

Clients who borrow from the Finance Segment are often unable to borrow on conventional terms from traditional lenders.

---Curses, snubbed again! Charlie Finch does a round-up of art blogs for Artnet's online magazine, but your favorite example of this genre is nowhere mentioned. In this case, I guess it's just as well I've been excluded: The reliably inflamatory Finch declares: "What's 'fun' about the art blogs is how conformist, reactionary, redundant and self-referential they are."

Duck, Chuck! I see a blogosphere swarm headed your way.

---If your city can't handle a Guggenheim satellite, how about a remote-control airplane museum? Is Zaha Hadid still interested in a museum project in Taichung, Taiwan?