The little black dress, the quilted handbag, the two-toned shoe — the iconic essentials created by Coco Chanel inspire Peter Philips, Creative Director of Chanel Makeup, to create the elegant Fall 2012 Collection...

A drought summer? In the garden maybe, but not on the wine front. This is the season for chilled wine, with reds as well as whites benefiting from a spell in the fridge. In the red department, I’ve chosen a couple of New Zealand Pinot Noirs – which, to...

Before the stuffy opulence of Paris haute couture fashion week, the City of Light has a few days to take in the breezier fare of the spring 2013 men’s collections. The best trends that emerged over the last few days revealed an industry with an eye turned to sport — spritely active popped up in nearly every line. A cold front may have descended on Paris over the weekend, but the barrage of shorts, light-colored suits, and pieces meant for outdoor use looked past any idea of cold weather, and instead focused on the warmth that always follows winter. Guys, it’s time to stock your closets with safari shorts, camo everything, and long skirts . Yes, skirts. Skirts for guys. 

Click to see a slideshow of all of the trends that came out of Paris men’s Spring 2013 fashion week. 

This past weekend, the world watched in horror as Islamists from the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine razed centuries-old mausoleums in Timbuktu. While UNESCO has led the international outcry, calling for an immediate halt of the destruction spree that began last Saturday, a group of roughly 30 Ansar Dine Islamists, armed with axes, shovels, and automatic weapons, continued to carry out what they believe to be a divine order to destroy the idolatrous shrines of local saints.

The devastation to Timbuktu's historic tombs comes only days after UNESCO designated the Malian outpost as an endangered heritage site at the request of the Malian government. In its 16th century heyday, Timbuktu was a gold-rich city situated along an old Saharan trading route. During this time, the three great Islamic mosques of Timbuktu were restored to their glory, and the city grew as an Islamic seat of spiritual learning.

With this came a remarkable religious build-out: the city erected new shrines for some 300 local saints, overhauling the landscape with a patently organic brand of architecture. This past weekend, Ansar Dine threatened to destroy all 16 main mausoleum sites, as locals told The Guardian, with little regard for the international uproar that has ensued.

"The only tribunal we recognize is the divine court of Shariah," said Oumar Ould Hamaha, a spokesman for Ansar Dine, acknowledging the group's blatant indifference to pleas from the United Nations. "It's our Prophet who said that each time that someone builds something on top of a grave, it needs to be pulled back to the ground," he explained. "We need to do this so that future generations don't get confused and start venerating the saints as if they are God."

The destruction of Timbuktu brings to mind the razed Buddhas of Bamiyan, two colossal standing Buddha statues carved into a cliff in Afghanistan in the 6th century and dynamited by militant Islamists in 2001. But as Guardian arts writer Jonathan Jones pointed out in a pained howl of a blog post, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were non-Islamic religious idols; the shrines of Timbuktu, on the other hand, are part and parcel of a city that was crucial to the spread of Islam in Africa. Their destruction is a reminder that militant groups like Ansar Dine are but small factions of an exceedingly diverse religion.

But perhaps the most injured party in the wake of these events would be Africa, a continent that has struggled to preserve its cultural monuments from being sacked and pillaged. Timbuktu's shrines are so invaluable to Mali — especially as the country has been actively cultivating its tourism industry — that their destruction constitutes "a possible war crime," according to one private radio station. Locals could only watch helplessly from afar this past weekend and into Monday as pick-up trucks surrounded Timbuktu’s treasured monuments and Ansar Dine carried through on its threats. Media sources report that neighboring African countries are currently seeking backing from the U.N. for a military intervention, but it remains to be seen how they can and will retaliate.

Pace Gallery’s permanent London space has been a long time coming. Two years after opening a small office in London’s SoHo neighborhood, the gallery has finally secured a 15-year lease on a sprawling space at the esteemed Royal Academy. “Finding a big space in Mayfair is like hunting in a haystack,” Marc Glimcher, Pace’s president, told ARTINFO in an interview. “If you walk around, you realize just a few of those spaces exist.”

Come October, Pace will open its 9,000-square-foot venue at 6 Burlington Gardens, in the west wing of the Royal Academy. The blue-chip gallery will lease the space from the art institution in what Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the RA, characterized as “a public/private partnership.” Until recently, the space was occupied by the Christie’s-owned gallery Haunch of Venison, which had temporarily left its space off Bond Street while it was under renovations.

Pace will share the upscale Mayfair neighborhood with a number of other American gallery outposts, including Gagosian, Michael Werner, and David Zwirner. “London is a place where citizens of certain regions come to really live, not just to visit,” Glimcher said, when asked about the city’s appeal as an art market.  “Just look at the nationalities of the kids in English schools. People from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and India — they are all committed to London.”

The space will be led by former Gagosian director Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and opens just before Frieze Art Fair with the exhibition “Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes.” The show — which marks Mark Rothko’s first gallery exhibition in London since 1963 — will juxtapose approximately 10 of the Abstract Expressionist’s late black and gray paintings with 10 of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famous photographic series capturing the horizon line. Sugimoto, a longtime fan of Rothko’s dark paintings, hatched the idea with Pace’s Andrea Glimcher and Christopher Rothko, the painter’s son, over lunch. Most of the pieces will be borrowed from Sugimoto and the Rothko family.

Architectural purists need not fear that Pace’s contemporary program will lead to an overhaul of the Academy’s Beaux Arts building, which was originally constructed in 1870. “It will still feel like you’re in that building,” said Glimcher, who has tapped architect David Chipperfield for the design. “We won’t be closing up the beautiful windows and turning them into a white wall.” (The RA is currently undergoing its own renovation, to be complete in 2018.)

Asked if he feared the new European Resale Rights directive, which requires that a portion the proceeds of a resold artwork must go to the artist’s descendants, would discourage buyers, Glimcher quipped, “People expect that the super-rich might be very nimble and very clued-in, but in fact, people who have gotten to that stage are very loathe to change the way they do things.”

Pace’s mini-empire now clocks in at seven galleries — two in London, one in Beijing, and four in New York (with the latest opening on 25th Street this fall). Glimcher acknowledges it’s difficult not to feel pressure to expand Pace’s brand. “There certainly is fierce competition over artists,” he said. “It’s become extremely brutal, and for a small group of galleries, having a space in another city gives them a foothold that they will try and utilize with the artists” — in other words, to poach them. At a certain point, he said, the dynamic is not dissimilar to “the lemmings all rushing faster and faster to the edge of the cliff.”

How, then, is it done right? “You can open a gallery defensively to protect your artists, or you can go where the artists are,” Glimcher said. He noted Pace’s Beijing space largely exhibits the gallery’s Chinese artists. “It doesn't mean you aren't also defending yourself at the same time.”

With a $15 million donation, Simon Mordant, co-CEO of the independent corporate advisory firm Greenhill Caliburn, and his wife, Catriona, led the recent $53 million campaign to renovate the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), in Sydney. In addition to chairing the MCA, the 52-year-old is serving as commissioner for the Australian pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale and sits on the international councils of MOMA and the Tate. Mordant spoke with Benjamin Genocchio about art, philanthropy, and giving it all away.

Can you describe your personal collection and how you got started acquiring art?

I bought my first picture as a teenager from the Royal Academy’s summer show in London. I was working across the road and popped in at lunchtime and fell in love with the work. I bought it and started a correspondence with the artist. The picture sits on the desk in my study. We own several hundred works of art from Australia and internationally, covering all media. We have never thought of it as a “collection” but rather as things we love. We have only ever sold one work, and I still regret that sale.

Do you find your collecting now is tied up with your institutional philanthropy?

We lend work to institutions and have also gifted works, and we expect to be doing more of that over time. However, we only buy things we love. We have supported institutions in funding their own acquisition programs, but those are curatorial decisions and not something we feel we should be involved in.

When did you get involved with the MCA, and how did you choose that institution to support?

It is my view that if you want a creative and vibrant community, then the arts are central, and contemporary art is the core. When I emigrated to Australia from the U.K. in 1983, I was quite surprised that there was no institution dedicated to contemporary art. I first visited the MCA’s current site — opposite the Opera House and Harbour Bridge when the building was turned over by the state government. And since its opening in 1991, I have been heavily involved.

What do you see as your role as commissioner for Venice?

The task is more daunting than I had realized. Along with the Australia Council, my task has been to choose the artist — the wonderful Simryn Gill — and then fund and mount the exhibition and ensure that the widest possible audience engages with theworks in Venice and then in Australia and in the international arts community. Australia was one of the last countries to be granted a site in the gardens and built a “temporary” building in 1988. Now we will be the first country to redevelop. It is a wonderful design by DCM. My wife and I kicked off the campaign with a $1 million pledge before the selection process was started.

What do you think are the most important recent developments in Australia’s contemporary art world?

Audience engagement with contemporary art has grown dramatically. Institutions have been developed in Melbourne, Brisbane, and  Tasmania with a focus on contemporary art and it is now part of the national curriculum. At the MCA we have grown from 100,000 visitors annually to 600,000 — and that was before we renovated and reopened. I’m sure this will grow dramatically now.

How do you go about getting more people involved in supporting the arts?

We don’t care what people are passionate about — the key is finding your passion. I have a personal desire to ensure that wealthy Australians do more to engage with the community and help to make a difference. Huge wealth has been created here, and more of it should be given back.

You are often quoted as saying you want to “die with nothing.” Why is that?

My wife and I have a shared view on inheritance and our son respects that. We came into the world with nothing and want to put back whilst we are around and can enjoy the pleasure and engagement arising from this.

This article appears in the summer issue of Art+Auction magazine.

If there is a top American movie actress one wishes well, it is Michelle Williams. Unfailingly appealing, she has the image of a kind and generous spirit – and in the unlikely event that she has been pulling the wool over our eyes, one senses that the image is close to the person. It is hard to think of one of her contemporaries who makes us care for her characters as much as Williams makes us care for hers.

She specializes in confused and vulnerable women trying to hold their own in alienating environments – hence her manipulative, hopelessly insecure Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn” – or in damaging or dwindling relationships. The Marilyn movie was clearly predicated as a light drama and Williams was required to show the star’s giddy, lovable side, but she was more compelling when showing her in thrall to the noonday demons or twisting her young admirer (Eddie Redmayne) around her little finger. 

While acting everyone else off screen in “Dawson’s Creek,” Williams played, early in her film career, two students perplexed at being betrayed by their best friends: Anna Friel in the British “Me Without You” and Christina Ricci in “Prozac Nation.” She was then cherishable as the earnest, questing missionaries’ daughter who accompanies her paranoid Vietnam-vet uncle on a healing trip across post-9/11 American in Wim Wenders’s underrated “Land of Plenty.”

She has been a traveler, too, in a pair of sublime Kelly Reichardt films: an itinerant, barely part of society, driving north with her dog to look for work in “Wendy and Lucy”; a bonneted pioneer wife on the Oregon Trail who, alone among her group of seven in “Meek’s Cutoff,” stands up to their racist wagonmaster when he attempts to kill the Cayuse Indian guiding them to salvation in the desert. Asked to be blunt, steely, and resolved, Williams showed she could transcend victimhood. She was at home in Reichardt’s almost wordless world; she is an actor who can make thought and stealthy movement vivid.

Her wives are seldom happy: she was heartbreaking winning the first of her three Oscar nomination as Alma, shattered by the sexual volte face of her husband (Heath Ledger, Williams’s late husband and the father of her daughter) in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning “Brokeback Mountain.” She was a little lost as the actress briefly married to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s stage director who casts her as a hausfrau in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.”

Martin Scorsese recognized Williams’s capacity for dreamy derangement when he cast her, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, as the mentally ill Dolores in “Shutter Island.” In “Blue Valentine,” she was judged by some critics to be cold and unfeeling for playing the hardworking young mother who finally rejects the alcoholic but devoted husband (Ryan Gosling) who sweetly courted her. Hopefully, she took the criticism as a compliment; her Cindy is a practical, realistic woman who realizes the relationship has run its course.

In her new movie, Sarah Polley’s “Take This Waltz,” which opened Friday (and is also on video on demand), Williams plays another woman whose marriage is jeopardized by her changing feelings. Although Margot loves her husband, an undemanding, teddy-bearish creator of chicken recipes (Seth Rogen), she is sexually drawn to an artist (Luke Kirby) she meets on a business trip and, discovering they are neighbors, is inevitably pulled into his force field. The movie is too talky, the sex scenes are awkward, and Polley’s visualizations of rapture are overwrought, but once again Williams is convincing as a woman forced to make a choice – and one doomed to repeat her mistakes. The recurring image of the film is of Margot holding a partner who has turned his back on her.

These are all fine performances. They are primarily in indie films, though, and I am not yet convinced Hollywood knows what to do with Williams. She has yet to play a bitch – it may go against her nature – or to be earthily sexual (her Marilyn being withholding). If she never plays a femme fatale, that will be all right, though I’m not sure playing Glinda the Good Witch in the 2013 prequel “Oz: The Great and Powerful” will stretch her. She can manifest ambiguity as well as goodness and possibly needs to muddy the waters.

A suggestion: what about a sequel to “Shame” in which Williams and Carey Mulligan discover they were twins separated at birth and proceed to drive each other mad?

The 2007 collapse of the American housing market dealt a heavy blow to the city of Detroit, and not even the lofty high-design visions of modernist icon Mies van der Rohe could escape the city’s tidal wave of disaster. Two twinned high-rises designed by the German architect in Detroit’s Lafayette Park were foreclosed in February of this year, according to Curbed Detroit, and now the city’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced that the buildings will be up for auction later this month. On July 18, one lucky, deep-pocketed bidder will walk away with rights to both Lafayette Towers and all 584 of their apartments.

Be warned, however, that the prized high-rises come with an enormous asterisk. As Curbed reports, the buyer will be contractually obligated to shell out over $10 million to execute a detailed, 80-page list of renovations, ranging from a handful of new peepholes to a sweeping overhaul of the buildings’ bathtubs. On top of that, the buyer must deposit just over $2.5 million into an escrow account that HUD can access in the event that repairs are not on schedule, as evidenced in the illustrated quarterly progress reports the buyer will be required to send.

HUD’s comprehensive list of repairs is a fine print nightmare for developers but a blessing for Mies’s 1960s-era architecture. Lafayette Park and its token pair of modernist steel-and-glass towers are part of a remarkable mid-century urban redevelopment project in Motor City. In the 1940s, the area had been classified as a “slum” and subsequently razed and abandoned until Detroit lured in Mies van der Rohe and famed urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer to evaluate the site and spearhead one of the first attempts at urban renewal in the nation. Though the Towers continue to symbolize the triumph of public policy, their foreclosure is a reminder of a recent crisis precipitated by the American city’s increasing privatization. Unfortunately, what Mies’s Lafayette Towers need now is a hero, and a very rich one at that.

Yesterday, the government opened its art vault to the highest bidder. Online auctioneers Gaston & Sheehan, on behalf of the U.S. Marshal Service, completed an auction of 245 works of art that have been forfeited to the government in the last few years after being seized during investigations of several convicted white-collar criminals. The sale was mostly made up of prints and lithographs from a range of different periods. In the event, the most popular proved to be the Old Masters works from the collection of Colorado Ponzi schemer Shawn Merriman, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for mail fraud in 2010. Several of Merriman's etchings by Rembrandt and Albrecht Durer fetched more than $100,000, with a very dark (meaning later in the series) version of "The Entombment" (1654) jumping from $40,000 to over $140,000 in the last 15 minutes of bidding to sell for $146,000. The auction house did not release pre-sale estimates.

So, is this a secret way for the aspiring art collector to get a deal? While ARTINFO had originally suggested that the works were going to be sold for bargain prices, that didn't turn out to be the case. There were many competitive bidders on the most coveted lots, with some works receiving more than 50 bids within the last few hours of the sale. That said, we compared the sale prices to similar print sales from the last year or two, and it seems that there were relative bargains to be had, particularly for the work of well-known contemporary artists like Ghada Amer and John Baldessari, who apparently have a following in the white-collar criminal community. We've gone ahead and surveyed our trusty auction data to tell you whether there wwere any deals in this cloud of criminal castoffs.

For a breakdown of the nine most interesting works sold at the auction — from sky-high prices to the bargain bin — click on the slide show.

Tomorrow the United States will observe its national holiday, Independence Day, with fireworks, baseball games, BBQs, screenings of the 1996 science-fiction film "Independence Day," and much flag-waving. Though the holiday marks the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed the 13 colonies' separation from Great Britain and it wasn't until June of the following year that the fledgling union of states adopted Old Glory as its official flag, its red, white, and blue pattern of stripes and stars has become a staple of July 4th celebrations — much more so, in fact, than the rarely observed Flag Day.

For these and innumerable other reasons, the U.S. flag has proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration, fodder for allusion, and focus of political commentary for artists over the past 225 years. Here, ARTINFO has collected our favorite pieces of flag art and ranked them from the most patriotic to the most dissident. Happy 4th of July! To see ARTINFO's Top 10 U.S. flag artworks, click the slide show.

Today, recered British Old Master John Constable’s masterpiece “The Lock” sold for a record-setting £22.4 million ($35.2 million) at Christie’s Old Masters evening sale in London. Though a record, the price was actually on the low end of the £20-25 million estimate once buyer’s premium (which is included in the result but not in the estimate) is factored out. In total, the auction tally was £85.1 million ($132.7 million). 

One family's feud-induced loss is another's gain. The painting was consigned by the eccentric Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, the fifth and last wife of the Swiss industrialist and art collector baron Hans Henrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The former Miss Spain created an uproar within European art circles with her decision to sell the painting, which has until now been on display at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. After hearing that it would be sent to auction, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum trustee and former exhibitions director of the Royal Academy London, Sir Norman Rosenthal, publicly declared that it "represents a moral shame on the part of all those concerned, most especially on the part of Tita," according to the Telegraph ("Tita" being Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisnza). He resigned his post at the Spanish museum.

After the Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza's death in 2002, most of his large art collection was sold to the Spainish government, but about 250 works were kept by the Baroness. Most of them have been on loan to the state free of charge for more than a decade. Thyssen-Bornemisza announced in March that she found herself in need of cash because of the economic crisis, and would therefore sell the painting. According to the Telegraph, the Baroness's stepdaughter, Francesca Von Habsburg, refuted the claim that Carmen needs the money.

There is no word yet on the buyer. The London Old Masters sales continue tomorrow at Sotheby's.

An abbreviated version of this article originally appeared on Above The Estimate.