Alexander RodchenkoÕs painting, ÔDanceÕ, 1915, Russia

Russian art is gathering international attention and hefty price tags as the country’s elite buy their motherland’s masterpieces away from home.
Avant-garde painters Alexander Rodchenko and Malevich, whose paintings symbolized early twentieth century Russia, sit in auction houses in New York and London, from where they are snatched up by nostalgic Russians for millions of dollars.
“The new class is rising, it’s accumulating tremendous wealth, but there is a lack of symbols to identify themselves with,“ Mikhail Kamensky, director of auction house Sotheby’s Russian division in Moscow, told Reuters.
“Russians are the biggest buyers of Russian art. They want to build up a new reputation in a wealthy international community and they do this through Russian cultural symbols,“ said Kamensky. Sotheby’s set up its Moscow branch last May.
Kamensky talked with Russian art lovers in a revamped 19th century exhibit hall at a business conference organized by Troika Dialog brokerage last week in Moscow, which dedicated a session to art as business.
“It’s incredible how many museums are popping up in Russia and how high auction prices are getting abroad. Russians want art on their walls of what they saw in childhood,“ said Georgy Nikich, curator of Moscow’s Cultural Policy Institute.
The conference lined its halls with large paintings by Russian living artist Evgeny Chubarov, whose abstract works recently fetched hundreds of thousands of pounds at Sotheby’s.
The auction house--which was established in London over 260 years ago and now has branches across the world--sold Russian art worth around 70 million pounds ($139.3 million) last year in Britain alone.
Most went to extremely wealthy Russians in London, which hosts a growing, elite class including billionaire and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.
Christie’s auctioneers, which started in London but has been lately moving into emerging markets China and India, sold a record purchase of a Faberge egg last year for 9 million pounds.
Despite Russia’s political tensions with the West, facets of Russian culture are growing rapidly and prospering as the country undergoes its longest economic boom for more than a generation, fuelled by record oil prices.

An aboriginal woman making handicraft.

Australian campaigners have warned that indigenous languages are declining at record levels.
They believe that the country’s cultural heritage is at risk unless more is done to ensure the survival of these ancient tongues, reported BBC.
Experts estimate that before European settlers arrived, hundreds of languages existed on the Australian continent.
But many of these languages have already been lost forever, and only a few dozen still remain.
As they die out, they take with them irreplaceable parts of aboriginal culture and history.
Colonization and the forced removal of tribes from their land have had a withering effect on language.
In Australia’s harsh Western Desert, indigenous groups have been determined to keep hold of their ancient ways.
Pitjinjara is flourishing. It is spoken by about 3,000 people and is a symbol of their cultural identity.
Only one Australian state, New South Wales, has a comprehensive indigenous language policy.
Campaigners have said it would be “absolute madness“ if politicians did not fight to preserve such an important part of the country’s heritage.

China is publishing a cultural encyclopedia that experts believe will be an unprecedented summary of the country’s historic works since the founding of the New China.
The series, “Zhong Hua Da Dian“ (“The Great Encyclopedia of China“), had 49 volumes in print with more than 100 million words as of 2007, Xinhua reported.
The series is expected to cover more than 20,000 ancient books and texts in various categories including history, literature, philosophy, astronomy, medicine and others.
The period covered ranges from the Qin Dynasty (221 BC-206 BC) to the Revolution of 1911, led by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, which overthrew the Qing Dynasty.
Work on the series began in 1992 with a government allocation of 400 million yuan (about $55 million ). The series is scheduled to be finished by 2010 with more than 100 volumes and 800 million words.
“The compiling and publishing of this encyclopedia is a significant symbol of China’s prosperity in economics and culture,“ said Wu Shangzhi, a senior official of the General Administration of Press and Publication. Wu added that the series would be highly useful in conveying Chinese ancient documents to academicians and ordinary readers alike.

India’s economic boom has fuelled demand for condos, cars and company stocks but some of the new wealth created in Asia’s third-biggest economy is finding its way into art.
Entrepreneurs and young professionals, the biggest beneficiaries of India’s financial prosperity, are buying works of art both to signal they have arrived in life and as a safe-haven investment, auctioneers and gallery owners say, AFP reported.
“The interest in art is part of the lifestyle change we are witnessing,“ said Maher Dadha, 54, chairman of Bid and Hammer Auctioneers, who estimated the minimum value of the combined collection at 100 million rupees.
“Wealth has percolated down and people are buying art just like they are buying penthouses,“ he said.
The hammer went down on a 1971 Husain watercolor on paper, entitled Shiva, at 3.4 million rupees ($86,374), the top price paid at the auction. At the start of this decade, Husain’s works fetched less than 600,000 rupees.
Auctions of modern and contemporary Indian art have raised millions of dollars overseas in recent years, with Christie’s selling a Tyeb Mehta painting for $1.6 million in 2005.
“Now it’s an internal trend, where Indian art is getting recognition in India itself,“ said Dadha, adding that India’s rich “don’t blink for a moment over cost“.
Economic growth running at an annual nine percent, a stock market that rose a record 47 percent last year and surging salaries for finance and technology professionals have created a middle-class clientele for art.
Collecting Indian art has been traditionally a pursuit of former maharajahs, industrial houses, overseas collectors and rich expatriates.
The local art market--both gallery sales and auctions--is worth between $400 and $450 million and expanding as prices jump, said Arun Vadehra, owner of Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi and a consultant to Christie’s.
“The art market is very hot,“ said prominent Indian art critic, Ella Datta.

Zarivar lake near the Iranian city of Marivan, Kurdestan province.

Storms of increasing frequency and ferocity are destroying some of Scotland’s most important historical heritage, conservationists warn.
The National Trust for Scotland is concerned that many of its 129 properties are at increasing risk from winds of up to 80mph, rising sea levels and a dramatic change in temperatures. It has launched an appeal for emergency funds of more than £300,000 to help make urgent repairs needed to a number of gardens and buildings damaged in the recent gales, the Guardian said.
Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran has experienced some of the worst damage in its history and the magnificent 200-year-old Hutcheson’s Hall in the centre of Glasgow has had to be temporarily closed for storm repairs.
Signature trees have been lost at Culzean Castle, Inverewe Gardens, Crarae Garden and The David Livingstone Centre at Blantyre, while the only Rhododendron magnificum at Arduaine Garden near Oban has been destroyed.

The Kirche Am Steinhof near Vienna

The gold-domed church atop a hill overlooking Vienna may seem incongruous in the middle of a psychiatric hospital, but it owes its very existence to this unusual location.
Built between 1904 and 1907, the Kirche Am Steinhof was long shunned as too modern and scandalous by Viennese society, more accustomed to baroque architecture, AFP reported.
Setting it off in an outer district of the capital--and in a mental institution--made it tolerable. Locals joked at the time that crazy people deserved a crazy church, while others said the building might only make them more delirious.
A century later, the structure is considered one of Europe’s first modern churches, a masterpiece of “Jugendstil“, a late 19th-century style similar to art nouveau, and draws numerous visitors.
Designed by Otto Wagner, a founder of the Secessionist movement that rejected the prevailing academic conservatism in Viennese art, the church was part of one of the most modern psychiatric hospitals of its time.
Am Steinhof was built to be functional, with the patients’ needs in mind. It was a focus of theater evenings and social events for patients, who were free to wander around the grounds and given work in the gardens and workshops.
“Art has to fit the living, the only mistress of art is necessity,“ Wagner said.
The pews, created by the noted design workshop Wiener Werkstaette, were rounded so patients might not hurt themselves on sharp edges.
Center pews were noticeably narrower for unruly patients while calmer ones sat on the wider outer benches.
Wagner intended the church to serve different religions and planned Jewish and Protestant prayer rooms in the crypts, but lack of funds forced this, too, to be abandoned.
At its inauguration on October 8, 1907, the structure was harshly criticized by Archduke Franz Ferdinand as well as a local politician who said, “We Catholics ask of a church that it look like one.“ Another critic who found the building’s white and gold too fanciful compared it the tomb of an Indian maharajah.
The 51-meter (167-feet) high structure bears Wagner’s trademark golden wreaths and black studs on the white marble slabs of the facade, and features two stained-glass windows by Secessionist artist Koloman Moser.

Luxury villas, flat screen TVs and mobile phones will all go up in smoke this Tet lunar New Year as newly affluent Vietnamese burn paper models of the latest mod-cons for their dead relatives.
In a sign of Vietnam’s growing wealth, especially in the big cities, the product range of ’hang ma’ votive offerings burnt for ancestors has shifted from common household items to a catalogue of high-end luxury goods, reported AFP.
Among the latest paper-and-bamboo replicas meant to make life easier in the afterlife are models of new Japanese motor scooters, sleek Sony television sets and DVD players, karaoke sound systems and even multi-storey family villas.
Under Vietnam’s age-old ancestor worship tradition--discouraged by the communist government but still widespread--families at Tet burn these items to ritualistically send them through the smoke to the world of the dead.
“The Honda SH150 and Dylan models are now the favorite scooters for the departed,“ said craftsman Nguyen Huu Nang, 60, at a paper workshop in Dong Ho, a village outside Hanoi that specializes in making the paper objects.
“People now want more powerful and more expensive motorbikes,“ he said.
For centuries Dong Ho, a labyrinth of alleys and red-tiled roofs, has been famed for its traditional woodblock prints, depicting ancient folk tales with natural colors on rice paper to make artwork popular especially during Tet.
But as tastes have changed, the number of households making traditional prints has dwindled from 150 in the 1950s to about five.
Today most families--instead of chiseling woodblocks and mixing colors from indigo leaves and eggshell--make paper mobile telephones and motorcycle helmets, which recently became compulsory in the world of the living.
Families are now upgrading every year, said the Dong Ho craftsman, as he used scissors and a glue gun to turn piles of cardboard--mostly scrap paper from industrial packaging--into rows of fashionably red motor scooters.