In 2003, when Pinault, who is now 69, shed some major artworks at auction -- a Rothko for $16.4 million and a Degas bronze for $10.3 million, among other top lots -- the move prompted speculation that his holding company, Artemis, was feeling a credit squeeze. Though Pinault is one of the richest men in France, and a pal of French president Jacques Chirac, his company is loaded with debt. What's more, a long-running lawsuit by California regulators seeks as much as $1 billion from Artemis for some insurance shenanigans in the 1990s, though the judge in the case has recently indicated that the damages won't be substantial. Pinault recently pulled the plug on plans to build a deluxe $190-million Pinault Foundation museum outside Paris on an island in the Seine.

In an interview in El Nuevo Dia newspaper, museum founder and director Emilia Somoza admitted that museum employees were usually excluded from the competition, but said that an exception was made in this case because of the quality of Luiggi's work. The award jury included 1960s abstract painter Noem Ruiz -- who is Somoza's longtime companion -- as well as Fernando Cross and Ricardo Pau Llosa. Founded in 1984, MAC was housed rent-free at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazn until 2000, when it moved into the historical Labra School building.

Recently Robi Draco Rosa, composer for Ricky Martin and a rock star in his own right, donated $75,000 to MAC for what was supposed to be a "state of the art" multimedia library. So far, the library that bears his name lacks a single DVD.

WEB ART AT THE NEW MUSEUM
New Yorks New Museum of Contemporary Art and its partner organization Rhizome.org have teamed up to present "Rhizome ArtBase 101," June 23-September 10, 2005, in a bold attempt to bring internet art to a museum public. Curated by Lauren Cornell and Rachel Greene, with assistance from Kevin McGarry, the show provides history and context for the growing body of artworks that incorporate the web, focusing on 40 works from the more than 1,500 documented in Rhizomes online ArtBase. Works will be contextualized according to 10 categories of work -- Dirt Style, Net Cinema, Games, E-Commerce, Data Visualization and Databases, Online Celebrity, Public Space, Software Art, Cyberfeminism and Early Net.Art. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser is the installation extreme animalz: the movie: part 1 (2005) by Paper Rad and artist Matt Barton, a work that uses Google Image Search to gather gif files that are then synched to the convulsions of an army of 50+ roboticized stuffed animals.

Christie's June 9 sale of decorative art and design set a new world auction record for a piece of 210th-century furniture when a 1949 table designed by Carlo Mollino sold for a staggering $3,824,000, well above the high estimate of $200,000. The buyer was a private collector. The Mollino table came from the collection of contemporary art collector Dakis Joannou, who sold a total of 26 lots, which together fetched almost $5 million.