Creative energy … McEnroe responds to the umpire in his championship days at Wimbledon.
Photo: AFP

John Patrick McEnroe, one of the most brilliant, bad-tempered sportsmen of all time, is in London to commentate on the Wimbledon tennis tournament for the BBC.

But he has something else on his mind. On July 1 he is selling at Sotheby's a rarely seen portrait by Andy Warhol of him with his first wife, the actress Tatum O'Neal. The proceeds, which could be as much as £350,000 ($722,000), are going to charity. Not a lot of people are aware

that the man once known as "superbrat" has a serious interest in art and an impressive collection.

"It all started in the late '70s," McEnroe tells me. "My parents never went to galleries, so it was a bit like the left side of my brain wasn't there."

During the French championships in 1977 his mixed-doubles partner, Mary Carillo, took him to see Claude Monet's Water Lilies paintings at the Jeu de Paume. "I didn't know a Matisse from a Michelangelo, but when I got up close I thought, 'That is incredible.' But it was really my friend Vitas Gerulaitis who got me looking. He was four years older than me, someone I looked up to."

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Latin lovers ... Visitors to ArteBA in Buenos Aires browse the exhibits. Photograph: Cezara de Luca/EPA

"Just a few decades ago, nobody wanted to buy Latin American art," pined Inés Katzenstein, director of the art department at Buenos Aires's Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, at a panel on Reactivating the Local Canon at arteBA, Buenos Aires' 17th annual contemporary art fair. Now, we all do.

In the overpriced international art market, the Argentinian peso devaluation of 2001 may have been a blessing in disguise. With the Argentine peso pegged to the US dollar at three to one (currently six pesos to the pound), Argentinian art is more affordable for buyers with foreign currency to spend. Also, ArteBA's oversized crowds (this year, a record 120,000 visitors) may well have been lured by the idea of Buenos Aires as a tourist hotspot as much as the talent on display.

The frenzy for contemporary Latin American art may be due to an economic bubble, which is a fear voiced by gallery owner Jorge Mara, among many others. At ArteBA, red dots noting "sold" dotted gallery walls like confetti. For all the free champagne, splendid chaos of transactions and talk of pricing bubbles, there was also some real talent: the photographs of Buenos Aires-based Marcos López (including The Director's Birthday, a Catholic school scene), which were reminiscent of a subdued David LaChapelle, lived up to early hype. Photographs by Florian Beckers and Santiago Porter's equally luminescent scenes were captured with subtle lighting and breathtaking clarity. So far, the highest reported sale has been an oil painting by Uruguayan artist Pedro Figari, which went for $120,000.

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Art is big business. The UK art market is estimated at £8.5 billion — second only in value to New York. But should the artists who create the works and their families enjoy a slice of the lucrative pickings?

Battle lines have been joined between Britain’s artistic community and a coalition of London auction houses and dealers over a law that would pay resale rights or a royalty on the sale of artists’ works for 70 years after their death.

Living artists across Europe won the right to resale rights or royalties on their works under a European directive in 2006. The Government, which initially opposed the measure, won an opt-out from extending the right to the works of dead artists for 70 years, because of fears that the art market would shift abroad.

That derogation will expire on January 1, 2010. The auction houses and many art dealers want the Government to apply to the European Commission to extend compliance until January 2012 — if not indefinitely. The Government is shortly to publish a consultation paper on the issue but ministers have already indicated that they would like to press for the opt-out to be extended.

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Alison Elizabeth Taylor creates lifelike scenes in wood veneer.

According to the New York Times on a recent spring morning, the artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor paced nervously around the second floor of an architectural woodworking firm in East Harlem, watching closely as three sinewy men prepared one of her delicate wood inlay compositions for the veneering press.

“I feel like I’ve got some open wound until these are glued down,” she said as they fitted the piece onto a slab of Baltic birch plywood that they had just slathered with urea resin. “I feel very vulnerable.”

Unusually for a 35-year-old contemporary artist, Ms. Taylor’s favored medium is wood marquetry, a craft that, like oil painting, flourished during the Renaissance. She had come to the woodworking firm William Somerville to finish “Room,” a massive installation that is the highlight of her second solo show at James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea.

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According to the Us New.com the writer brings a life of creative and critical labor to the examination of American masterworks

What is distinctively American about American art? That is the question John Updike, beak-nosed patriarch of American letters, set for himself in this year's Jefferson Lecture, the 37th in a series of annual talks sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.

"The Clarity of Things," the lecture's title, comes from Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Calvinist theologian and divine whose graphic and sometimes terrifying sermons helped spark America's first Great Awakening. The phrase sums up what Updike believes is an enduring feature of the American mentality: an inclination, derived both from Puritanism and the empiricism of early modern science, to find in things, clearly and exactly perceived, the "principal manifestations" of God's perfections and even another text of divine revelation.

More simply, as Updike elaborated, this mentality exhibits a deep-rooted preference for things over abstract concepts, an aesthetic memorably summed up in the words of 20th-century poet William Carlos Williams: "For the poet there are no ideas but in things." Or as Updike would also insist, for the American artist in general.

If Updike's lecture ultimately revealed as much about him as his subject, it is probably little surprise: It distilled much of what he has been up to in a prodigious body of creative and critical works that now includes more than 50 books of fiction, short stories, poetry, and assorted nonfiction.

Updike's heavily laureled career began in small-town Pennsylvania, where artistic ambitions were instilled in the only son by a doting mother who harbored similar ambitions herself. Graduating from Harvard College, Updike spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England, before settling on writing as his profession. Apart from an early two-year stint at the New Yorker, Updike has lived and worked in Massachusetts, bringing forth, among other fictional creations, the

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