from The Wall Street Journal

A Divine Intervention

By RALPH GARDNER

It made sense that Sotheby’s asked writer James Frey to walk me through “Divine Comedy,” a sale of artworks open to the public through Oct. 19, with the auction house operating more like an art gallery. The show’s three rooms, inspired by Dante’s epic poem, are divided into Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, with works ranging from African masks to those of Rodin, Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, loosely reflecting the themes of damnation, suffering and ecstasy.

Though only 41 years old, Mr. Frey, who updated Dante’s masterpiece for the show’s catalog, has already visited all three realms during his eventful career. For those familiar with the name but who can’t quite recall its cultural significance, Mr. Frey is the author of “A Million Little Pieces,” the best-selling memoir that turned out to be part fiction, and that Oprah Winfrey, who’d championed it, invited Mr. Frey on her show to apologize. Back in Dante’s time, the price of bad behavior was getting sucked into hell. These days it’s to bow prostrate before a national TV audience and beg for forgiveness, as Mr. Frey did, submitting to his punishment with no more protest than one of Michelangelo’s doomed Sistine Chapel souls.

But since coming out as a hopeless sinner, the author has traveled the fast lane to redemption; there’s no better proof than that Sotheby’s, which is in the science of minimizing rather than encouraging risk, asked the author to contribute his reinvention of the Divine Comedy, entitled “Il Divino Bambino,” and starring an expletive-named protagonist. Since the “Million Little Pieces” debacle, Mr. Frey has written a couple of other bestsellers, is working on a pilot for HBO about the porn industry and can afford to indulge his passion for art. He told me he owns works by several of the contemporary artists, who he also counts as personal friends, featured in the show. If that’s suffering, I want to sign up.

“Art influences me much more than writing does,” he explained. “I can imagine Warhol sitting there,” he continued, of “Repent and Sin No More,” a 1985 silkscreen of just those words against a black canvas (and one more example of Warhol’s genius escaping me) “and having a conversation with somebody, and talking about sex and drugs, and somebody says, “Repent and sin no more.’ ”

” ‘Should I repent and sin no more?’ ” Mr. Frey went on. “My answer is no. I’m very pro sin.”

While I am too—finding virtue, or what masquerades under its name these days, greatly overrated—I can’t say we bonded until we arrived in front of Richard Prince’s “School Nurse,” who looks nothing like my school nurse. Mr. Frey said he has a Prince nurse in his own collection, and while he resisted describing the subject matter on the record, he said the Sotheby’s piece, of a vixen with blood streaming from her operating mask, is tame by comparison.

“That has to stay in my office at home,” he reported. “We have a 5-year-old daughter who sees it all the time and asks what is it. ‘It’s art. It’s like paintings of beautiful women that are 500 years old.’ ” I doubt she bought the explanation. Neither did my daughters when I told them that the Pop Art painting over our mantelpiece of a love goddess—whose face is obscured by a black cloud, but whose breasts are rendered with great elan—was a color-field painting. Like Mr. Frey, my wife informed me when we moved into our new apartment that it was going to reside in my home office. Twenty years later, it still has pride of place in our living room. A member of the family.

I’m not an art critic (which should be obvious by now) but I’ve always enjoyed exhibitions such as “Divine Comedy,” which juxtapose artists from different centuries, since that rarely happens in a museum setting. Seeing your fourth Corot landscape in a row, or even a roomful of Cézannes, has a way of deadening the eye and putting the brain on autopilot. But to have the opportunity to compare Bouguereau’s “L’Amour Vainqueur,” a virtuosic 1886 painting of Cupid and Psyche in flight, sitting side by side with Jeff Koons’s “Cherubs,” a couple of kitschy putti that ought to kill the market in porcelain collectibles for good, flatters both works.

The show also helped me finally to develop an appreciation for Damien Hirst. His “Summer in Siam,” of butterflies fluttering against pale blue sky, suggests that one may as easily encounter paradise on Earth as in heaven. And Will Cotton’s 2010 “Beatrice” proves that goddesses abound in downtown bars where Mr. Frey, who collects Cotton’s work and counts him a friend, explained the artist sometimes finds his models. This one is perched on pink cotton candy and white meringue clouds, a simultaneous tribute to both dessert and female beauty.

Mr. Frey, who was asked to contribute “Il Divino Bambino” by Lisa Dennison, the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, now at Sotheby’s, said he wasn’t paid. “I never charge people to write about art.”

Instead he had the Microsoft word document of “Il Divino Bambino” transferred to canvas, the resulting artworks for sale at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, a rare-book shop on East 64th Street, starting next week.

If Mr. Frey basted in hell for a while, he seems currently to be basking in the cooling breezes of a more habitable climate. “I asked for the Francken,” he said he joked when Ms. Dennison insisted on some sort of compensation. He was referring to Frans Francken the Younger’s 1635 “Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma— the Choice between Vice and Virtue,” with vice looking far more fun. “They said no.”

[ click to read at The Wall Street Journal ]

from The New York Observer

Seven Circles of Sotheby’s Selling

By Alexandra Peer

There were art works by Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, Auguste Rodin and Jeff Koons, but everyone was watching Padma Lakshmi’s pants. The Top Chef co-host, in impossibly tight coral-colored capris covered in a gold lamé print, cut to the front of a book-signing line at Sotheby’s to glad-hand author James Frey.

What was the occasion for this unlikely mix of literature, reality TV and fine art? “Divine Comedy,” an elaborate themed display of art by the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, now Sotheby’s executive, Lisa Dennison. The exhibition, on view through Oct. 19, invites the visitor to Sotheby’s to tour hell, heaven and purgatory in the form of artworks depicting each, several of the works spectacular or particularly rare. But despite a gimmicky conceit and lighthearted demeanor—”have fun,” urged the wall text, right by a huge crucifix depicting Jesus Christ as a wart-covered frog—the show is very much about money. It represents a new business model for the auctioneer.

Drafted into all this was James Frey, who is co-owner of a Lower East Side art gallery—Half Gallery—and has written several art-catalog essays. He was on hand to sign a limited-edition exhibition catalog that featured his “Il Divino Bambino,” a reinterpretation of Dante’s story. He declined to discuss his compensation, and said he was very surprised at how many people wanted a signed catalog—”I thought I’d do two and be done with it.” Interestingly, the famous dissembler said that his two favorite works in the show were the Francken and the only “fake” chosen for the whole exhibition, a particularly harsh version of the afterlife painted not by a famous artist but by his “follower,” i.e., copycat. “I love the fake Bosch,” he said.

[ click to read full article at The Observer ]

from Cal State Fullerton’s Daily Titan

Heavy metal tide rolls in

By ALYSSA WEJEBE 
Daily Titan Staff Writer 
Published: September 21, 2010

Flashback to 2007′s Ozzfest, the annual metal rock American tour founded by heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne. Second stage festival sponsor and alcohol manufacturer, Jagermeister intended to remove Miami-based band Black Tide from the bill because the band, comprised of members from 14 to 19 years old at the time, was under the legal drinking age of 21.

Black Tide manager Cory Brennan made an appeal to festival sponsor Live Nation and Sharon Osbourne, Ozzfest’s chief executive. Black Tide was bumped to the main stage where the stage’s sponsor did not sell alcoholic beverages.

Since then, Black Tide has continued to move up in the music industry. They’ve toured with All That Remains, Bullet for My Valentine and Avenged Sevenfold. Signed with Interscope Records, Black Tide released their debut album, Light from Above, in 2008.

Rolling Stone named Black Tide “Metal’s New Teen Titans” and one of the “Best Rookies of 2008.” Black Tide is currently on tour with Drive A, Escape the Fate and Bullet for My Valentine. The last stop on their tour is Oct. 27 at the Palladium in Hollywood.

Black Tide has played at a book reading of James Frey, who asked them to play at his book reading. A riot between Frey’s fans and Black Tide’s fans broke out.

Black Tide has had less explosive interactions with literature before, as their songwriting is sometimes influenced by books.

“We take influence from everything and everybody ? doesn’t even necessarily have to be music,” Sandler said.

Angelica Brown, 20, of Detroit, Ill, said she liked Black Tide because they’re her generation’s Metallica and Megadeth.

“They don’t hold back or try to fit into a genre that could land them on the radio,” Brown said. “Instead, they play with passion and are sincere.”

[ click to read full article at the Daily Titan ]

[ visit the Black Tide website ]

from Edible Manhattan

Eat Drink Local Profile #24: Sotheby’s Heirloom Veggie Auction & Farmers Market

[ 0 ]September 20, 2010 | By Brian Halweil

Black Sea Man tomatoes like these will go to the highest bidder on Sept. 23 at Sotheby’s. Photograph courtesy of Seed Savers.

The Auction:

Art of Farming at Sotheby’s

What it Is:

It’s a little known fact that we here at Edible Manhattan have an Art section that celebrates food-centric Gotham works like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, a rendering of McSorley’s bar,  and Hopper’s Nighthawks, the iconic image of a lonesome Manhattan soda shop in 1942. So we are particularly delighted that on Thursday (Sept. 23rd) some 30 some-odd farmers from the greater New York foodshed will bring their art — meaning heirloom veggies from cranberry beans to Newtown Pippin apples — to Sotheby’s to be offered up on the auction block to chefs, grocers and other bidders.

The auction is a passion project for some Sotheby’s staff and farmer friends, who declare there’s as much valuable works being created on nearby farms as in SoHo studios.  The cases of auctioned produce will get eaten throughout the city in the days that follow, becoming part of the ingredients and dishes celebrated during Eat Drink Local. (Decide where you are going to dine now.)

How to Go:

Tickets are still available to the cocktail party ($250), which will be crammed with chefs, farmer and other food community movers and shakers (not to mention some arty types). That includes admission to the experiential auction of Edible-friendly items, like a private tasting with the owners of Tuthilltown Spirits,  a tour and tasting at Red Hook Winery, four potted Newtown Pippin seedlings (delivered to anywhere in the five boros),  a B&B getaway to Long Island wine country, and a signed copy of a cryptic, comestible tale, “Celebration!!!,” commissioned from James Frey for the auction.  The gala dinner (sold out at $1000 per seat) follows with courses prepared by Jeff Gimmel of Swoon Kitchenbar in Hudson, New York, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Chef of ABC Kitchen, Roberto Alicea, Executive Chef of Andaz 5th Avenue and Myriam Eberhardt, Pastry Chef of DBGB Kitchen and Bar.

[ click to read full post at The Edible Blog ]