Metal Health Will Drive You Mad
Metallica Drummer Puts $12 Million `Boxer’ Basquiat Up for Sale
By Lindsay Pollock
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Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Lars Ulrich, the drummer for the heavy-metal band Metallica, is selling a nearly 8-foot wide Jean- Michel Basquiat portrait of a boxer at Christie’s International in New York on Nov. 12.
Christie’s said the 1982 painting is estimated to sell at about $12 million.
“Untitled (Boxer)” was among the highlights of a 2005-2006 Basquiat retrospective that toured several museums, including the Brooklyn Museum.
Basquiat’s fighter, with a black skeletal face topped with a white crown, raises his gloves in victory.
“It’s a proxy self-portrait,” said Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international co-head of postwar and contemporary art. “The black artist as defiant hero.”
Raised fists are a reference to black empowerment, Gorvy said. The painting will adorn the cover of Christie’s contemporary art auction catalog.
The Danish-born, San Francisco-based Ulrich is a longtime collector, favoring colorful expressionist art inspired by primitivism. He sold a group of paintings at Christie’s in 2002, including Basquiat’s 1982 “Profit I” which fetched $5.5 million.
Metallica’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” released last month, features tunes like “Broken, Beat & Scarred,” and “Cyanide.”
Roundup For The Ol’ Bitty
Sacked gardener poisoned plants after feud with retired judge’s wife, court told
Edward Hancock denies spraying weedkiller on the former high court judge Sir Richard Tucker’s garden
Sir Richard Tucker and his wife, Lady Jacqueline, arriving at Gloucester magistrates court this morning. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
An angry gardener poisoned a retired high court judge’s plants after being sacked due to a “clash of egos” with the judge’s wife, a court heard today.
Edward Hancock, 45, is accused of spraying weedkiller on Sir Richard Tucker’s garden in Stanton, Worcestershire, after a 20-year feud with Lady Jacqueline, a garden designer.
Their relationship reached breaking point in April and he was fired via a note left on his van after failing to turn up for work on the £1.5m property, Gloucester magistrates court heard. A month later, Tucker, 77, and his third wife returned from a holiday to find their lawn had turned orange.
The gardener, of Northway, Tewkesbury, denies a charge of causing damage worth £500 to flower borders and a grass verge.
Giving evidence, Tucker, who presided over high-profile cases such as the Polly Peck fraud trial, said Hancock was a “good country gardener” but was volatile. He accepted there had been a clash of egos between the gardener and Lady Tucker, and said: “There have been times when my wife had said ‘it’s either him or me’.”
The retired judge said of Hancock: “I got on with him perfectly well but he had to be held with velvet gloves because he was very temperamental and sometimes moody. He worked one day a week, always on Wednesdays. In the latter years he became very moody and his attitude to my wife became very aggressive.
“They found it difficult to communicate with each other. A lot of the time she was in London and they didn’t meet, but on April 16 there came a time when they had words.”
Simon Hantaï Gone
Simon Hantaï, Painter of Silences, Dies at 85
Simon Hantaï, a highly regarded, famously reclusive French painter whose work explored ideas of absence and silence — and who took those ideas so seriously that he disappeared completely from view for 15 very productive years — died on Sept. 11 at his home in Paris. He was 85.
The death was confirmed by a friend, Paul Rodgers, owner of the Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery in Manhattan. According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, Mr. Hantaï died in his sleep.
Born in Hungary, Mr. Hantaï was a major figure in European art from the 1950s onward. He was known in particular for abstract, often huge canvases that crackled with bold, saturated color punctuated by unfilled areas of pure white. Their singular appearance resulted from a method of folding and tying the canvas before applying paint, a process known as pliage, which Mr. Hantaï developed in the early 1960s.
He was also known for his long, self-imposed retreat from the public arena in the 1980s and ’90s. In 1999, the magazine Art in America described this absence as stemming from “a streak of ethical obstinacy virtually unparalleled in contemporary art.”
“Credit is a sacred trust, it’s what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?”
DYN-O-MITE! Horace Was Right
French novelist wins Nobel literature prize
By Natalie Whittle
Published: October 9 2008 12:16 | Last updated: October 9 2008 14:14
The novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He is the first French writer to win the title since Claude Simon in 1985.
JMG Le Clézio, as he is more commonly known, was born in Nice in 1940, and hails from a Breton family which emigrated to Mauritius in the 18th century. A peripatetic childhood took him from Nice to Nigeria and back again to his birthplace, where he finished his studies having begun an English literature degree at Bristol university in the late 1950s.
His first novel, Le Procès-Verbal (The Deposition), published in 1963, brought him immediate recognition, winning the Prix Renaudot. It is a nightmarish, experimental vision of insanity, as experienced by Adam Pollo, a student who loses his memory and subsequently his mind.
The Nobel laureate has since written more than 30 works of fiction, non-fiction and essays, including the novel Désert in 1980, which won the Grand Prix Paul-Morand, awarded by the Académie française.
Le Clézio, who has been writing since boyhood, was first seen as a literary wildcard, though his later work has been characterised by a softer approach to content and form. His latest novel, Ritournelle de la Faim (Gallimard), was published last week and is written in memory of his mother.
Le Clézio had been tipped to win the prize but was not the favourite. The more favourable odds had been given to the Italian writer Claudio Magris and the Syrian poet Adonis.
Perennial candidates from the US, including Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, had been all but discounted from the frontrunners, after the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, last week told the Associated Press that ’’Europe is still the centre of the literary world’’.
The US, he said, is “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.’’
Awarding the prize, the Academy praised Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”.
At a speech Le Clézio gave in April in Seoul at the International Publishers Congress, he championed literature’s power to cross borders and enhance cultural understanding.
To prove this point, he imagined a world in which Gutenberg had not invented the printing press. The result, he said, would be “un monde fermé”, catastrophically unjust and unbalanced.
He also speculated that if the internet had existed in the Third Reich, Hitler might have been an easy target for ridicule, and so might not have come to power.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
WALL STREET for $71.00 do I hear 72…
Gambling on price of art to become a reality
By Deborah Brewster in New York
Published: October 9 2008 03:49 | Last updated: October 9 2008 03:49
Investors will from Friday be able to bet on the price of art, when Intrade’s The Prediction Market begins trading futures contracts – which can be bought for as little as $30 – based on the art market.
Dublin-based Intrade, which already offers futures contracts based on political and economic events such as who will win the US election, will use the Mei Moses All Art Index as the basis for prices.
The contracts will start trading on Thursday. The move is part of a trend for art to be viewed as an asset class, with the development of art funds and art prices indices.
Chad Rigetti, vice-president of business development at Intrade, said: “The idea to create a price-transparent, liquid tradable art-based derivative occurred to me after reading about hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin’s purchase of Jasper Johns’ ‘False Start’ for $80m in the fall of 2006 … Creating a product that would bridge two circles – collectors and financiers – seemed obvious.”
He said investment strategies had become increasingly quantitative, and at the same time high-end art was being bought by people who had made money from such strategies. He thought these people would be natural candidates to buy art futures contracts.
“There has been an influx of financially savvy and technically savvy investors, which has led to the demand for this type of instrument,” he said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Full-on Show At The Half
[James Frey imitating a painting by Damon Johnson]
JOHN NORWOOD
NYC: IT’S A BEAUTY – IT’S A BITCH!
Go HERE for the entire gallery from this event by John Norwood.
Night is my time for walking. I love to look for that glow of light that beckons from my intended destination; a movie premiere, a new restaurant, a new nightclub, an art gallery opening. As I approached the appropriately named Half Gallery, for painter Damon Johnson’s new show titled, “Thanks for Asking”, I noticed that only a slight glow could possibly escape from this tiny LES storefront. Also, apropos, their logo was done all in caps with the bottom halves of all the letters removed.
Never mind the size of the gallery, I had big expectations. Three clever people own the place; James Frey, the best selling author. Bill Powers, the former editor of Blackbook Magazine and Andy Spade, husband of handbag empress, Kate Spade. Plus, Damon is the son of the New York Post’s Page Six editor, Richard Johnson.
Bad Ass Sambas Hit The Roof
Paint By Numbers
Repro Man
by Michael Kaplan 
October 2008 Issue
The opening night of “©Murakami,” Takashi Murakami’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, outshone the standard high- culture shindig. Luxury-goods giant 
Louis Vuitton, whose Murakami-designed purses, wallets, and scarves have helped propel the brand, subsidized the $1,000-a-plate gala. Kanye West performed, and the guest list—from Tobey Maguire to Christina Ricci—read like that of an Oscar-night fete. Outside, fireworks exploded.At the exhibit, revelers shopped at a temporary Louis Vuitton boutique, the first of its kind, selling lv-monogrammed bags and wallets that had been Murakamied with squat-faced cartoon characters. That Vuitton had set up a retail shop in a museum was unusual enough, but equally notable were the artworks Vuitton was selling: 500 “limited- edition” prints priced at either $6,000 or $10,000.By any definition, sales were brisk. Hundreds of prints were snatched up by fans of the goateed artist. The trouble started when one of them, collector Clint Arthur, noticed that two of his Murakamis weren’t numbered, even though the accompanying certificates said they were. (Limited-edition works usually bear both the artist’s signature and a number to help establish authenticity and value.) The discrepancy was “a translation problem between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami,” Arthur says a salesclerk told him.
But when Arthur wrote Murakami asking that the proper numbers be added, he received an answer from the legal department of Louis Vuitton North America. If Arthur was dissatisfied with his purchase, the letter said, he could return the artwork and be refunded his money plus interest.
But Arthur wanted to keep the pieces and have them numbered. Surfing the internet, he discovered a California law stating that dealers who willfully provide certificates of authenticity that contain incorrect information are liable for damages that total three times the cost of the print. He filed a class-action lawsuit against Vuitton, arguing that the company intentionally tried to pass off faulty documentation. While he was at it, Arthur slapped MOCA with a suit charging that the museum breached the same statute by selling Murakami prints without certificates in its gift shop.
War Spreads Overseas
Hells Angel Gerry Tobin ‘killed by strangers in biker turf war’
Gerry Tobin, 35, lived in South East London with his girlfriend
A mechanic who was murdered on the M40 as he rode home at 90mph from a biker festival last summer was shot for being in the “wrong” motorcycle gang, a court heard today.
Gerry Tobin, a member of the Hells Angels, was killed by a single bullet to the head as he rode his Harley-Davidson home after the Bulldog Bash in Warwickshire. Birmingham Crown Court was told today that the men responsible for his murder had no personal animosity for Mr Tobin and had never met him.
Timothy Raggatt QC, prosecuting, said that the shooting was carried out because the rival Outlaws motorcycle gang felt Mr Tobin was riding through their territory.
“This wasn’t a case of a man being killed for any personal motive or any personal reason,” Mr Raggatt told the jury.
“This was a man who was targeted not because of who he was, but because of what he was. In one sense, Gerry Tobin was a random victim.
“It was almost a military-style operation and had at its heart the plain intention to kill.”
Brad Pitt Is No Bo Svenson!!
| The Holocaust, Tarantino-style: Jews scalping Nazis | |
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| By Assaf Uni | |
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Tags: Israel News, Holocaust  |
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| BERLIN – For weeks, Germany’s tabloids and culture pages have been preoccupied with Quentin Tarantino’s film “Inglorious Bastards,” slated to start filming next week in Germany.
An early draft of the script leaked onto the Internet three months ago suggested the film would contain scenes of bloody vengeance exacted by Jews against Nazis. One campaign would be carried out by Jews in the U.S. Army intent on scalping Nazi soldiers on occupied French soil; another would be a Jewish refugee’s revenge against the Nazi officer who murdered her parents. Pitt is to play Jewish-American Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a revenge squad known as “The Bastards,” who launch a killing spree in which they hang, torture, disembowel and scalp German soldiers and engrave Swastikas on their foreheads, according to the leaked draft. The film is raising controversy in Germany, where the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust are usually restricted to historical discourse. “This is pop culture meeting Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force,” said the film critic of SuedDeutche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe. “The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable.” |
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While the tabloids are drooling over the movie’s star, Brad Pitt, who is moving with his wife Angelina Jolie and their children to a villa close to Berlin (“The most beautiful couple in Wannsee,” one headline declared), the serious media is focusing on another angle: Is Germany ready for a Tarantino-style treatment of World War II? Up Yours, Keep the Sh*t, I Am F©cking Outta Here
Friday Night Art Crawl
My final and favorite stop was the opening for Damon Johnson’s exhibit “Thanks for Asking,” which is showing for one month at the Half Gallery. This event came with a whole host of fun facts. #1: The exhibit is curated by James Frey, best-selling author of A Million Little Pieces.
#2: Although nearly impossible to gauge from Damon’s humble demeanor, the opening boasted a star-studded guest-list, with visitors (and new Damon Johnson collectors) spanning from Michael Ovitz and Cynthia Rowley to Carlo McCormick and Half Gallery owners, Bill Powers and James Frey – just to name a few.
“So give me a stage / Where this bull here can rage…”
| Scorsese, De Niro reunite | |||
| AFP | Published:Oct 03, 2008 | ||
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LOS ANGELES – Oscar-winners Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are to revisit the criminal underworld once more in a mob drama about a notorious contract killer, it has been reported. The duo, who have teamed up on several hit crime movies before, including “Goodfellas”, “Casino” and “Mean Streets”, are to make a movie adaptation of “I Heard You Paint Houses”, Charles Brandt’s book of the same name, reports said. The book is based on the life of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who is reputed to have carried out more than 25 killings for the mob, including the murder of Teamsters’ union boss Jimmy Hoffa. De Niro is set to play Sheeran in the film, Daily Variety reported, while Scorsese is to direct. The title of the film comes from underworld slang for contract killings and the resulting splatter of blood on walls and floors. |
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Leave My Monkey Alone
A Kentucky man claims surgeon removed his penis without consent during circumcision
Thursday, September 25th 2008, 3:01 PM
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky – A man who claims his penis was removed without his consent during what was supposed to be a circumcision has sued the doctor who performed the surgery.
Phillip Seaton, 61, and his wife are seeking unspecified compensation from Dr. John M. Patterson and the medical practice that performed the circumcision for “loss of service, love and affection.”
A woman who answered the phone at Commonwealth Urology would not take a message for the doctor Thursday. But the Seaton’s attorney said the doctor’s post-surgical notes show the doctor thought he detected cancer and removed the penis. Attorney Kevin George said a later test did detect cancer.
“It was not an emergency,” George told The Associated Press on Thursday. “It didn’t have to happen that way.”
The lawsuit filed earlier this month in state court claims Patterson removed Seaton’s penis without consulting either Phillip or Deborah Seaton, or giving them an opportunity to seek a second opinion.
The Seatons’ suit is similar to one in which an Indianapolis man was awarded more than $2.3 million in damages after he claimed his penis and left testicle were removed without his consent during surgery for an infection in 1997.
Andy On ‘roids
The Polaroid production line
Everyone who was anyone posed for a Warhol snapshot. Jonathan Jones on a compelling show of celebrities in the raw
Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol. Clockwise from top left: Sean Lennon, Truman Capote, Evelyn Kuhn, William Burroughs, Martha Graham, Jimmy Carter. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: “How could you let them in?” The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies – so it’s a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.
Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York’s MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol’s tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.
This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.
Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol’s favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward’s Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist’s readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol’s films, screen-tests, videos – and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.
At Least The Remains Didn’t End Up On eBay
| Who will smoke the ashes of Kurt Cobain? | 24/09/08 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Natascha Stellmach will smoke the singer’s ashes as part of her five-part installation in Berlin.
Australian-born Natascha Stellmach claims to have acquired the ashes of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Now she’s transformed the grunge star’s remains into an installation titled Set Me Free, that investigates suicide and the power of desecration. The complete burning away ritual will take place with a small group of people in a private location. For further details please contact the gallery. Read more: http://artworldmagazine.com.au/ (22 September 2008, Artist sets Kurt Cobain free) |
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N+1=T
N+1, Now in T-Shirt Form
via nplusonemag.com The Sartorial Situation
Just in time for fall semester, n+1, the Brooklyn-based journal of prose combat, has a new line of T-shirts. (Hey, The New York Review of Books sells Illuminated Pocket Magnifiers, okay?)
While we’re somewhat surprised they’re not referred to as “Cotton Monuments,” the shirts do come in two colors: socialist red and existentialist black. The Times A.O. Scott might say these unisex American Apparel shirts, “sometimes display a certain pained 21st-century ambivalence about the culture they inhabit.” They’re also limited edition and come in five sizes. (“Note: women may want to buy a size down.”)
In case you’re wondering, the shirts are modeled by writer Wesley Yang and managing editor Kate Perkins.
For brekkie tomorrow…
James On James
Cultural Life: James Blunt, singer
Interview by Charlotte Cripps
Friday, 3 October 2008
Books
I recently read ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey. I have mixed feelings towards rehab – one side of me thinks it’s a gap year for the privileged, and another side has seen its benefits for very dear friends. The book itself has been accused of being made up of lies – but then that’s what addicts do.
Music
I’ve just had three weeks in Ibiza, so I’ve been in the clubs. The track I remember hearing most this summer was the Mark Knight & Funkagenda mix of ‘Man with the Red Face’. Another track that has been fun to hear is Pete Tong’s mix of my song ‘1973’.
Visual arts
When our tour hit Bilbao in northern Spain earlier this year, I dropped into the Guggenheim. I think it’s one of the best modern-art museums in the world. Louise Bourgeois’ spiders are amazing, and the big dog outside made of flowers is enough to keep anyone confused.
Television
We’ve been on the ‘All the Lost Souls’ World Tour since January, so I haven’t had a chance to watch any TV. We sleep in bunks on the bus, but maybe once a week we check in to a hotel. Then we can watch CNN for what’s going on in the world.
James Blunt plays at the O2 arena, London SE10 (0844 856 0202) on 14 October
The Polygamist Pompadour
Fashion Magazines Promote Polygamist Hairstyles for Fall!
W, above, with close-up, and Vogue below
Back in April, when the raid on a Texan polygamist compound dominated the news (weren’t those the days!), those aggrieved Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints wives’ prominent hairdos became a subject of much fascination. Were they meant to indicate closeness to God? To wash one’s husband’s feet in the afterlife? To distract from those hideous dresses?
Now they reemerge in October issues of Vogue and W, which interpret the mega-bouffants for the stylish luxury consumer (i.e. pair them with Dior). We’re not sure what the W model has been doing with that shirtless guy in the background, but we’re guessing she wasn’t washing his feet …
Cholesterol Balls On The Half-White
At the Strip Club in St. Paul, chile oil, curry and beet juice update the deviled eggs. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)
“Well, the front fell off by all means – but that’s very unusual.”
Ed Ruscha’s PUBLIC STONING
A Novel Approach
Published: October 1, 2008
Writer James Frey may have taken a beating in the literary world for his partly fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces— for which Oprah Winfrey famously took him to task—but he’s a growing force on the art scene. Pal Richard Prince designed the cover for Frey’s recent novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and the author has boldly commemorated his Oprah humiliation by commissioning a painting, Public Stoning, above, from Ed Ruscha.
What did Ruscha make of the request? “He laughed and then said ‘absolutely,’” says Frey. The painting is on view this month in New York—not at the Half Gallery, which Frey owns with designer Andy Spade and former Black Book magazine editor Bill Powers, but at the Flag Art Foundation, in the show “Wall Rockets”, for which Frey has written a catalogue essay. And that’s the truth.
“A Novel Approach” originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction‘s October 2008 Table of Contents
Americans Stink, No Nobels For You
from AP via Breitbart.com via Drudge
| Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete |
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| Sep 30 03:54 PM US/Eastern By MALIN RISING and HILLEL ITALIE Associated Press Writers |
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: “Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list.” As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.” Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States,” he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday. He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year’s winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn’t comment on any names. Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.” The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “ That ignorance is restraining.”His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.” You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. |
Pollack Yea or Pollack Nay
Paintings could be by Jackson Pollock, or not
Joe Doane / Azusa Pacific University
OWNER: Erich Gabor Neumeth, 89, says he obtained the paintings in the 1960s as payment of a debt.
If the paintings are genuine, Azusa Pacific University stands to gain a windfall. However, that’s quite an ‘if.’
AS EXECUTIVE vice president of Azusa Pacific University, David Bixby fields lots of calls. But one that came through last March was a stunner. Howard Kazanjian, a film producer and university trustee, had come across a trove of paintings by a giant of 20th century art that might be donated to the evangelical Christian university.
The good news was that the works were said to have been made by Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist known for his “drip and splash” style. The bad news: This was yet another batch of undocumented paintings attributed to the artist.
Kate Moss Self-Portrait In Lipstick
Kate Moss’s self-portrait in lipstick finds buyer
Last Updated: Sunday, September 28, 2008 | 2:22 PM ET
CBC News
A self-portrait drawn in lipstick by model Kate Moss has been scooped up by a private buyer for £33,600 ($63,900).
London auction house Lyon & Turnbull revealed late Saturday that the canvas, a side-angle view of the supermodel, did not sell at auction at its reserve price of £40,000 ($76,000)
The 34-year-old had created the work while in a troubled past relationship with musician Pete Doherty.
The portrait also features stains of blood belonging to rocker Doherty, who in addition has inscribed the words: “Who needs blood when you’ve got lipstick?”
The frontman for Babyshambles is a recovering heroin addict and had sold the lipstick self-portrait to an anonymous buyer, who put it up for auction.
A self-portrait by Doherty, signed in blood, was also put up for sale in the auction, but no one wanted to buy it.
It was inscribed with the words: “Look what they have done to the boy” and had a reserve price of £10,000 ($19,000).
Prince Does Pamela
And What About Pamela?
How perfectly Princian? Colin Gleadell unearths this catalogue gem from the upcoming photography sales in which it is revealed that Pamela Anderson is selling a Richard Prince photograph. From the story it would appear Anderson is selling in distress but Gleadell is more curious how Anderson came to be a collector in the first place:
How Anderson came to acquire the photograph is not known. “Pamela is a girl friend,” Prince tells me. In 1998, he made a series of works in which he appropriated 8in x 10in publicity photographs of celebrities, Anderson among them, on which he wrote dedications and signed their names.
Why she is selling is also unknown. Her manager [ . . . ] describes her as “a small-scale art collector” and says that she is selling for “complicated reasons”. “I am having to sell this photo and it kills me,” she says.
Pamela Anderson: Art Collector (Daily Telegraph)
Konstantin Pavlov Gone
Bulgarian poet Konstantin Pavlov dies at 75
Article Launched: 09/29/2008 09:17:26 AM PDT
SOFIA, Bulgaria—Poet and screenwriter Konstantin Pavlov, who became one of Bulgaria’s most prominent intellectuals with his rare defiance of the country’s communist regime, has died, a filmmakers union said. He was 75.
Pavlov died Sunday after a long illness, the Union of Bulgarian Film Makers announced.
He was among the few Bulgarian intellectuals who dared to assert their professional independence during the 1945-89 communist regime. Pavlov gained popularity despite censors imposing a decade-long publishing ban against him in 1966, with Bulgarians clandestinely copying and reading his poems.
His poems have been translated into many European languages and he has been recognized with a number of national awards for poetry and literature.
Some of his most popular volumes of poetry are “Sweet Agony” (1991), “The Murder of the Sleeping Man” (1992) and “A Long Time Ago…” (1998).
In 1980, he was granted the Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary film festival for his screenplay of the film “Illusion”.
Pavlov was born on April 2, 1933, in a small village near the capital, Sofia.
He is survived by his wife Maria and his daughter Donka. The funeral will be held Tuesday in Sofia.
Wynn Is Forgiven
Watch Those Elbows: Wynn’s $139 Million Picasso Joins N.Y. Show
By Lindsay Pollock
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Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — A $139 million Picasso painting damaged by billionaire owner Stephen Wynn when he somehow poked his elbow through it will be publicly shown for the first time since the 2006 mishap.
The patched-up “Le Reve,” or “The Dream,” owned by the Las Vegas casino operator, is part of a Picasso exhibit opening Oct. 15 at Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Other lenders to “Picasso’s Marie-Therese” include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and collector Steven Cohen, founder of hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors LLC.
Dealers estimated the show includes more than $500 million in artwork, though most isn’t for sale — including “Le Reve.”
“He has no intention of selling it,” said Nick Acquavella, a gallery director.
Wynn, who has an eye impairment, accidentally put a silver- dollar-sized hole in the 1932 portrait of Picasso’s sexy blonde mistress Marie-Therese Walter while showing it to friends, who included the writer Nora Ephron. The 2006 incident occurred less than 24 hours after he agreed to sell “Le Reve” to Cohen for $139 million. The sale was eventually canceled.
The tear was repaired and the erotic painting of Picasso’s dozing lover, with her left breast exposed, usually hangs in Wynn’s Las Vegas office.
“To the naked eye, you can’t really see anything,” Acquavella sai