Now comes Michael Jackson without bubbles, thanks to Sunland artist Seaton Brown, who has created a 144-square-foot portrait of the King of Pop out of 1,680 empty soda pop cans — the contents, bubbles included, having gone down the drain because, as the artist tells Culture Monster, “I don’t really drink soda.”

His piece, “A Tribute to the King of Pop,” will be on display Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in downtown’s Pershing Square, acknowledging the anniversary Friday of Jackson’s death as part of the annual ”Art Squared” exhibition co-sponsored by the city’s Recreation and Parks department and the Downtown L.A. Art Project.

Brown, like Koons, picked the “Thriller”-era Jackson, before repeated cosmetic surgery completely reconfigured his face. Normally, the 40-year-old artist says, he’s a traditionalist who doesn’t dabble in Pop art or alternate media, earning his living from oil paintings and as a freelance illustrator and designer.

But an online image of a rendition of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” that Toronto artists made from more than 4,000 Rubik’s Cubes got Brown thinking about doing something comparable; Chuck Close’s pointillistic self-portraits entered his thinking, as did a trip down a supermarket aisle in which he was struck by the sheer abundance of color in soda cans.

Brown mulled doing an aluminum portrait of George Washington, but when Jackson died, he was on his way: Pop as a style, pop cans as a medium, the King of Pop as an honoree. He says about 20% of his raw materials were empties he bought from a recycling station; for the rest he paid retail, spending, he estimates, about $600 on soda cans both empty and full, and about $400 on other materials. The tricky part, he says, was finding good skin tones. The solution: the cream, root beer and cherry vanilla flavors of Whole Foods’ house brand.

“A Tribute to the King of Pop” was finished in January — “it was a full-time job for about five weeks,” Brown says — and was first seen in March at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk.

This video shows how it was done.

"Taking of Christ" -Caravaggio

stolen from a Ukrainian museum, the Interfax news agency quoted Ukraine’s interior minister as saying on Tuesday.

The painting, called the “Taking of Christ,” or the “Kiss of Judas,” and considered the most valuable piece of art in Ukraine, was stolen from a museum in the Black Sea port of Odessa in 2008 in what officials described as a “cultural catastrophe.”

“On June 25, in Berlin, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry agents together with their German colleagues detained three Ukrainian citizens and one citizen of Germany and recovered Caravaggio’s painting,” Interior Minister Anatoly Mogylyov told a briefing.

It was recovered in Germany, where the four were detained.

Mogylyov said another suspected member of the gang, which focused on high-value thefts, had been detained in Ukraine.

“We have carried out more than 20 searches and proven (the group’s) involvement in more than 20 thefts in Ukraine,” he said.

The painting had been bought by a Russian ambassador to France and presented as a gift to a Russian prince before being turned over to the Odessa museum last century.

Doubts had been expressed about the painting’s authenticity, but Soviet art experts in the 1950s confirmed the work was indeed by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It underwent restoration work in 2006.

A version of the same painting by Caravaggio hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

17. Jeff Koons 2010

Jeff Koons this week revealed his latest creation in Paris, BMW Art Car number 17. Koons and his staff have been working on the brightly colored design since February.

The BMW M3 GT2 is covered in a vinyl wrap with a design that really pops. The car will race at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, June 12-13, 2010.

The tradition of creating BMW art cars has been around since the 1970s. Previous art cars were designed by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ernst Fuchs.

1. 1975 Alexander Calder

BMW has released today the first image of the latest BMW Art Car Jeff Koons which will be premiered at the 24 hours of Le Mans race. The new BMW Art Car Jeff Koons is based on the BMW M3 GT2 which has been homologated to run in this year’s Le Mans event. The BMW Art Car by Jeff Koons is the 17th creation of the range and will be unveiled in France on June 12, 2010.

3. Roy Lichtenstein 1977

To get the inspiration of the 17th BMW Art Car, Jeff Koons joined the company’s racing team for testing in Sebring, where he was able to experience the racer at work. The Jeff Koons BMW Art Car was produced by the artists together with a team of BMW engineers and designers at Schmid Design, in the company’s homeland in Bavaria.

For the actual design of the BMW Art Car, Jeff Koons used 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models which gave him the opportunity to view the end result from all angles, before putting it in reality. The previous BMW Art Cars have been designed without the help of a computer.

4. Andy Warhol 1979

The design of the BMW Art Car Jeff Koons features various racing and speed motifs, including debris and supersonic acceleration hints.

The Design Process

As part of his creative process, the artist collected images of race cars, related graphics, vibrant colors, speed and explosions. The resulting artwork of bright colors conceived by Koons is evocative of power, motion and bursting energy. Its silver interior along with the powerful exterior design, the Art Car will impart a dynamic appearance even when it’s standing still.

“These race cars are like life, they are powerful and there is a lot of energy,” said Koons.

Louise Bourgeois – a legendary painter and sculptor

Bourgois was well known for her abstract, often controversial pieces of artwork that would inspire many other artists (especially young women).

Her sculptures were often made of metal, wood or rubber and would often use an emotionally agressive theme. Underlying all of her work, however, was the idea that the fragile human body had a need for nurture and care in a dangerous world.

Her most popular works include “Nature Study” (1984) and “Fillette” (1968).

Louise Bourgeois, the grande dame of contemporary artists best known for her sculpture and disquieting symbolism, died Monday May 31, 2010 of a heart attack at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 98.

Sculpture became Ms. Bourgeois’ primary medium after 1945 when the Peridot Gallery, a prestigious venue in Manhattan’s then-intimate art world, staged her first solo sculpture show. In 1982, Ms. Bourgeois became the first female artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Subsequent retrospectives in 1993 and 2007 that visited major institutions in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Madrid, London, Paris and St. Petersburg, Russia, consolidated her position as a world figure in art.

Her work, which is on view at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco through June 12, came to the attention to the Bay Area public in 2007 when the San Francisco Arts Commission installed her giant bronze “Crouching Spider” (2003) at Pier 14 on the Embarcadero. It stayed until early 2009. In 1996, the Berkeley Art Museum presented a career survey of Ms. Bourgeois’ drawings.

Ms. Bourgeois acknowledged that the spider imagery in her art was a Freudian symbol of female sexuality, a private symbol of her mother and a celebration of arachnids’ crucial predator role in keeping the Earth’s insect population in check.

She frequently said her work sprang from conscious and unconscious memories of her childhood, with a caring but invalid mother and an imperious, unfaithful father.

In the mid-’60s, a rising generation of feminist artists and critics rediscovered her art, and although she was never entirely comfortable with that affiliation, it accelerated a career that previously had been in low gear.

Born in Paris on Dec. 25, 1911, Ms. Bourgeois worked early on for her parents, who marketed and restored antique tapestries. Some of her art’s spider imagery also evokes her youthful part in repairing threadbare textiles.

Although Ms. Bourgeois drew frequently to assist in the family business, she studied mathematics when she entered the Sorbonne, in search, she said, of impersonal, unbreakable rules.

She soon digressed into art studies at various schools in Paris and a stint as studio assistant to Fernand Leger (1881-1955), one of France’s most esteemed painters at the time.

In 1938, Ms. Bourgeois married American art historian Robert Goldwater (1907-1973), a specialist in tribal arts who wrote extensively about their influence on European modernism.

Once settled in New York, where she continued her studies at the Art Students League, Ms. Bourgeois entered the widening circle of European artists who sought refuge there from the war, including several Surrealists, whose influence she would later deny, though critics continue to make that connection.

In 1993 Ms. Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and London’s Tate Modern commissioned for its 2000 opening a suite of works from her for its mammoth Turbine Hall.

Ms. Bourgeois received several honorary doctorates, and, in 1997, the National Medal of Arts. France named her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and conferred its Grand Prix National de Sculpture in 1991.

She is survived by sons Jean-Louis and Alain, both of New York City, two grandchildren and one great grandchild. A third son, Michel, died a decade ago.

still from "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies"

“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” is filled with celebrated talking heads,including Martin Scorsese, who produced the film with Mr. Glimcher and Robert

Greenhut; artists like Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl and Lucas Samaras; and the video performance artist Robert Whitman (the most articulate), discussing the relationship of movies to the artists’ work.

Directed by Arne Glimcher; narrated by Martin Scorsese; director of photography, Petr Hlinomaz; edited by Sabine Krayenbühl; produced by Mr. Glimcher, Mr. Scorsese and Robert Greenhut; released by Arthouse Films. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. This film is not rated.

What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema — especially Georges Méliès’ photographic magic tricks — whose playful spirit found its way into Cubist paintings and drawings, especially those of Picasso. A voracious consumer of popular culture, he was first exposed to the movies in 1896, at 15, and was immediately smitten. Later Picasso became an ardent fan of Charlie Chaplin; he and the more cerebral Braque even founded a film club. Their passionate interest in new technologies extended to aviation, and they nicknamed each other Orville and Wilbur.

In 1900 Picasso attended the World’s Fair in Paris, where he was captivated by the American dancer Loie Fuller, who wore billowing veils onto which colored light was projected. Those images, noted the art historian Bernice Rose, found their way into his seminal 1907 painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” There is also speculation that the images of fans and musical instruments in Cubist paintings were borrowed from the movies.

PICASSO AND BRAQUE GO TO THE MOVIES

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

NEW YORK, NY.- Produced by Martin Scorsese and Robert Greenhut and directed by Arne Glimcher, Picasso and Braque go to the Movies is a cinematic tour through the effects of the technological revolution, specifically the invention of aviation, the creation of cinema and their interdependent influence on artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. With narration by Scorsese, and interviews with art scholars and artists including Chuck Close, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, the film looks at the collision between film and art at the turn of the 20th Century and helps us to realize cinema’s continuing influence on the art of our time.

It was the turn of the 20th Century and the disciplines of art and science were about to converge in a way that would change our perception of the world forever. Produced by Martin Scorsese and Robert Greenhut, narrated by Martin Scorsese and directed by Arne Glimcher, PICASSO AND BRAQUE GO TO THE MOVIES is a virtual tour through the effects of the technological revolution, specifically the invention of aviation, the creation of cinema and their interdependent influence on Picasso And Braque’s invention of Cubism, the most radical shock in the history of Western Art.

For the first time, art removed itself from the pedestal and interacted with and incorporated elements of popular culture. PICASSO AND BRAQUE GO TO THE MOVIES takes us from Picasso and Braque’s early work in Paris circa 1900 and the Exposition Universal where the wonders of Modernism were revealed, and into the artists’ studios. Picasso and Braque first met in 1907 when they had independently arrived at a similar place in their work. Soon their work would be virtually indistinguishable from each other and their lives would be inseparable, their passion for aviation led them to renaming themselves Wilber and Orville.

It becomes startlingly apparent that the basic language of cinema was invented by 1912 as can be seen in over 120 clips of archival footage that are incorporated into the movie. Interviews with film and art scholars and artists including Chuck Close, Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl among others help us to comprehend the creative process in contemporary terms and cinema’s continuing influence on the art of our time. The evolution of their work and the artistic influences of Manet and Cezanne are also discussed. Five years of research in the international archives of film and the cooperation of Major Museums of the world made this film possible.
Review:

“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” is a marvelous documentary by art gallery legend and sometime filmmaker Arne Glimcher that chronicles the ways in which Cubism was influenced, inspired, and threatened by the emergence of cinema at the turn of the 20th century. The film focuses primarily on Picasso and Braque, the founders of Cubism, who at one time were so close they called themselves Wilbur and Orville (after the Wright brothers).

Glimcher – aided by a marvelous lineup of talking heads including the film’s coproducer Martin Scorsese, Picasso biographer John Richardson, art critic Adam Gopnik, and such artists as Julian Schnabel and Chuck Close – draws on a startling array of film clips from the era. We see the magic of the early silent shorts by the Melies brothers, by Chaplin (whom Picasso greatly admired), and the great French comic Max Linder, as well as rare footage of fan dancers, strong men, and the famous Exposition Universelle in Paris.

The film’s thesis is that Cubism seized film as a revolutionary new art form and, by fracturing the image within the canvas, sought ways to create a cinemalike dynamism that would both rival and complement the movies. Altogether fascinating. Grade: A
]]> http://gvartauctions.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/picasso-and-braque-go-to-the-movies/feed/ 0 gvartauctions 28picassospan-1-articleLarge http://gvartauctions.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/gvaa-offers-free-banner-ad/ http://gvartauctions.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/gvaa-offers-free-banner-ad/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:49:11 +0000 gvartauctions http://gvartauctions.wordpress.com/?p=120 ]]> GV Art Auctions is offering a free banner ad to any and all artists who list their art at auction in the month of June.  The banner’s size is quite large.  It’s dimensions are 850px x 309px.

GVAA is an art auction site created by artists to help promote interest in the arts. New research suggests that arts audiences are declining.  It is important to keep the arts alive and thriving.  ”We have met hundreds of artists over the past three years.  One of the biggest concerns of these artists is selling their works.  Even though we have had moderate success with art show openings in our CT gallery, we felt the pressing need to expand to a much wider audience.  With the online auction site, we hope to appeal to a national if not a world-wide audience of artists and collectors.  There are plenty of artists out there with many fantastic pieces of work.  It is our job to see that these pieces find a good home.”

Registration and listings are completely free at GVAA and commission is a record low–making GVAA the least expensive art selling site to benefit artists.

To list, visit:  www.gvartauctions.com

“how-to” video tutorials are available on the site as well.  Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Punta della Dogana in Venice

Despite one of the worst art market slumps in years, these individuals all have collections worth $700 million or more.

Suffering from one of its worst years in recent memory, the art world got a boost in June when French billionaire François Pinault opened his new modern art museum, the Punta della Dogana, in Venice’s former customs house at the entrance of the Grand Canal. In what some called the “Dogana effect,” the opening was also seen as having helped boost attendance at Art Basel, the respected contemporary art fair in Switzerland later that month. While sales for the toned-down fair are hard to come by, a record crowd of 61,000, including billionaires Mitchell Rales, Eli Broad and Roman Abramovich showed up at the event.

Wealthy patrons and collectors have been the lifeblood of the art world for centuries, from Italy’s Medici family to American industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon. That is still true today even as art valuations drop. Indeed, in a downturn like this one, billionaires are some of the only people who can still afford to buy expensive art or help prop up museums.

Broad, for instance, spent $30 million in December bailing out the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to prevent the museum from having to sell off artwork and leave its current headquarters. Several months earlier, Estée Lauder Chairman Leonard Lauder gifted $131 million to New York City’s Whitney Museum, of which he is chairman emeritus, in part to help it keep its Upper East Side location.

Art is a passion for these billionaires, but it is also a valuable asset. So how did their personal collections hold up in the past year, and who among the rarefied rich owns the most valuable works?

Forbes recently scoured the art world to find out, spending weeks consulting with collectors, art appraisers, insurers, auction houses and gallery owners around the globe. We decided not to include members of the art trade, like dealer Larry Gagosian, or corporate collections, such as Bill Gates’, which belongs to Microsoft.

Since the art world trades on closely held information, most experts requested anonymity in discussing private art collections. While some disagreed on exact figures, almost all agreed on the top billionaire collectors. The final list includes 14 individuals who hold private collections worth $700 million or more. The estimates are purposefully conservative and should be considered “at least” numbers.

"Shot Red Marilyn" - Warhol

Topping the ranks is Philip Niarchos, son of the late shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos and father of Stavros III, who was linked in the past to American heiress Paris Hilton. He is said to have the most valuable collection, worth at least $2 billion. Philip’s father began collecting art in 1949 and over his lifetime acquired many well-known masterpieces including Vincent van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear” and Pablo Picasso’s self-portrait “Yo, Picasso.” Since his father left him the collection, Philip has quietly added such contemporary works as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Self-Portrait” and Andy Warhol’s “Shot Red Marilyn.”

"Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear" - Van Gogh

During our quest to pin down these extraordinary collections, we discovered a new fortune belonging to Esther Grether, a little-known Swiss cosmetics heiress whose 7.5% stake in Swatch and art collection of more than 600 pieces, including ones by Paul Cezanne, Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon, make her not only a billionaire but also the only woman in our list of top art collectors. She keeps the works in a printing factory that she converted, and where she also lives.

Valuing art is an obvious challenge, and even more so today with the art market affected by the same liquidity crisis as any other product or service. “The confusion [in valuations] has to do with the lower number of sales,” said Dr. Beverly Schreiber Jacoby, a fine art adviser and former head of Old Master Drawings at Christies in New York. “Theoretically, there are fewer points of reference since last fall.” With fewer buyers in the market and a healthy supply of new art, the contemporary art market took a precipitous fall in the last year, with some pieces depreciating in value by up to 90%.

"Yo, Picasso" - Picasso

Entertainment mogul David Geffen, for instance, made the list although the value of his collection was a matter of heated debate. Some argued his collection, comprised of seminal works by Jasper Johns, Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock, could be worth up to $2 billion. One person said the entire collection is worth only $400 million, due to the plunge in contemporary art prices. We pin the value at $1 billion.

Regardless, most agreed that Geffen proved to have impeccable timing in selling some of his collection three years ago. In a period of months in 2006, he apparently sold four paintings for $420 million including Jasper Johns’ “False Start” to Citadel’s Kenneth Griffin for $80 million and de Kooning’s “Police Gazette” and “Woman III” to SAC Capital’s Steve Cohen for $63.5 million and $137 million, respectively.

Cohen also makes the cut with a collection valued at $750 million, even though he likely couldn’t sell his de Koonings for anything close to what he paid for them. Still, he has earned a reputation as a prolific, adventurous collector. He is the buyer, for instance, of British artist Damien Hirst’s piece, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”–a 13-foot tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. The creature reportedly rotted and was replaced. It also was the inspiration for a book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, by economist Don Thompson, who used it as a symbol of greed in the contemporary art world.

Cohen’s passion for art may even surpass his love of business: SAC Capital bought a stake in Sotheby’s auction house earlier this year, even as the auction house reported losses of $34.5 million for the first quarter of 2009.

Dennis Hopper - lover of art

I found this wonderful video of Dennis Hopper talking about the art that inspires him.  He gives a tour around his home explaining why he loves art, how he got into collecting art, and how surrounded by great contemporary art energizes him.

“I think that probably I collect things I wish I had made.”

“I started collecting in the ’50s, so for a lot of people who were going to the beach, going to tennis, and going to the mountain skiing, I was a gallery buff.”

“My idea of collecting is not going and buying bankable names, but buying people I believe really are contributing something to my artistic life.”

Dennis Hopper died at his Venice, California home early Saturday, May 29, 2010.  He was 74.

Hopper’s death comes right on the heels of one of his biggest accomplishments as an artist. On July 11, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will open the first comprehensive survey of Hopper’s artistic career to be mounted by a North American museum with an exhibit called “Dennis Hopper Double Standard” (named after his iconic 1961 photograph).

Hopper not only collected great contemporary art–he had one of the finest private collections around–he was a gifted artist and photographer himself who as a child had studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. All of his early works, as well as his first art collection, including an original Andy Warhol “Campbell Soup Can” which Hopper bought for $75, were destroyed in by the Bel Air fire in 1961. Broken-hearted, he put down his brushes for some time. His wife at the time, Brooke Hayward, gave him a camera and he started taking pictures of their movie star friends and quirky urban scenes around Los Angeles, many of which he published in 2001 in a charming and intimate photography book titled, “1712 North Crescent Heights,” the address where he and Hayward lived.

In “Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital,” an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in 2006, there was series of photographs Hopper took in the 1960s of an ice house that he and several artists constructed in the late 1960s. He described it as sort of a guerilla art event: they found an empty lot, brought in huge blocks of ice and built the place. Then Hopper photographed it over several days as it melted in the southern California sun. He laughed remembering the experience, the trouble they caused, the fun of it all. Knowing Hopper’s profoundly dark period that would follow in the 1970s, that scene and that laugh seemed all the more poignant.

In October, 2008, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris mounted “Dennis Hopper & le Nouvel Hollywood,” an exhibition of everything Hopper: his personal art collection, which included several portraits of him by well-known contemporary artists (I loved the Julian Schnabel one made of broken plates); pictures he had painted; photographs of him on sets and in life; photographs he had taken, such as those of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and his most well-known, “Double Exposure,” of two Standard gas station signs on a corner in West Hollywood, which he snapped through his car windshield in 1961; of movies he had appeared in; and clips of films he had directed. When you saw it, Hopper made sense: he was a Renaissance man from Kansas.

In addition to being a prolific artist, the late Dennis Hopper also supported environmental, scientific and humanitarian causes.

It is thought that Moss, 36, her partner Jamie Hince, and her 59-year-old mother Linda were asleep in the house when the burglars struck.

Detectives believe they may have made their escape after being disturbed when either Moss, or Kills guitarist Hince, 42, woke up.

A 24-year-old man was arrested nearby in connection with the burglary and inquiries are ongoing, police said.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Camden Police are investigating a burglary at Greville Road, NW6, from approximately 4.20am on Thursday, May 20.

“A 24-year-old man was arrested in connection with it and inquiries are ongoing.”

Moss recently spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on works by Banksy, the guerrilla artist, including a 12ft by 18ft mural depicting herself and several celebrity friends which she reportedly commissioned at a cost of £150,000.

She also owns several Banksy prints as well as the stolen portrait.

The raid on the model’s home is not the first time works by Banksy have been targeted by thieves.

Police are hunting a man and a woman who smashed their way into an art gallery in New Compton Street, central London, earlier this month and snatched Banksy prints worth more than £16,000.

In 2007, 10 prints worth about £10,000 were stolen from a branch of Art Republic in Brighton.

Fans of Tintin, the Belgian comic-book boy detective, should flock to Paris or check out the website of Piasa auctioneers, which has assembled 230 items – original drawings, plates, first editions, rare objects and documents – for the “Hergé Sale” on Saturday.

Estimates range from 3,000 to 250,000 euros, and some works were unknown even to the foundation. One was a gouache of Captain Haddock, Tintin, Snowy and Professor Calculus on a beach with some surrealistically oversize seashells (below). Estimated at 50,000 to 70,000 euros, it was owned by a friend of the artist who collected sea shells.

Hergé fever, say the auctioneers, is growing with the anticipated Stephen Spielberg Tintin film, The Secret of the Unicorn, due to be released next year.