google ad sense 728 x 90

Where The Hip Call Home


Tiger Woods paid 38 million for his Jupiter Island Home, pictured above


WHAT MOVES CELEBRITY HOMESEEKERS
Real Estate Feature
Star-Studded Neighborhoods
by Matt Woolsey

"...There are all sorts of reasons why celebrities cluster in exclusive enclaves--beachfront property, good schools and extra-tight security to name a few... [and]
'They want to move to where all their friends are,' says Susan Breitenbach, a Bridgehampton, N.Y.-based Corcoran real estate agent, of the stars who flock to Long Island's East End. That also seems to be the case on Jupiter Island, Fla. In January 2006, Tiger Woods joined fellow golfers Nick Price and Greg Norman on the exclusive island when he bought a $38 million, 10-acre compound....

The Hamptons, a collection of quaint villages boasting the million-dollar second homes of dozens of A-listers, lies just 75 miles outside of New York City. Look out for Martha Stewart on Georgica Pond, Gwyneth Paltrow and Alec Baldwin in Amagansett, and Paul Simon in Montauk--a neighborhood so exclusive that Jimmy Buffett tried to buy a trailer there for $430,000... '


Paltrow and hubby call Amagansett home

For people hubbed in New York, there's really no other choice,' says Breitenbach... Back in Manhattan, stars huddle in several distinct neighborhoods. Robert DeNiro, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and model Gisele Bundchen call Tribeca home, and Bono, Liam Neeson and Madonna reside on the Upper West Side. In both areas, spacious lofts or multilevel townhouses run into the tens of millions...


Deniro has always been a big fan of Tribeca
Recently, A-listers such as Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger have answered the bohemian call of Brooklyn, plopping down $3.5 million for a four-story brick house with a three-car garage in Brooklyn Heights... At the Southern tip of the country, in Miami Beach, big shots flock to appropriately named Star Island, where Lenny Kravitz, P.Diddy, Hulk Hogan and Gloria Estefan all have multimillion-dollar mansions...

From Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland Drive and up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, Southern California has the highest celebrity concentration of anywhere on our list... Living in gated Beverly Park, where one home is currently listed for $38 million, would put them closer to Santa Monica's First Presbyterian School, where the Spielberg kids went, while living in Bel Air would place them closer to the Brentwood School, which Arnold Schwarzenegger's children attended.


Sean Penn and Robin Wright prefer Ross, in Northern California

Indeed, many celebs enroll their kids in private schools, though Sean Penn and Robin Wright-Penn--as well as Barry Levinson, who lives in Ross, Calif., outside San Francisco--send their children to one of California's best public schools, Ross School... Privacy in all regards is a big part of the celebrity real estate game. When it comes time to buy or sell a home, most celebs do so through limited liability corporations (LLC), which keeps their names off property records and sales listings, even if publicizing the sale might boost the selling price... 'Using their names would help the sale, but they're private people...'

via Forbes.com

Photojournalism: Value Keeps On Rising


Above is Robert Doisneau's most well-known photo

Art Market Insight [Feb 2007]
Art investment
Photojournalism - Collective memory and photography [Feb 07]


The above graph is from Artprice.com

The photojournalism market is booming.
Turnover at auction has risen by more than 250% in 10 years, and the trend is strong in the USA, France and the UK. For many years photojournalism was considered a secondary form of art, much like scientific or ethnographic photography. Since the 1950s however it has become well established, partly thanks to World Press Photo, with its annual contest celebrating the year’s best journalistic photographs, and a number of exhibitions underlining the news photo’s dual role as documentary testimony and aesthetic artefact.

The great names of photojournalism, Cecil BEATON, Henri CARTIER-BRESSON, Robert CAPA, Raymond DEPARDON, Robert DOISNEAU, Walker EVANS, Dorothea LANGE and Marc RIBOUD, all documented their times through sensitive images of undeniable cultural significance. Many of these are now finding their way into cultural institutions, prized for a combination of the iconic value of the shots and the photographers’ commitment, as well as aesthetic considerations (definition of the image, framing, etc.).

In the 1930s, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were hired by the US Farm Security Administration and produced a magisterial record of rural poverty during the New Deal. Their index has outstripped that of the French photographers in an astonishing rally: Walker Evans’s index has more than doubled since 2005 and Lange’s has tripled since 2004.


Dorothea Lange's White Angel Breadline

The highest priced photojournalism picture ever is White Angel Bread Line by Lange (see above image), which captures the depth of America’s crisis between the wars. On October 11, 2005, Sotheby’s NY knocked down the print for USD 720,000 (nearly EUR 600,000).

Another print of the same subject was offered at New York’s Phillips, de Pury & Company sale on October 19, but this one, from around 1955, failed to command the same interest and sold for its high estimate of USD 45,000 (EUR 35,897). Prior to that, the highest price paid at auction for a photograph was a relatively modest USD 120,000 for Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (October 22, 2002, Christie’s NY).

Despite these record sales, though, around half the Lange and Evans pictures that come up are later prints and can be bought for less than EUR 5,000.


The above photo by Robert Capa is one of his most famous (Picasso and Francoise Gilot)

Naturalised American Robert Capa, joint-founder of the Magnum agency along with Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger, carried his camera through the Spanish civil war in 1936. There, he captured live the Death of a Republican Soldier, an image that was picked up and reprinted worldwide and came to symbolise this war in the collective memory. Despite the picture’s fame, subsequent prints are often bought in. Photojournalism collectors are highly selective and would rather pay EUR 5,000 or EUR 10,000 for a contemporary print than bid up a print from a later historical period than its subject.

Two years after that, Capa reported on the second Sino-Japanese war for Life, before going on to record the allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Mingling with the soldiers, he took 119 pictures of which 108 were accidentally destroyed by an unfortunate Life lab worker. Auction houses regularly put up D-Day images printed between 1960 and 1990.

These tend to find buyers for an average EUR 3,000 to EUR 7,000. Oddly, Capa’s records at auction were not set by images stemming from his committed journalism but by two self-portraits taken around 1938 that went for three times their estimate at EUR 15,000 to EUR 17,000 in April 2003 (at Phillips, De Pury & Luxembourg, April 25, 2003, New York).


The above photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson now sells for roughly $15,000.00

Cartier-Bresson prices have risen sharply since his death in 2004. Enthusiasts rushed to buy his pictures and the rate of bought-in prints fell from 50% in 2002 to 10% in 2004.

While the majority of transactions range between EUR 1,000 and EUR 5,000, his work generated record sales at auctions in 2005. Christie’s sold On the banks of the Marne for USD 110,000 on October 10, 2005 (EUR 90,827). The photo depicts a picturesque picnic scene along the Marne River and shows the changing French society of the 1930s. It dates from 1938, just two years after the French won the right to annual holidays. The print itself is a later version (1955), and collectors – who are demanding about print dates – tend to prefer vintage prints dating from between 1930 and 1950. Prices fall steeply for 1970s and 1980s reprints to between EUR 4,000 and EUR 7,000.

The Luxembourg-born American emigrant Edward Steichen was director of aerial photography for the allied forces during World War I. However, he spent most of his career working on portraits of well-known figures (Garbo, Churchill, etc.) and genre scenes. He is popular among Americans, and most of his works were selling for between EUR 1,000 and EUR 10,000 even before his index began a spectacular rally in 2005 (+240%). On February 14, 2006, his photo of Rodin’s Balzac reached USD 550,000 (EUR 462,330) setting a new record at Sotheby’s New York. Steichen's photo engravings are less popular. Collectors can buy a “piece of history” for less than EUR 1,000.

Today, the boundaries between photo-reportage and art photography are becoming blurred, as visual artists such as Sophie Ristelhueber, Paul Seawright and Jean-Luc Moulène move onto what was previously considered journalistic territory.

Some Kewl New Finds

laurasweet's recommendations at ThisNext

(Pictured clockwise from top left):
The stand up tissue box, a really unique pair of wedding rings inscribed in latin- hers fits within his,new Ross McBride timepieces for Normal, The amazing collaboration between LG washing machines and the UK's Designers Guild, Anomorphic reflective cup and backwards graphic saucers, and Grooveware: utensil indented ceramic plates.

Just click on the item above to learn more.

The "Eyes" Have It. Paintings by Sas Christian Compared To The Keane's Big Eyed Paintings



I know that like fashion, art trends tend to repeat every few decades.
There's certainly no better example than the recent and growing resurgence of interest in Big-Eyed Waif paintings. In the 60s and 70s Margaret D.H. Keane's paintings were all the rage. In case you think I meant Walter Keane's paintings, I didn't. You see, although they were signed as Walter, and sold as his, the paintings were actually done by his wife Margaret. Not wanting to relinquish the rights to the artwork, Walter and Margaret's divorce proceeding went all the way to Federal court. At the hearing, Margaret painted in front of the judge to prove her point. In 1965, the courts sided with her, enabling her to paint under her own name.

You may think of these big-eyed paintings as 'retro' or 'kitsch' but considering original oil paintings of Keane's go for upwards of $25,000, that's a pretty penny to pay for "novelty" art. But what caught my attention, in addition to the publication of an art book celebrating this genre called Big-Eyed Masters, is another newly published book of works by contemporary artist Sas Christian.


   
 cover of Sas Christian's Looking In

 Christian's paintings are uncannily similar in both subject matter and composition to Keane's but she insists that her paintings are not inspired this artist. Instead she says- and I quote from her own biography, "She was never inspired by one person in particular, however now the artists she most admires would be Bouguereau, Tamara De Lempicka, Mark Ryden... Sas draws inspiration from everyday occurrences, movies and music." It's hard to believe Christian is not aware of her works' likeness to Keane's. Perhaps her more macabre treatment of the subject matter is why she likens herself to Ryden.

Some of her paintings incorporate blood or slightly sadist sexual imagery that was absent from Keane's sad and teary paintings. It is also possible that because of Christian's youth and venue (she was born in London) she's not aware of Keane's work. But even more odd to me is the lack of parallels drawn between the two by her publishers and other art critics. Both artists work is very soulful with the subject directly confronting the viewer. Neither paints 'happy' portraits and both paint youthful subjects, often with pets. There's even an asian flavor to some of each artists works. Granted Christian's work is less painterly and more illustrative as well as more 'realistic' if I can use that term loosely. Clearly both artists are talented and prolific and their work has a certain eerie appeal. But it's hard to deny the similarities.

Below are some examples of Keane's work from over 30 years ago side by side with Christian's present work.

  
Above: More of Margaret Keane's work  
Above: More of Sas Christian's work 

As much as I enjoy Christian's work, it looks pretty derivative to me.
All those in favor say "eye".

Trade in An Old Habit for a New One

With the introduction of Absolut's Pear Vodka comes a fun series of videos encouraging you to get rid of an old habit by blowing it up.

Whether you're addicted to Caffeine or Shoes (or as in my case, both), the videos are a fun visceral way to introduce this product.

















Interesing Article on Paint from the NY Times



New York Times
February 14, 2007
Paints’ Mysteries Challenge Protectors of Modern Art (Abridged)
By RANDY KENNEDY

LOS ANGELES — In a sprawling, white-on-white lab here that looks like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a British scientist named Thomas Learner recently lifted the top from a small box of slides, the kind that usually contain microscopic samples of bacteria or chemicals.
But this was a different kind of lab, and the slides were coated with dozens of shades of dried acrylic paint, at once as ordinary as house paint and as precious as rare isotopes. This is because the acrylics had been taken from the Santa Monica studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, who died in 1994 and who, like many artists of his generation, had largely abandoned the oils that had been the medium of painting for at least five centuries. Instead, he turned to their modern successors: acrylics, enamels, alkyds and many other substances that are more synthetic than organic.

The new paints, which began to emerge in the 1930s and made their way into many studios by the 1950s, allowed artists to do things they couldn’t do with oil. Morris Louis used thinned acrylic to stain, rather than coat, canvases, creating an ethereal effect. Jackson Pollock used gloss enamel because it poured and dripped the way he wanted. Bridget Riley and Frank Stella both used ordinary house paints, Mr. Stella because they “had the nice dead kind of color” that he wanted, right out of the can.

But while conservators have inherited generations’ worth of knowledge about oil paints, they know comparatively little about synthetics and how to protect the masterpieces created by using them, many of which are rapidly approaching the half-century mark.

Acrylics, for example, can leave surfaces softer than oil paints do, and so dust and dirt stick to them more easily. The surfaces can also be breeding grounds for mold. How should they be cleaned? Or transported? What should the temperature and humidity be in the museums where they are displayed? And what can institutions do — besides panic or weep — if real problems arise, if a deep red on a Mark Rothko painting slowly becomes a pale blue, for example, or if cracks appear in a Pollock easily worth tens of millions of dollars? (These two crises have arisen in recent years.)



In 2002 the Getty Conservation Institute here, working with the Tate in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, began an ambitious project called Modern Paints to answer such questions. It is only one part of a much larger undertaking for conservators of modern art, who now must deal with painting, sculpture and installation materials as strange and fragile as latex, old cathode ray tubes, whale-bone dust, fluorescent tubes, preserved sheep and at least one shaggy, taxidermied angora goat.

Over the last few years, in its labs perched high in the hills of Brentwood, the Getty has brought complex technology costing millions of dollars to bear on modern paints, building up a database of thousands of kinds of pigments, solvents, chemical binders and other substances. In the process it has helped cast light not only on better ways to clean, care for and transport modern paintings, but also on the ways that artists — some, like Morris Louis, highly reclusive — worked.


As just one reminder of the kind of lab this was, a cardboard storage box sitting on one table was emblazoned with the hand-lettered warning: “Beware!! Works of Art Below.”

Click here to read the full article

Room(s) With A View, Santa Monica, CA




The Penthouse, a new restaurant and lounge opening on Monday at the revamped Huntley Santa Monica Beach, is the latest effort to turn the hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., formerly a Radisson, into a hot spot. Two blocks from the beach, the space was designed by Thomas Schoos, above, who is responsible for the interiors of the popular Los Angeles restaurants Koi and Table 8.

The Penthouse, with a shimmering wall of Capiz shells, a glass fireplace and curtained cabanas for privacy, above, was designed to appeal to bright young things, Mr. Schoos said. But the best feature predates the designer’s hand: a jaw-dropping view of the Pacific coastline. “It’s like being on the beach, minus the sand,” he said.

Huntley Santa Monica Beach, 1111 Second Street, Santa Monica, (310) 394-5454.

Tattoo You. And your furniture. And your jewelry. And your clothes.

Tatts are back in a big way.
Instead of permanently marring your skin and risking Hep C, why not get tattoos on everything but your body? Here are a few thoughts...

just click on the images below to get more information or to purchase
Tattoo You. And This. And That. And then.....

See more of my Tattoo You. And This. And That. And then..... list at ThisNext.

San Francisco: No Room For Parking, But There's Always Room For Jell-O.

 
above: San Francisco's Marina made of Jell-O

 Liz Hickok is a San Francisco based artist working in photography, video, sculpture, and installation, and currently... Jell-O.

 
Above: San Francisco's famous Alamo Square

 
Above: Liz Hickok's Jell-O Alamo Square

News of Hickok's "San Francisco in Jell-O" series is spreading quickly. Her work has been included in such publications as The New York Times, Harper's, and San Francisco magazine, as well as on the cover of Artweek. She has been featured on several different local and national news and radio programs such as the CBS Early Show, VH1, Spark* (KQED, Bay Area), All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation (NPR). Below are more fun images of the City by the Bay in Jell-O. 

 Foggy San Francisco:
  

The Palace Of Fine Arts:  

The Ferry Building:
  



 
Twin Peaks:
   

  The Bay Bridge:
   

 Her San Francisco Jell-O creations are available as limited edition C-prints on her site. 

Can You Take A Pretty Picture?


Communication Arts invites you to enter your work in the 48th Photography Competition.

Now is the time to promote your talent by having your work selected for the largest and most important juried competition for photography.

Selected award-winning pieces will appear in the August Photography Annual of Communication Arts magazine. More than 70,000 copies will be distributed worldwide, assuring important exposure for the creators of this outstanding work.

Deadline: March 13, 2007

Click here for submission guidelines, PDF entry forms and FAQs
:
http://www.commarts.com/competition

Please donate

C'mon people, it's only a dollar.