Arts & Letters
78 articles filed under Arts & Letters.
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Arts & Letters
A Day at the Races with Charles Bukowski
We spent Sunday with the kids on Octoberfest Day at Santa Anita Park. I’m not sure why it was selected as a good venue for the grandkids, but it was. I’ve seen only two equine racetracks in my time, and…
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Arts & Letters
Too Tacky! What Is the Fine Art World Coming To?
From Art Today: “Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady competed over an original George Condo drawing at a charity art auction in Atlantic City. The reality star kicked off the bidding for “Standing Female Figure”…
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Arts & Letters
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns From LC: In this article from The Art Newsletter, Martin Bailey suggests that the nuclear test explosion at the heart of the film Oppenheimer seems prefigured by Van Gogh’s…
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Arts & Letters
Feb. 24, 2015 Letter From James “Whitey” Bulgar to 17-Year-Old Brittany Tainsh
The notorious Boston gangster who eluded capture for nearly two decades before being captured in 2011 “My life was wasted and spent foolishly, brought shame and suffering on my parents and siblings and will…
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Arts & Letters
The Current State of the Art Market
Artworks going for $20 million plus comprised half of the art sold at auction between 2018 and 2022. This Botticelli, for example, sold for $92.2 million at Sotheby’s in London in 2021. Click here. Auctions of…
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Arts & Letters
Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot and the Passage of Time
In a recent Sunday column for The Free Press, Douglas Murray shared a literary gem he has memorized and the story of how it shaped his life. Click here.
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Arts & Letters
The Contemporary Art Market Is Still Strong
The high end of the art market has been doing very well for a surprisingly long time. In recent months, however, there’s been some softening. That’s not surprising. In fact, it’s overdue. What I’m comforted to…
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Arts & Letters
Einstein's Unexpected Career Advice Sparks Plumber's Reply
I’d Rather Be a Plumber… In October 1954, Albert Einstein was asked by the editor of The Reporter to comment on the hostile treatment many American scientists and intellectuals received during the McCarthy era…
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Arts & Letters
Good News, Bad News — May 17, 2023
France’s Pompidou Center will close in 2025 for five years, while it spends $300 million fixing itself up. The bad news is that it will still be open till then. Its architecture, inside and out, has always…
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Arts & Letters
There Is a Good Side to Your Dad” (Fingers Crossed!)
From Letters of Note… In 2017, at the end of a particularly bitter custody case in Scotland that resulted in the father being granted indirect contact with his three children, a psychologist advised the…
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Arts & Letters
Gallows Poetry, Anyone?
Have you ever heard the name Chidiock Tichborne? My mother, who required us to memorize a poem every weekend, told me about him when I was very young. I was reminded of him earlier this week in an essay by…
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Arts & Letters
Is This Art? Is Sarah Lucas a Sculptor?
The front page of Art News on Tuesday announced that that Sarah Lucas had just won a $400,000 prize from New York’s New Museum. “The award,” the article said, “officially titled the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture…
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Arts & Letters
Yayoi Kusama at the Hirschhorn
When I was living in DC, I spent a fair amount of my weekend time at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery. It always had something worth looking at. Currently, they’re featuring Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese…
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Arts & Letters
Things Worth Remembering: W.H. Auden’s Poetry
It might have been 40 years ago. I was walking by a church in Manhattan and noticed a sign on the door indicating that Auden, WH Auden, one of the greatest English language poets of the 20th century, was…
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Arts & Letters
Charlotte Brontë Rejects A Marriage Proposal
In a letter dated Mar. 5, 1839, 23-year-old Charlotte Brontë declines a marriage proposal with her own version of “It’s not you, it’s me.” In the letter to the Reverend Henry Nussey, which is very polite but…
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Arts & Letters
Another Auction, Another Record Sale
Sotheby’s London sold a Wassily Kandinsky painting for a record-breaking $45 million on March 1. The 1910 landscape was recently given to the 13 heirs of a German Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis…
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Arts & Letters
The 10 Most Expensive Paintings of the Last 12 Years
Masterworks, a company that sells fractional shares of important artworks it buys at auction, sent me this list of the 10 most expensive paintings sold in the last dozen years. I was surprised by some of them…
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Arts & Letters
A Fascinating Story About Art Forgery
Ever since I began to forge the paintings of modern masters to hang in my first-bought house in 1985, I’ve been interested in reading about more accomplished forgers. Here is a story I came across recently…
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Arts & Letters
The Ultimate Fantasy for Art Collectors
This painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger will be auctioned next month in France after having been recently rediscovered. The owners were unaware that it was by the famed…
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Arts & Letters
This painting by Piet Mondrian has been hung upside-down for 77 years
The goof was discovered by the curator of a new exhibition at a museum in Germany. Here’s how she figured it out.
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Arts & Letters
Victorian Suitor's Backup Plan For Rejected Proposal
I don’t know if this letter was written in earnest. But I do know, from Letters of Note, that it is real. Margaret Stuart-Wortley 1879 Margaret, If you find yourself unwilling to accept me, will you please…
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Arts & Letters
From the Smithsonian: The artwork that took 30 years and 200 acres to create
Read about it here.
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Arts & Letters
Stopping the “Stop Oil” Numbskulls
To publicize their idiotic cause of “no more oil production,” protestors have been targeting art treasures in museums in Europe almost non-stop since the beginning of this year. At the start, their strategy…
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Arts & Letters
From a letter Charles Bukowski, at age 64, sent to his publisher in 1971
“I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words…
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Arts & Letters
Is This a Party You’d Want to Go To?
Click here for a first-person account of the recent LACMA fundraiser, which raised $5 million. It will tell you everything that is wrong about the art market today.
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Arts & Letters
What Should We Say About Alex Katz?
The Guggenheim is putting on a major retrospective of Alex Katz’s paintings. I came across a review of it by Alex Greenberger in Art News that was very negative. He calls the work “vapid.” (You can read the…
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Arts & Letters
Big Artwork, Bigger ROI!
The last time it was sold at auction, in 1987, it sold for $660,000. Andy Warhol’s 1963 White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times), from his “Death and Disasters” series, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Nov…
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Arts & Letters
Katharina Cibulka's Feminist Construction Site Text Installation
Here’s another example of why visual artists should not be allowed to use words. This is an installation on the façade of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. It is by someone named…
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Arts & Letters
Ernest Hemingway's Mother Rejects The Sun Also Rises
Something I’ve learned about writing: You can’t assume that friends and family members will want to read your books and essays. Some won’t read them at all. (K doesn’t read my non-fiction writing because she…
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Arts & Letters
Bach, Rachel Carlson, and MC Escher
I’m a fan of MC Escher’s art. And Rachel Carlson’s writing. And Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. (Who isn’t?) But did you know that they are connected? Escher and Carlson were inspired by Bach. And each was also…
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Arts & Letters
Peak Stupid!
I’ve said in previous blog posts that I’m sure NFTs will be widely used in the art world over the next ten years. Not as art pieces themselves, but as digital ID tags that can be attached to each individual…
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Arts & Letters
Fine Art and the Great Wealth Transfer
I can’t remember where I read it, but over the next two decades something like $70 trillion will be passed down from America’s Baby Boomers to their kids and grandkids. About $40 trillion of that will go to…
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Arts & Letters
The Art Business Is Still Booming
Both Fine Art and Forgeries! In this age of digital information, you’d think forgeries would be easier to detect. They should be. (And they will be when NFTs come into common use.) But when the art market is…
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Arts & Letters
Forgery: Modern Art’s Biggest Problem
Stephanie Clegg, an art collector, paid Sotheby’s $90,000 for a Marc Chagall watercolor about 10 years ago. Recently, she sent it to an authentication panel in France that declared it a fake. When Clegg…
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Arts & Letters
How A Thousand Daily Calories Changed My Writing
I rarely get drunk anymore. I can’t remember the last time I did. Still, I like to drink. A cocktail at 5:30. Two glasses of wine at dinner. And a Cognac with my cigar afterwards. But, in an effort to lose 25+…
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Arts & Letters
Art Is About Beauty – Sometimes in More Ways Than One
When I first read that Anna Weyant, a 27-year-old artist represented by the influential Gagosian Gallery, had sold a painting for $1.6 million, I was eager to know more about her. I first looked at her work…
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Arts & Letters
Kids Write the Darnedest Things
From 11-year-old Emily Dickinson A letter to her brother, April 18, 1842 “[T]he chickens grow very fast I am afraid they will be so large that you cannot perceive them with the naked Eye when you get home the…
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Arts & Letters
Congratulations to the Lionesses, England’s women’s soccer team, for making history Monday night!
Their win over Germany in the European Championship final – after a 56-year title drought for the UK – would have amazed the man who wrote this letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895: “[A woman]…
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Arts & Letters
Vermeer's Mastery of Light and Domestic Intimacy
Long before Girl With a Pearl Earring, I was a huge fan of Johannes Vermeer. Here is a short lesson about him from an art historian, with a few comments about why his art was so great. Click here.
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Arts & Letters
When You Can’t Sell a Stolen Work of Art
A Dutch historian known as the “Indiana Jones of Art” recovered ancient Catholic relics when the pieces were left on his doorstep a few weeks ago. The relics were stolen in early June from the Fécamp Abbey…
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Arts & Letters
Sometimes You Get It Right…
And When You Do, Why Not Crow About It?! I bought this painting 30 years ago in a yard sale from a neighbor, who was Pakistani, as he was leaving the housing development we lived in then. I didn’t know the…
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Arts & Letters
William Blake's Dual Mastery Of Poetry And Visual Art
The Amazing Genius of William Blake The Ancient of Days (1827) I studied William Blake as an undergraduate. His poetry was exactly what a young man of my interests needed. And then, when I was much older, I…
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Arts & Letters
Performance Art or Wanton Destruction of Property?
On Monday, July 4, two people from a group calling itself Just Stop Oil went into the National Gallery in London and glued themselves to the frame of John Constable’s The Hay Wain. They also covered the…
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Arts & Letters
The Ara Pacis Museum
Every time we are in Rome, K and I stop by the Ara Pacis, a museum built around a 2,000-year-old altar dedicated to the goddess of peace. The altar itself is a never-flagging source of pleasure. Enclosed, as…
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Arts & Letters
Go to Hell With Your Money
I’m not ideologically inclined to like Asger Jorn’s school of art. But I have a number of pieces by him in a collection of COBRA art that I inherited through my first failed attempt at the art business. And so…
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Arts & Letters
More on the Conceptual Art Scam
On May 16, I wrote about a discussion I’ve been having with my partners in producing my next book on Central American art. The issue at hand is conceptual art and why I think so much of it is BS. Click here to…
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Arts & Letters
Empty Frames
Another great essay by the great Theodore Dalrymple in Taki’s Magazine, this one on junk art. Here’s an excerpt: “Empty Frames” “Only a couple of weeks after the draping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a…
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Arts & Letters
M.C. Escher Is Now a Movie
I became a fan of M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist, the moment I saw this print. His pictures seemed designed to draw me in and hold me in a way that was enticing but also disturbing. They are like some of Dali’s…
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Arts & Letters
How to Apologize for Being Drunk
Getting drunk, behaving badly, and then apologizing for it is as old as civilization. In Dunhuang, China, a thousand years ago, it was so common that the municipality’s Bureau of Etiquette came up with an…
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Arts & Letters
New Mexico Couple's Audacious $150 Million Art Heist
Wonder how an ordinary New Mexico couple pulled off a $150 million art heist? Click here.
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