Midori has spent her adult life trying to live beyond being a child prodigy. “In many ways, she says, she has spent her adult life pushing to create the normalcy she missed as an international child star. Her image as a prodigy was carefully cultivated by those around her. ‘They would tell me things like, ‘You have to say you like classical music, you never listen to anything else’.”
Tag: 11.29.02
Austrian Court Seizes Painting
The Austrian court – long criticized for not doing more to ensure the recovery of artwork looted by the Nazis – has taken the remarkable step of seizing an Egon Schiele painting valued between €45,000-60,000 which was to have been sold at auction. “The Vienna seizure is preliminary to possible private action to recover the painting. Although Austrian law favours owners who in ‘good faith’ have acquired stolen objects, a lawsuit nonetheless will apparently take place.”
Buy High, Sell Low?
Dotcom pioneer Halsey Minor bought millions of dollars worth of paintings at the top of the market. Now he has another venture to fund, and he’s selling off his art. “Mr. Minor stands to lose about $13 million on the Christie’s sale alone, scheduled for Thursday. And experts speculate that he has already lost $10 million on paintings the Gerald Peters Gallery recently sold privately, including works by Hopper and Hartley.”
Hirst In Space
When British scientists were designing a small vehicle to land on Mars, they knew they wanted an artist to design a piece of art to go with it. They picked Damien Hirst. He came up with “a spot chart design, scaled down to 26 grams on a background of aluminium, and tinted with copper, cobalt, manganese and molybdenum in the nine colours of Mars, will be bolted to the side of the lander.”
Beyond Prodigy
Midori has spent her adult life trying to live beyond being a child prodigy. “In many ways, she says, she has spent her adult life pushing to create the normalcy she missed as an international child star. Her image as a prodigy was carefully cultivated by those around her. ‘They would tell me things like, ‘You have to say you like classical music, you never listen to anything else’.”
Supplementary Pleasures
Everything about The Times Literary Supplement, that “coded message to the intellectual elite whose 36 pages of densely packed articles have come out regularly for the past century and a bit” is “endearingly odd.” The TLS’s “circulation has never topped 50,000 and is now level-pegging at about 35,000 worldwide” but its influence is enormous.