Italian tax police said Saturday that they had seized works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and other artistic giants in a crackdown on assets hidden by the disgraced founder of the collapsed dairy company Parmalat. Authorities estimated the 19 masterpieces stashed away in attics and basements were valued at $150 million. Parma Prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said that, based on wiretapped phone conversations, officials believed at least one of the paintings hidden by Calisto Tanzi in the area of Parma was about to be sold
How far would you go to help save an endangered animal? How about allowing someone to jab ink into your skin with tiny needles, 150 times a second? That’s exactly what hundreds of volunteers signed up for last weekend at ExtInked, where people came from far and wide to have one of Britain’s most endangered species permanently tattooed on their body, making them a life long ambassador for that species
Andy A multimillion-dollar collection of original artwork by famed pop art icon Andy Warhol was stolen last week from a West Los Angeles home, according to police. On 3 September, a housekeeper for noted art collector Richard L Weisman walked into the dining room of Weisman’s residence on Angelo Drive and noticed several pieces were missing, said Detective Donald Hrycyk, head of the LAPD’s Art Theft detail. A dozen large portraits that had adorned the walls the day before were gone. Hrycyk said there was no sign of forced entry into the home and that nothing else was disturbed, including several other Warhol paintings hanging on nearby walls. There were no immediate leads or suspects, Hrycyk said
Unknown hackers broke into the web site of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) this week, in what appeared to be a similar attack to one perpetrated last week on the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF)
Banksy has pulled off his most daring stunt yet by staging his biggest-ever British exhibition in complete secrecy. The covert graffiti artist snuck into Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery and replaced many of the artefacts on display there with 100 pieces of his own work, including a burnt-out ice-cream van. The spray-painted van, which sits under a giant melted cone, appears alongside dozens of sculptures, oil paintings and his trademark stencils from today. Despite Banksy’s international notoriety, the exhibition remained a closely-guarded secret with only two officials at the council-owned museum aware of the installation. The reason the museum was closed was even kept secret from top council officials
Bettie Page, the brunette pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85
Famed former pinup model Bettie Page is hospitalised in intensive care after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles
Lithographs that once belonged to a German duke and vanished when the Soviets occupied parts of Germany after World War II, have turned up at Sotheby’s in London
A statue symbolising the mythical origins and power of Rome, long thought to have been made around 500BC, has been found to date from the 1200s. The statue depicts a she-wolf suckling Remus and his twin brother Romulus — who is said to have founded Rome. The statue of the wolf was carbon-dated last year, but the test results have only now been made public. The figures of Romulus and Remus have already been shown to be 15th Century additions to the statue
An ancient gold cup mysteriously acquired by a British scrap metal dealer is to be sold at auction with an estimate of nearly $1 million, after languishing for years in a shoe box under its current owner’s bed
The mysterious donor of 57 carved stone heads found scattered around Yorkshire over the last two weeks is a reclusive artist currently on holiday somewhere in a tent
. The shadowy figure caught on CCTV at one of the 19 places where the primitive-looking sculptures have so far been found is Billy Johnson, a 43-year-old who describes his work as hypnogogic, or sleep-inducing
Liverpool is playing host to an interesting piece of artwork for the next 18 months. Called Turning The Place Over
by Richard Wilson, it consists of a rotating wall that turns 360°. Cut in the wall of an old Yates’s Wine Lodge, the installation sits opposite one of the city’s train stations and is costing £450,000
Artist Nadine Jarvis can fabricate pencils from carbon left over by incinerating human remains — it’s part of a larger research project into post mortem
. She notes that 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash — a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind
— via Boing Boing
Dan Heller, author of the Photography Business Blog and a longtime watcher of the idea of selling photos on the Internet, observed Tuesday that there’s low-level buzz about Flickr possibly getting into the stock photo business
. He concludes, For Flickr to do it is obvious. Not doing so while they are on top of the game would be suicide.
It’s an interesting possibility. With some tweaks to the Web site and an opt-in check box on the image upload page, Yahoo and Flickr photographers could begin selling images to the sorts of folks who need to buy stock art — via CNET
A life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee has been placed in Disneyland by guerrilla artist
Banksy. The hooded figure was placed inside the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the California theme park last weekend. It is understood to have remained in place for 90 minutes before the ride was closed down and the figure removed
UK graffiti virtuoso Banksy has smuggled 500 doctored versions of Paris Hilton’s new CD into stores across the country. The CD contain Banksy’s remixes and have titles like Why am I Famous?
, What Have I Done?
and What Am I For?
— via Boing Boing
I’m a part-time fine arts student at Meadowbank TAFE, also known as the Sydney Gallery School. I’ve just found out that the gallery that is used for student exhibitions is being shut down by the College Director. Main reason being that there will no longer be someone constantly at the gallery, and that person is being moved. While there is normally a teacher or 2 around, it was the Clerical Officer that was permanentley stationed there, who not only did the day stuff and FIne Arts course enquiries, but also Fitting and Machining and Welding enquiries. The Clerical Officer, and all other clerical staff, are being moved to another block on campus in a centralised location.
Here are the reasons for moving all clerical staff to one location:
- Upskill C/O’s.
- Free up accommodation in sections.
- Provide better flexibility/equity and systems support to teaching sections.
- Meet an increasing demand for clerical support
- Operate within defined budgets
Some how I suspect it’s got a hell of a lot more to do with the last item than any of the miserable other excuses, sorry but I don’t see how it helps to upskill people, provide better flexibility and support or meet increasing demand for clerical support. The Sydney Gallery School has offered to rotate clerical staff in the gallery to help with upskilling, and are more than willing to look at other comprises but of course the College Director won’t have a bar of it.
I think one of the funniest suggestions came from College Management, they said that the gallery could be hired out to students or outside interests, however this would mean that the gallery would need to turn over $80 000 to employ a Gallery Director. Fucking wankers!
This is just ridiculous! Ok Mr/Ms Fucking College Director, now what do you call the school?
Protests can be sent to the Minister of Education and some others I’m sure.
Like most creatives who prefer working on Apples, I’ve been hanging out for some sort of concrete evidnece that the Adobe CS2 suite will run well/much better on the new Intel-based Macs under the Rosetta emulator, or that Adobe will release a Universal Binary update. Well I need a new mac within the next week, and decided to just go ahead and place an order for a 17-inch PowerBook any ways. I’ve also managed to find a two-tone purple laptop bag over at the Crumpler site named, The Dreadful Embarrassment.
However, it’d still be nice to know when Adobe are going to make that Universal move. I have no concrete evidence, but the guys over at Photoshop TV have this for us to mull over: No Intel-based OS X version of CS until CS3?
And on another tangent, you can now get a diploma in advanced studies in character animation over at Animation Mentor.com.
Photocritic.org has posted a great guide to making your own inexpensive macro photography rig from cannibalised lens — and body-covers and a Pringles can — via MAKEblog
Here’s my entry for Illustration Friday, the topic is float this week. I admit it’s pretty morbid, but at least it’s a pretty fish.
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