“Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.” ― Gore Vidal

dealer, artist, critic

work by Don Porcella

Ballerina by Banksy

Banksy recently updated his website with a number of new works that have been making the rounds the last day or so. My favorite new artwork is this simple piece depicting a spray-painted ballerina delicately traversing the string on the back of a picture frame like a tight rope. 

INCONGRUOUS ELEMENTS

Incongruous elements
work on paper
Dean Monogenis
New York

Regards from Barcelona

The Association of Photographers' Student Awards have been announced with Jordi Ruiz Cirera from London College of Communications named as the 2012 Student Photographer of the Year

Ruiz Cirera's series of portraits of members of the Mennonite communities in Eastern Bolivia won him the top prize. The Mennonites emigrated to Bolivia in the 50s hoping to be able to preserve their traditional lifestyle away from the trappings of the 20th century. "This series of portraits intends to showcase the relations and the family roles within the Mennonite community, as well as their deep isolation from contemporary society," says Ruiz Cirera.

Ruiz Cirera originally hails from Barcelona but graduated from the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC last year. He spent a year working on the Mennonite project, a second series from which (one shown below) won him a Merit at the AOP Student Awards.

Simone

Peter Mendelsund isn't generally known as a designer who makes garish book covers. But in his recent designs for three late works by Simone de Beauvoir, he's done exactly that. And for good reason...

His covers for de Beauvoir's memoirs Adieux and A Very Easy Death, and the novella collection The Woman Destroyed apparently reference the look of the handmade protest posters seen on the streets of Paris in 1968.

Bringing the look up to date, the lettering has the quality of freshly daubed marker pen, while the illustrations are in bright blocky colours – the messy imagery on The Woman Destroyed reminiscent of an early MS Paint application.

"I wanted a style that had a certain directness – and I liked the idea of co-opting the visual language of revolution for a writer who was nothing if not (philosophically, politically) revolutionary," writes Mendelsund on his blog Jacket Mechanical. "Also the style is more or less temporally and geographically correct. The simplicity of the style made it possible for me, with my limited skills, to make them myself."

This is an unusual direction for Mendelsund who, as an associate art director at Knopf in the US, has a reputation for producing some quite beautiful and elegant book covers for writers such as Michel Foucault, Roberto Calasso and Franz Kafka (whose entire works he recovered in 2010 – we reported on the series, here).

On his blog, Mendelsund writes that his work for the de Beauvoir project sought to be both brash and attractive at the same time. "I've certainly made ugly covers before; and I hope that I've made pretty ones," he writes. "But it's the coexistence of both attributes that makes me happy here."

Mendelsund also prefaces his explanation of the cover direction with a smart essay on the relationship between de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre, using a single photograph of the couple as his starting point.

Looking for...

Myoung Ho Lee

tree 5

2007

For $250 million....

Qatar Purchases Cézanne’s The Card Playersfor More Than $250 Million, Highest Price Ever for a Work of Art

With this landmark score, the tiny, oil-rich nation joins a massively exclusive club: only five Card Players exist, and the other four are in world-class collections such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purchase is just the latest bid in Qatar’s effort to become an international intellectual hub.

What would you do with $250 million?

1 Cezanne


10 decent sized mansions in the Hamptons

100 upper-middle class family homes in Beijing

1000 Ferrari 458 Italia Coupes in Rome


10,000 Ducati 1199S motorcycles in Paris

100,000 complete high school educations including accommodation, 
food and healthcare in Lhasa, Tibet

5,000,000 milking goats in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

50,000,000 egg-laying chickens in Dhaka, Bangladesh