Moonbattery

Beard of the week award goes to:

William Gilmore Simms

Bargain of the week goes to:

An unnamed Art Collector who paid 4.9 Million Dollars for a painting by Japanese "artist"

Kazuo Shiraga’s painting titled "BB56"

 

The Auction House's catalogue (Christies) describes it thusly:

 “Painted directly with the artist’s feet as he suspended himself above the canvas from a rope hanging from the ceiling, the painting represents a unity of the central tenets of postwar abstraction with performance art.”

And it’s from the most influential period of the artist’s work: “Painted in 1961, ‘BB56’ dates from a highly significant time for the artist,” the catalog description says, adding that 1962 “was the year in which Shiraga was given his first solo show outside Japan, at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, where this painting was exhibited.”

That it may look, to some, like a child’s finger painting is irrelevant. “A lot of contemporary art is aggressively ugly,” Professor Galenson said. “That doesn’t matter in terms of its value.”

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"Aggressively Ugly."

You nailed it, Prof!



Non calor sed umor est qui nobis stupiditas
It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.

-Ed