Dali House

Some incensed critics have compared buying a painting by Hitler, as happened with much fanfare this week, to bidding on eBay for the hairball that Britney Spears coughed up after she kissed Madonna (well, maybe that’s a bad example – who wouldn’t want that??)

But the guy was such a Compleat Failure at everything he applied himself to, the dictionary’s definition of bad, that his artistic side will always rank right up there with the great curiosities of evolution.

It’s been said before that, for people like Caesar and Napoleon and Uncle Adolf, the world was a vast canvas, and life the ultimate experiment in aesthetics, with people as pigments and wars and mass murders as the brushstrokes. They considered themselves gods, after all.

Even as a god, though, Hitler was humble enough to admit he wasn’t a very good painter. Neither were the other two amateur daubers who waged World War II, Churchill and Roosevelt. It would have been nice if they could have settled things with a painting competition instead of trying to blow up my dad. I think Churchill might have won too. See the rest.

Possibly the most amazing thing about Wolfgang Flatz dropping a dead cow from a helicopter five years ago is that the howls of outrage drowned out the trappings of the performance, the point of it all and the noise of the chopper itself.

Or maybe that’s not really surprising at all. The trappings were a load of tripe, there was no clear point to it, and the copter was no louder than any urban jackhammer.

It was in all the papers. The Austrian was making a statement about consumerism (or something). The City of Berlin, which is perhaps a tad liberal nowadays after being home to the last century’s greatest control freak, was asked to have its cops cordon off a major section of posh Prenzlauer Berg so that thousands of people could watch Flatz – naked but for a film of blood and suspended from the helicopter with his arms outstretched crucifixion-style – ferry the dead cow to a point 45 metres above an abandoned building and then drop it.

Fine, the city councillors said with a flurry of tick marks on sheets of paper. Anything else?

Yes, the cow will be filled with fireworks and explode on impact. Oh, and there will be music. Loud music.

Fine, the city councillors said. More ticking. See the rest.

Considering the noisemaker of a painting we’re talking about, the Norwegian cops are staying pretty damn quiet about how they managed to get back Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on August 31, a full two years after it was snatched in broad daylight from the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Hopefully the jumpy Scandinavian press, now that they’re no longer busy doodling cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, can get to the bottom of this mystery within a mystery. Most likely a ransom was paid, but if so, it only deepens the mythology swarming like irked bees around Eddie’s freaky little canvas.

It is, after all, a potent symbol of the frightfulness of our times (and perhaps of Munch’s a century ago), and it was no small irony that Norwegians treated the theft of this national treasure as as terrorist act.

But for now, at least, all the cops are saying is that they recovered “The Scream” and “The Madonna”, seen above, the other Munch painting stolen with it, in better-than-expected condition, a ragged corner and water damage to the former and some small rips and gouges in the latter, all of which can be repaired.

If “The Scream” — or “Skrik” as it’s known in Norway (literally, “yikes!”) – weren’t such an important symbol, this would have been one zany comedy from start to finish.
See the rest.

Calling the enigmatic Banksy a “graffiti artist” is like calling George Bush a politician – there’s so much more to it than that – but it is on the street where he’s destined to make his biggest dent, Basquiat with a razor conscience.

I came across the Briton’s considerable fame while poking around in the art brewery at Juxtapoz Magazine, where he appears to enjoy god-like status, and was prepared to be dismissive until I popped into his own website, a brutally austere place that’s nevertheless packed with cool things, and read his “manifesto”.

This is in fact an excerpt from the account of a British soldier who was among the first to see the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. The surviving prisoners were in in need of everything, yet some idiot had shipped them a crate of lipstick. Never mind, the writer discovered with awe as he watched spindly women die with their paint on, it was exactly what they needed to become human again. See the rest.

“Like elements winking into life in a dreamscape”, as Clara Chow of the Straits Times put it, 10 monumental sculptures by Salvador Dali have been appearing on Singapore’s streets in batches this past week. Thailand has a coup; Singapore imports Dali.

But, curiously, the cautious city-state erected the statuary at midnight to cut back on the number of gawkers.

They’re part of a “Dali In Singapore” exhibition coninuing until October 14, and they’re all for sale. The biggest piece, “Space Elephant”, photo above from AFP, will set you back US$1.7 million and not so much be a conversation piece in you garden as alert NASA to your lunacy. See the rest.