Dali House

What every bloke needs: The Mail Wife’s Letter Reminder

You watch the Beijing Olympics and you just have to ask: “Is America finished?” It’s a wholly unnecessary (and silly) question, but I just found it too convenient a entry to this essay on Rube Goldberg, the second most all-American boy after Ben Franklin, with Norman Rockwell a close third. Goldberg was even born on Independence Day.

Goldberg dreamed up his own version of Yankee can-do spirit that earned him fans across the land. Interestingly, on the other side of the pond was a Brit doing to the same thing at the same time. You needed a stiff upper lip around his devices — otherwise it might get caught in the gears.

Rueben Garret Lucius Goldberg showed up gadget-free in San Francisco in 1883 but was one of those kids who was always doodling all over his schoolbooks, so you knew there was going to be trouble. And then he became an engineer.

This was obviously a mistake — a useful one, of course, something like Einstein working in the patent office — but fortunately the San Francisco Chronicle needed a sports cartoonist to do horrible caricatures of Babe Ruth.

By 1907 Rube was filling the New York papers with cartoons and by 1915 he was famous, thanks to his chief protagonist Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts and the diagrams for his inventions — “Rube Goldberg machines”.

To begin with, Professor Butts had an Automatic Weight Reducing Machine, and all you needed to build one was a donut, a bomb, wax, a balloon and a hot stove. It worked because you had to wiggle your way out of the contraption to get some food, and that was a lot of exercise.

Tickled by the human tendency to choose the most difficult route from Point A to Point B, Goldberg came up with machines that he called “a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results”. This could well apply to nuclear weapons: He won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for a drawing showing the world on the atomic precipice. See the rest.

There’s a whole lot of people in Beijing at the moment, even more than usual, and, while Hu’s definitely on first, it’s still Mao at bat in the minds of millions. So here’s the Graceless Helmsman as recast by Shi Xinning in 2005.

“Mona Lisa” (yes, that’s the title, and evidently it is black and white) was up for sale at Sotheby’s London last month for a mere £50,000 or thereabouts. Shi was looking to get twice that for five times the celebrities with his “The Beatles”, shown below, from the same year.

These were part of the 39-year-old’s “Utopian Stories” series begun in 2000, Western icons colonising the once-shy China.

“I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and scenery,” Shi has said. “I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent.”

In London too. Right about the same time in the same city, Sotheby’s was flogging a posh bonfire’s worth of Andy Warhol collectibles. There was yer Michael Jackson and yer Ted Turner, yer Judy Garland, yer Skull and even an “oxydation painting” — piss and acrylic on canvas, £70,000 please. See the rest.

LuciaM, one of the most active members of the Google Earth Community, sent me the photo above, which she’d taken while roaming around New York City — just some buildings near the intersection of MacDougal & Houston, she believed.

Then later she noticed something else in the picture besides the buildings and the rather forlorn-looking fellow sitting on the front steps.

Yes, as if offering the poor guy some reassurance, there’s Our Salvador, peering from a billboard advertising the “Dali: Painting and Film” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. What a surreal place.

What can I moan about Damien Hirst that hasn’t already been moaned elsewhere? You don’t see a lot of contemporary art at Dali House, and he’s one of the reasons why.

But the folks at Sotheby’s have given me a nudge about their big, two-day “Damien Hirst — Beautiful Inside My Head Forever Evening Sale” in London in September, and I just had to have a look at the catalogue. Well, you do, don’t you, when something ghastly comes along?

There’s nothing ghastly about pickled fish, of course. It’s the prices people pay for them that are horrific.

The auction house says Hirst has come up with a batch of “new” stuff — 223 lots in all that are collectively expected to generated £65 million-plus.

The picture up top shows a construction called “The Kingdom”, and I’ve tossed Damien in with the shark, just for fun, alright? Tiger shark, glass, steel, silicone and formaldehyde solution with steel plinth. It was created this year.

Didn’t this used to be called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? Yes, it was, but this is a fresh specimen, and the asking price is between £4 million and £6 million. Talk about catch of the day.

He’s capable of a decent picture, like “Transience Painting 2″, shown here, a relative steal at £500,000, but it’s an anomaly in his world.

The dead sharks, zebra, dove, sheep and calf are all back for the autumn sale, the flies stuck to resin, the butterfly wings glazed with diamonds, the packets of medicine and bottles of pills, the spins, the spots and the, uh, unicorn.

I suppose we should just look the other way because Hirst is giving a fair chunk of the proceeds to charity — kids and musicians in need and Survival International, plus a bit for Bill and Melinda Gates’ AIDS concern — but certainly not all the money.

Hirst, says Whitecube.com, “has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture”. I think the bloke after whom this blog is named was doing that around the time Damien was born, and Don Salvador was already standing on the shoulders of scientifically minded giants of art.

And I believe we’ve seen plenty of curiosity cabinets from the 17th and 18th centuries. Wonderful things. You can put one together yourself from odds and ends. Or you could pay Damien Hirst £3.5 million for the zoologist’s special of the day pictured below, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”: glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution.

The title is apt for Hirst, but far too obvious to be a decent joke.

October 11, 2008: I really did have to add this.

Just as Lehman Brothers was going belly up and the US Congress and Senate were frothing over the credit crisis, Damien Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale at Sotheby’s London on September 15 and 16 was raking in $200,752,179 for 218. Somehow, even with, five lots went unsold. The prices averaged out to $920,882.

Sotheby’s subsequent Art Market Review credited the auctioneer’s own marketing blitz for making the auction “more than a sale of artwork”.

“It became an international cultural event of significant proportions. Hirst is one of only a handful of artists with global name-recognition — and possibly the only one alive today. The artist’s status as a living symbol of contemporary art set up a rare opportunity for collectors (and non-collectors) from around the world to participate in a unique event …

“One of Damien Hirst’s central rationales for selling new work through an auction instead of through the artist’s network of dealers was his often-repeated desire to ‘democratise’ his market,” the review continued. As a result, as far as the auction house could determine, 91% of the buyers were acquiring their first work of art by Hirst, and they accounted for 69% of the sale’s total value.

“Sotheby’s reports that bidders and buyers at the sale were ‘primarily Russian, Indian, French, UK and US collectors’.”

This was, the review concludes, “a unique event. Hirst is the rare personality who would take the risks involved. Both the volume of art on offer and the level of media interest necessary to propel the sale, suggest that it is an event that cannot easily be repeated.”

Both the pious and and the profane had a look in at the Sotheby’s auctions of Russian art on June 10 and 12.

Above, what at first glance seems to be dinnerware with a Muslim motif is in fact a piece of Soviet propaganda from the 1920s, a plate made by the Higher State Art-Technical Studios, known as VkhUTEMAS.

The figure from the Caucasus kneels before a hammer and sickle, surrounded by an Arabic transliteration of the Russian slogan “Workers of the World United” and images of labourers and a factory.

Sotheby’s, which was counting on between £5,000 and £7,000 for the piece, explained that VkhUTEMAS was similar to the German Bauhaus in intent and scope, merging traditional craftsmanship with modern technology.

Then there was the jolly watercolour “Bacchante” of Count Mihaly von Zichy (1827-1906), below, and you really have to wonder about the models. If they had to hold that pose for a long time, didn’t she get itchy? Someone liked the painting enough to pay £15,000 for it.