Posted on 10/17/2006 9:01:12 PM PDT by verum ago
Pablo Picasso's "dream" painting has turned into a $139 million nightmare for Steve Wynn.
In an accident witnessed by a group that included Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Wynn accidentally poked a hole in Picasso's 74-year-old painting, "Le Reve," French for "The Dream."
A day earlier, Wynn had finalized a record $139 million deal for the painting of Picasso's mistress, Wynn told The New Yorker magazine
The accident occurred as a gesturing Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision, struck the painting with his right elbow, leaving a hole the size of a silver dollar in the left forearm of Marie-Theresa Walter, Picasso's 21-year-old mistress.
"Oh shit, look what I've done," Wynn said, according to Ephron, who gave her account in a blog published on Monday.
Wynn paid $48.4 million for the Picasso in 1997 and had agreed to sell it to art collector Steven Cohen. The $139 million would have been $4 million higher than the previous high for a work of art, according to The New Yorker.
Cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid $135 million in July for Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I."
Wynn plans to restore "Le Reve" and keep it.
I just bought a fine piece of art that reflects my superior breeding and cultural superiority. Be happy I deign to not only talk to the likes of you but to show you something that might raise your cultural awareness from the muck your currently inhabit.
Behold!
Do I need sarcasm tag? And yes, I do like this piece, it cracks me up but I don't think my wife would let me put it up anywhere but in my office.
Insurance?
A masterpiece!!!
Why, I'd go to my $100 limit for such a fine work. Please tell me it is a velvet print.
Only the ones who would spend money on it. The rest of us are still in our RIGHT minds.
How can paintings be so valuable? I mean honestly...it's just....art. I would never pay $139 million for a picture. With that money I can retire to an island somewhere.
To be quite honest, I enjoy artistic expression in many forms. But the one I am referring to is, IMO, absolute artistic quackery. I mean, come on, I could buy some paint throw it together and call it art. I know he does some little thing here and there to create certain color schemes and such, but it's still pretty pathetic.
Shame the way it's all screwed up like that now.
Honestly, could your luck get much worse?
Yeah, if you're this guy who nailed his testicle to the roof.... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1721594/posts
I don't know anything about art or Picasso, but I always suspected as much.
If you prefer that sort of thing, fine. Just don't call it "art".
I'm not quite sure I'm really following your logic. If someone produced a painting featuring an oblique view of a particular (real world) stone wall whose pattern of nooks and crannies would defy memorization, and if the painting in fact matched the real wall perfectly, then that might be evidence that the painter used optical devices (though a sufficiently ambitious painter could get up and examine each small section of wall before painting it, I doubt any would be inclined to do so).
On the other hand, the fact that a painting shows a stone wall with lots of little nooks and crannies does not imply that the painter used optical devices to copy the design on a real stone wall. More likely, the painter knew as much about what stone walls look like as would people examining his paintings, and so he just painted an aesthetically-appealing bunch of rocks that looked like a stone wall.
One difference between good artists and most not-so-good artists is that the former are apt do be more realistic, but less accurate, than the latter. Give a good artist a rumpled linen napkin to examine and ask him to paint it from memory. You'll likely get a realistic-looking picture of a linen napkin whose pattern of ripples is a bit different from the one he examined. Give the same thing to lesser artist and the pattern of folds may more closely match the real one, but the overall aesthetic won't look as much like a real rumpled napkin.
You seem to believe that any detail that appears in a painting must have been seen by the artist in the real world, and seen from the same vantage point as he is painting. The fact is that good artists don't need to see the details in a scene while they're painting. If they need to know precisely what an object looks like, they'll examine it. And if (as is usually the case) the details aren't that important, they'll just make them up.
Incidentally, if you can find some examples of paintings which you think are good and which you know to have been traced, I'd like to see them.
... how ya like them apples? ;)
No, that's not what I believe. I'm simply telling you how human beings use prosthetics to control transition from one sector to another. Our eyes simply don't provide us with that information. In fact, we adapt our vision so that we recognize a color across a broad expanse irrespective of the incidence or strength of the light illuminating it.
What man face down? When I first looked at that painting, all I saw was the two faced woman (duplicitous?) or was she wanting to turn (change her opinion?) yet she was too drowsy (lazy, ignorant?).
I'm enjoying reading both of your comments on this thread and although I don't know much about art, I do know what I love. I had the opportunity of seeing my favorites up close and personal, the impressionists. CM is my favorite although I really enjoy all of them.
I lingered in front of each of these paintings for a very long time because I actually felt the four seasons which were portrayed in the exhibit. I kept walking from one painting to the next then back again to see if it was some mind over matter effect, or if the gallery had different temperature settings or fans going. No, I really felt Summer heat, then the Winter is where I felt/heard silence and felt chilled, then Spring and my nose actually started itching.
Art evokes feelings, emotions, memories and sometimes good discussion.
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