delekkerste

Finished "Quarry in the Middle" a couple of days ago and just started on "Ripper" by Stefan Petrucha (who wrote the "X-Files" comic book in the '90s). I'm only a few chapters in, but it looks like it's about an orphan in 1895 NYC who discovers that his dad may be both alive and Jack the Ripper.

Having watched a lot of "Sherlock" and "Elementary" on TV of late, I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel "The Valley of Fear" last month and just finished Max Allan Collins' crime novel "The First Quarry", about his enigmatic hit man's first assignment (I had read "The Last Quarry" some time ago). I'm currently reading "Quarry in the Middle", also by Collins.

(thumbs u

Well, I know that can't be right, because there are at least 3 different known owners of covers out of the first 10 issues and 4 if my friend who owns/owned one of them hasn't sold it yet, and I doubt any of those 4 is the guy you are talking about (none of them are known to be slab collectors), so add at least one more name to the list...

Back issues of Red Sonja and Uncanny X-Men are the two series that got me started reading and collecting comics in 1983. While I still have a good number of slabbed books (e.g., Conan 23 9.6, Conan 24 9.8, MF 1 9.8, all old-label, strictly-graded, hopefully unpressed beauties), I have since become one of the bigger collectors of Red Sonja original art. If you're a Sonja fan, check out these examples from my collection online: Barry Windsor-Smith - Conan the Barbarian #23 Page - Red Sonja's First Ever Panels in Comics Frank Thorne - Marvel Feature v. 2 #6 Cover Art Boris Vallejo - Red Sonja "When Hell Laughs" Paperback Cover Art Esteban Maroto & Neal Adams - Savage Sword of Conan #1 Page John Buscema - Conan the Barbarian #67 Page Sal Buscema - Red Sonja v. 1 #14 Page Mary Wilshire - Red Sonja v. 3 #3 Cover Art Frank Brunner - Conan and Red Sonja Conan #24 Scene Commission Gabriele Dell'Otto - Red Sonja vs. Thulsa Doom #1 Cover Art

Since "Ready Player One", I've read: The Book of Bond: Or Every Man His Own 007 by Lt.-Col. William "Bill" Tanner (pseudonym). A 1960s book which cribs from the original Fleming 007 novels and tells you how to look and live like James Bond. The gag is that it tells you how to be James Bond, down to the proper hair color, not just to adopt his style and preferences. A quick read and pretty funny. Basquiat - Hatje Cantz, publisher. An exceptional art book from a recent Basquiat retrospective including a previously unpublished interview with the artist from 1985 and several short articles/essays, as well as more than 100 gorgeously reproduced photographs of some of his best work. Awesome, a must-own for admirers of the artist's work like myself. Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios - Maria Lind, Olav Velthuis, eds. A newly published compilation of essays on the contemporary art world and market. Probably only for die-hards like myself. I'm currently reading "All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make - And Spend - Their Fortunes" by Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan. It was written just before the 2008 crash, but so far it's been a good read and provides a good perspective on the vision you have to have and the risks you have to take to make it to the highest levels in business.

Saw the 2nd ep last night. I'm enjoying series so far, though I do have a gripe about the show's overtly anti-wealth, anti-business theme. Every single business leader in Crescent City seems to be a criminal, Oliver's rich kid sister is a vapid party girl and even his rich mom is evil (I think it's pretty obvious that her new husband will be revealed as a baddie at some point too). Heck, even Ollie himself before he found redemption on the island was a cheating, brawling, substance abusing playboy and his dad (who got into bed with all sorts of criminals to build his empire) had no qualms about killing an innocent man before turning the gun on himself. The only wholly sympathetic characters are Laurel, who takes on legal charity cases, and her blue collar cop father.

I haven't seen last night's episode yet, but I did stream the first episode the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I'm going to try it out for at least a few episodes as I think it shows promise. Having Katie Cassidy in the cast certainly does not hurt either.

What on earth are you talking about?

Just finished reading "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline last night. For those who haven't heard of it, it takes place in the techno-dystopian future of the 2040s, where a tech mogul (think Steve Jobs merged with Gary Gygax) obsessed with late 20th century pop culture dies and sets into motion a contest to claim his real-world riches inside of the all-encompassing virtual reality world he created. It is an amazing book, the best I have read in years. For anyone who grew up with late '70s and '80s music, movies, videogames, computers, RPGs, comics, etc., the whole book is a tribute and love note to that period of geek culture. I agree with the reviewer who said that it felt like the book was written just for me. Just a smashing success, a stunning work of fiction. This book will make an astounding film if/when it is translated to the big screen. I demand that everyone here read it. You won't be disappointed.

Yes My understandig was that it was George Lucas who bought it . No, it was Spielberg. I recall one Board member even ran into Spielberg in person in recent years and asked him about it. He still owns it.

Yes

Just finished reading "Silver Wine Art Gold (SWAG): Alternative Investments for the Coming Decade" by Joe Roseman. Definitely a mixed bag - I think he does a good job of explaining how we got into the current debt mess and why it's so precarious for the future, but then he goes off on Malthusian resource shortages and how great the future looks like for the BRIC economies (both of which look rather silly nowadays in light of the global slowdown and the fact that commodities haven't reached new highs in more than 4 years). He clearly is no expert on either wine or art, which leads to glossing over a lot of problems and not getting very granular with his recommendations. Worst of all, at no point does he talk about value or valuations of these alternative assets, and the potential that they might already be discounting his macro scenario, thus making them potentially overpriced. Worth reading if you take it with a hefty grain of salt.

I've read the book twice. It is not a hatchet job on contemporary art by any means. It rather seeks to demystify how the art market works, everything from the good, the bad and the ugly. I also just re-read "I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)" by Richard Polsky, which is another great read into the world of contemporary art dealing. Why are you "anti" contemporary art, anyway? I think there's a lot of great art that's been produced in our lifetimes.

Just finished "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock" by Sammy Hagar. It was a fun, quick read, but short on big revelations. I guess the most interesting fact is that virtually all of his fortune comes from the tequila label he started in conjunction with his Cabo Wabo Cantinas. I'd probably give it a pass unless you're a die-hard VH or Sammy fan. I also finished "Kirby: King of Comics" and have started on "Big John Buscema: Comics & Drawings".

It is now. (thumbs u I'm currently reading "Art Cop: Robert Volpe, Art Crime Detective", a non-fiction account from 1974 about a detective focusing on solving art-related crimes for the NYPD back in the '70s. I'm also reading "Kirby: King of Comics" by Mark Evanier.

Read this also. Loved it. Yes, it's fantastic. If you read the credits, he got a Pulitzer Prize winner to ghost write it, which explains a lot.

I heard from the seller this evening - the sale is pending at more than double your "VERY high end" price.

Do you want to tap the Board's network and expertise to track down a piece of art that you've been looking for? Post the objects of your quest here and Boardies can either PM you or respond below. I'll start - does anyone know where the cover to Defenders #125 (Carl Potts/Bill Sienkiewicz) is? It was the first "New Defenders" issue and was hyped as being the next X-Men #94. Of course, it's a dollar bin book now, but I still have fond memories of it. I've asked a lot of the usual suspects if they had ever seen it, but nobody seems to have. Gene

(thumbs u I had the Vogels in the back of my mind as well - they certainly did well considering their very limited budget, though I recall from the documentary that their collection, though it had many top names in it, was notable more for its breadth and quantity than the presence of many (any?) top-tier examples. It's notable that the Vogels and the Steins both befriended a number of the artists they collected, which I imagine would be less common these days and would exacerbate the access problem, relatively speaking. I guess the short answer to my original question is that you would need a much bigger budget to achieve something comparable today (though, judging from what people are spending on comic art these days, there are number of OA collectors who probably have the budgets to make a real go of it!) For example, even if you recognized that Richard Prince's "Nurse" paintings were going to explode into the millions and become some of the most recognizable art of the decade when they came out in 2003 (and were largely shunned initially by collectors), you still would have needed to be able to afford the $50K+ asking prices - no postman (like Herb Vogel) would be able to do that these days. I didn't realize that there was a Cone sisters show going on simulaneously with the Steins show - I would imagine the exhibition you saw highlighted the relationship between the Steins and the Cones (just as the exhibition at the Met did), with the former having introduced the latter to Picasso and Matisse and sold them a good number of pieces as well.

So, Jasper Johns' contributions to the art world in your mind will forever be defined by the fact that he made a bronze sculpture of beer cans that was sold by Leo Castelli who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

"Yes, but..." 1. Johns is considered by some to be the most important artist of the past 60 years 2. He was doing other art that incorporated representations of everyday objects; works like the beer can sculpture helped provide a bridge from Duchamp to Pop Art 3. Just so we're clear, he cast two bronze cans and painted the beer label on them (i.e., he didn't just plop two beer cans on a bronze base). He was simply making sculptures of everyday modern objects which hadn't been done before 4. There's a long history of pranks and subversive behavior in art, from Duchamp to Cattelan (see the "ArtNews" feature cover story from a couple of months ago); Johns' work was in that tradition and an homage of sorts to Duchamp I understand your concern about the role of marketing in the past half century of art, but I don't think you should allow that cynicism to cloud all the real merit in this art.

By the way, I was at the Neue Gallerie museum yesterday. It was actually my first visit there (a glaring oversight) and, hence, my first viewing of Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which, I have to admit, is amazing in person and much more impressive than I expected. There's also a spectacular exhibition of early German/Austrian photography going on now - room #2 of the exhibition is mindblowingly good. I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the NYC area. I also saw the incredible The Steins Collect exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, which showcases the art collection of Gertrude Stein and her siblings that they assembled (on an upper-middle class type budget) in Paris in the 1900s-1940s. The exhibition ends this weekend and I can't recommend it highly enough, especially if you enjoy Picasso and Matisse. It's just amazing seeing collections like this, the Frick collection in NYC and the Barnes collection in Philly (among others) and to think that these used to be private collections of some of the most important art in Western history. It also makes me wonder if someone with a decent (but not necessarily unlimited) bankroll and a keen eye could build a collection of contemporary art that would be viewed as amazing, say, 30-40 years from now. Or, is it just an insiders' game now and is that no longer possible? Could it still be done in comic art, or did you have to get in on the big land grab when prices were still (relatively) cheap and the best pieces still largely available in the 1980s and 1990s?

Well, given how much art from the past half century-plus can be traced back, in whole or in part, to ready-mades/found objects, moves away from painting and drawing, and towards conceptual art in general, I'd have to say that Duchamp was not only the more influential of the two, but he was by a wide margin. Did you know, though, that it is virtually certain that the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was behind "Duchamp's" famous "R. Mutt" Fountain? ...amazing that de Kooning gave him the drawing to erase! Tom Friedman did an erased version of a Playboy centerfold in the '90s as kind of an homage to the piece - it was on sale at Christie's in March. There's more to it than that. (thumbs u There are many comic collectors and comic art collectors who appreciate all kinds of art. There are also those who don't. In any case, it makes for some very interesting conversation. Nothing wrong with that - if this subject gets anyone's blood pressure worked up unnecessarily, no one is putting a gun to their head to read it.

I'm reading a fantastic book called "The Forger's Spell" by Edward Dolnick. It's about Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren who faked a number of Vermeers in the 1930s and sold them to people like Hitler's right hand man, Hermann Goering. If you like art, crime, 1930s and WWII-era European history, this is the book for you. For the seven years between 1938 and 1945, Van Meegeren's Christ at Emmaus was the most famous and the most admired Vermeer in the world. It was the picture that popped into every art lover's mind when someone said "Vermeer", just as The Night Watch was when someone said "Rembrandt." Utterly fascinating and highly recommended! Gene