A head-scratching controversy has been brewing in the art world of late over a 1964 self portrait of Andy Warhol. Or more accurately put, a series of ten self portraits of the artist that used to be by the artist, but now aren’t, so they’re not self-portraits anymore, they’re just portrait portraits not by Warhol anymore despite being signed by him. Got it?

Maybe I should explain a little bit better: Warhol’s iconic Red Self Portraits (as the suite is known) have been decreed fakes by The Warhol Foundation, the New York-based body that declares Warhols authentic or not. Clearly there are a lot of Warhol forgeries floating around in the art world and let’s face it, a Warhol would be rather hard for the layman to authenticate.

With Warhol there is also the the issue of “who” actually painted the work or who pulled the screens for the serigraphs. In the 1960s it was just as likely to be studio assistants Gerard Malanga or Billy Name as Warhol himself. In the 1970s, it would have likely been Ronnie Cutrone. Everyone knows that when Warhol produced work at his “Factory” it was with a mechanical process, done by others and only supervised by the artist, who for the most part, only touched his pieces to sign them. This is a fairly well-established fact! (Malanga has long held that he painted the electric chairs series and few would dispute this claim).

However, due to a set of criteria that I find difficult to fully understand (read more about it below) somehow, someway this rather well-known Warhol self portrait became persona non grata to the Warhol Foundation and the owners are fighting back at what they consider an arbitrary and unjustifiable call, rendering once incredibly valuable—and signed!—Warhols absolutely worthless.

From The New York Review of Books “What is an Andy Warhol?” by Richard Dorment:

[O]ne picture in the series, now owned by the London collector Anthony d’Offay, is signed and dated by Warhol, and dedicated in his own handwriting to his longtime business partner, the Zurich-based art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (“To Bruno B Andy Warhol 1969”). Since the Renaissance, a signature is the way artists such as Mantegna and Titian acknowledge the authenticity of their work.

As if this were not enough to authenticate the work, the Bischofberger self-portrait appeared in Rainer Crone’s 1970 catalogue raisonn?ɬ

Mary Hagedorn is coral’s guardian angel. She’s a Smithsonian scientist heading up an effort to cryopreserve coral reef genetic data, so that if reefs are ever wiped out (and they look to be headed that way quick), we’ll be able to regrow them. Reefs are quite literally the lungs of the planet; crucial for filtering the air that we breathe and keeping the oceans stocked with life. Without them we would be done for. Yet, astoundingly, this woman is running her operation on personal credit card debt because the Smithsonian can’t properly fund her.

Check out this website I wrote to help raise money for her. These are the kind of people who change the world, and it’s those tiny PayPal donations that are what keep them going, for all of us.

(Help Mary Save Coral)

 
(via you idiot)

 
Just as David Tennant is about to leave the series and hand over the keys of the TARDIS to the eleventh doctor Matt Smith—the final episodes with Tennant air Christmas and New Year’s Day—the last remaining Dalek from the original series in 1963 is about to go on the auction block in Britain:

Despite the Daleks’ fearsome reputation onscreen, off it the plywood and fibreglass mutants were frequently cannibalised due to tight production budgets.

Mr Beech said: “Every time a new artistic director came in and ordered a redesign, they were re-patched and re-patched, until they got so bad they couldn’t be patched up any longer.”

Only the lower half of this Dalek dates from 1963, he said.

Also to be sold are a number of Cybermen, Sea Devils and Tractators.

They were all part of a touring Dr Who exhibition and are being sold because of the cost of conserving them.

Read more: Last Dalek from original Dr Who series for sale

 
An industry not known for giving freebies—ever—has decided to offer its services gratis, just in time for the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen. When Copenhagen’s mayor, Ritt Bjerregaard, sent off a message to local hotels urging them not to assist hotel guests in town for the event hooking up with… well… hookers, the pros struck back.

The postcards the city council sent read, in part: “Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes.” The local prostitutes became furious, protesting that the council had no right to interfere with them plying their perfectly legal—and the world’s oldest—profession.

From Der Spiegel:

“This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don’t understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way,” SIO Spokeswoman Susanne M?ɬ?ller tells avisen.dk.

M?ɬ?ller adds that it is reprehensible and unfair that Copenhagen politicians have chosen to use the UN Climate Summit as a platform [to target] sex workers.

“But they’ve done it and we have to defend ourselves,” M?ɬ?ller says.

Check out this hilarious 1967 response letter from David Bowie to his first American fan. So innocent! So na?ɬ

Infamous psychedelic Lovecraftian artist John Coulthart reports on a 1965 classic dug up via UbuWeb?

Discovery reports on the drug cocktail that our brave men and women in outer space indulge in on a regular basis to stay focused and sane. Personally, I have only one feeling about this, and it’s the same one I have about sex in space. [Waits for Branson-flights to drop in price…]

Outer space, at least as we encounter it in science fiction, is basically a drug free-for-all. If character’s aren?

 
I don’t know about you, but Jingle Babies scares the bejeezus out of me! Tr?ɬ

 
Adam Cohen, writing in the New York Times, discusses FDR’s skill in defining and maneuvering public option towards constructive social goals. Cohen skillfully argues a very fine point here, and picks a great example to make it: Roosevelt’s championing of a different sort of public option. Can you imagine how different American life would be today if something like this was a legacy of the New Deal? WHO in their right mind would have been against this?!?!

As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt crusaded for ?