Interesting report by Joel Rubin at the L.A. Times metro desk this morning: Apparently, Richard L. Weisman, the (former) owner of that big cache of stolen Warhols (valued at $25 million) has decided to forgo the insurance money because he doesn’t want to go through “the hassle” of the investigation. Weisman’s decision, first reported by the Seattle Times, was confirmed by LAPD today.

Dets. Donald Hrycyk and Mark Sommer, who make up the Los Angeles Police Department’s art theft detail, had few leads to follow. There was no sign of forced entry and no substantial witness accounts. And, oddly, other valuable pieces of art in the home had been left untouched.

Now, Weisman has said he is not going to pursue a payout from the company that insured the paintings.

“It is curious,” Sommer said. “We’d like to talk to him about it.”

We’d have to agree. How many people—even fabulously wealthy people—would choose to eat $25 million because of a perceived “hassle”?

PS Is this not the best Wanted poster of all time?

Cross posting this at Brand X

 
Disturbing portraits from Los Angeles based photographer Susan Anderson:

High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants is a close-up and intimate look at America?

 
These are just three of the disturbing images found on the website of California artist, Brendan Lott, who finds the source for all of them, it seems, online:

So I finally abandoned my studio practice and began to spend my art making time collecting digital snapshots anonymously from peer-to-peer file sharing networks.  I can access the snapshots of thousands of people at a time all across the globe.  These are images of people I know nothing about and cannot ever know personally—only look at.  The network serves as both a barrier and a bridge—I can see photographic depictions of their lives but never actually know them, and the people depicted have no way of knowing me.

Even stranger (yet somehow truer to life now as we know it), Lott himself never touches a canvas.  So as to better stay, as he puts it, “above the fray,” Lott outsources the actual painting of the works to artists living in China.  The top piece’s title, by the way?  “All I Have To Give You Is A Love That Never Dies.”

 
This week, Roger Ebert revisits one of his earlier pieces on conceptual artist Chris Burden, and turns it into a lovely meditation on the role of the artist in society:

Were these people all frequent visitors to the museum, or to art exhibitions in general?  Five years after the 1960s ended, were they now drawn to a man whose work seemed to negate love and music and flowers and—anything at all?  Burden was not of the Woodstock Generation.  His art perhaps said that art was a mockery.  That it was about the artist, who when fully committed was not engaged in life at all, but was on Pause.

One of Burden’s more infamous works was his possibly Vietnam-critical piece, “Shoot” (below).  In it, Burden was shot in the arm by an assistant standing five meters away.  After the “performance” was over, Burden was taken to a psychiatrist.

34 years later, on campus at UCLA, graduate student Joseph Deutch attempted a similar stunt.  The fallout lead, one month later, to the resignation of professor Chris Burden, who likened the piece to an act of “domestic terrorism,” and urged Deutch’s expulsion.

 
Bonus: Chris Burden’s Big Wheel

From Roger Ebert’s Journal: The Agony Of The Body Artist

 
Which one of these things doesn’t belong with the others? (Hint: Coldplay! Yuck!)

The classic album covers stamps come out on January 7, 2010

 
Nat Finkelstein, “court photographer” from ‘64 to ‘67 for Andy Warhol‘s Factory has died at his home in Shandaken, New York:

Mr. Finkelstein created spontaneous portraits not only of Factory regulars like Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga but also of the artists and celebrities who drifted in and out of the Warhol orbit.  He was on hand when Warhol presented Bob Dylan with one of his Elvis ?

 
Your move, Damien Hirst:

No, that’s not a real gorilla hanging from a cross.  It’s a large waxwork sculpture that British shock artist Paul Fryer has crucified in an attempt to ‘highlight [the] plight of the Western Lowland Gorillas, and to challenge the Christian notion that animals do not have souls,’ according to one report.

Fryer, who caused a stir earlier this year when he exhibited a statue depicting Christ in an electric chair just in time for Easter, has told reporters that his latest work, titled ‘The Privilege of Dominion,’ isn’t meant to cause offense.

The work is currently on display at an exhibition at the former Holy Trinity Church in Marylebone, London.  The show, which features works by 16 artists, is being held to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair.

In an article in the London Evening Standard, the artist said: ‘I do go to church and regard myself as a Christian, though I’m probably a heretic…. I just hope people understand the spirit of it is intended to create discourse and make people think rather than offend anybody.’

In the LA Times: Jesus As An Ape? Artist Crucifies Simian Specimen In London

 

 

 
Clever musical chair designs by artist Mikal Hameed: “By toying with the power of music and endless design possibilities I can brings beats, rhythm, and life into painting, furniture, and mixed media sculpture?

 
Here’s an amusing robotic dance competition from BBC One magazine-style television series “That’s Life.”

 
Artist and political activist, John Douglas’ Homeland Security work is a chilling series of provocative photographs taken of the artist himself holding M16s naked and then duplicated on a computer. Sporting an M16 and nothing else, Douglas becomes a ?