Word: rembrandt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values...
...owner sued and was given $94,000 damages by a German court, a verdict happily greeted by Beuys as a victory over the "exploitative self-interest" of the beer drinkers. Plainly, something had happened to the avant-garde in the half-century since Marcel Duchamp suggested using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Had it died of its own pomposity? If not, where was Beuys' claim to be an avant-gardist left? The problem is simple: there is no avant-garde any more, since its old ambitions of provocation and social attack have been swallowed by the prostrate tolerance...
What then was the secret of Edison's inventiveness? The core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized...
...three separate partnership deals arranged by Straw. One was to purchase a collection of antique furniture. The second was to buy eleven paintings that included a Mary Cassatt and a Winslow Homer. The third involved a spectacular $15 million group of 31 old masters and French impressionists, including a Rembrandt, a Titian, two Renoirs and three rare Seurats. Benedek said he put up $1.5 million for a half share in the first two deals and more than $1.8 million for a smaller share in the third, both paid partly in cash and partly in credits...
...images is information; they are scanned, milked, passed over. From that documentary point of view there is something perverse and excessive in the very idea of paying thousands of dollars for a single photo, a sum which a decade ago would have brought home three or four moderately good Rembrandt etchings...