NOT Paying Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg

it's brave to speak ill of the (recently) dead but writing in The New Republic, Jed Perl opines that like "contemporary con-artists such as Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, and Jeff Koons - Rauschenberg put a high-art style price tag on the ordinary. . As for his art, it stank in the 1950s, and it doesn't look any better today." read more here

Art: the Best Place to Park Your Millions?

While the GP puzzles over just what is art and experts make perilous judgements over whether it's `good' or `bad' - the art market's gone ballistic, with Christies' breaking the record auction price for a living artist, $33,641,000US for Lucian Freud's portrait of a fleshy naked woman: "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping".
(Freud has a penchant for painting either very thin or very large bodies, eg. the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery) .

$348 million worth of art was sold at Christies' New York, & interestingly, Americans bought 70% of it .

Meanwhile, over at rival auction house Sotheby's, Mark Rothko's "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) set a record for any contemporary work at auction - selling for $72.84 million! more