WilliamM

Hockey and hi favorite model, Peter Schlesinger.

Shop My Account News Culture Desk David Hockney’s Ninety-Million-Dollar Painting: A Masterpiece Becomes a Trophy By Andrea K. Scott The New Yorker 10:00 A.M. Forty-six years ago, David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at the Andre Emmerich gallery, in New York, for eighteen thousand dollars. Photograph by Anthony Wallace / AFP / Getty David Hockney is the world’s most expensive living artist as of Thursday night, when “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” his big, color-soaked picture from 1972, sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million. It’s a dubious distinction, given that the eighty-one-year-old British painter won’t see a cent of the proceeds. In the U.S., artists aren’t entitled to royaltieswhen a piece changes hands; they profit only the first time their work sells. The Hockney record topples Jeff Koons, whose balloon dogs sold, also at Christie’s, for a measly $58.4 million, in 2013. The painter, never press-shy, has issued no comment on the astronomical payout. (The identity of the buyer, as ever at auction, remains unknown.) Last week, at an event in his honor in London, Hockney did share his thoughts on the pre-auction hoopla with Reuters, saying, “I ignore it.” Still, it’s bound to feel good—vindicating, even—for the L.A.-based painter, whose exuberant figuration was, until recently, considered the visual equivalent of easy-listening music by the art-world intelligentsia. Even more gratifying than the interest of an anonymous billionaire, probably, were the half-million people who turned out to see the painting in Hockney’s retrospective at the Tate Britain last year. (The artist was a record-smasher there, too, bested only by Henri Matisse in the annals of the museum’s attendance.) But too often these days, when we talk about art, we talk about money. To cite just one example, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s name is now synonymous with the phrase “more than a hundred and ten million dollars.” “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” deserves the overused label “masterpiece,” but it’s not a better picture today than it was forty-six years ago, when it sold at the Andre Emmerich gallery, in New York, for eighteen thousand dollars. Trophies and masterpieces aren’t the same thing, as anyone who has seen Leonardo da Vinci’s half-billion-dollar “Salvator Mundi” can attest. Reminiscing recently about his attraction to the subject of pools—he painted about twelve, then moved on—Hockney said, “You can look at the surface of the water or you could look through it.” The market is a shallows, reflecting art as an unregulated and increasingly obscenely priced financial instrument; the real value of a great painting has an unquantifiable depth. I just hope that Hockney’s beautiful picture is bound for a wall and not a crate in a freeport.

I had a similar experience long ago when the extremely attractive office janitor asked me if I wanted to play tennis. I feel in love after the first set. Not based on any financial arrangements, we had occasionally talked about tennis, but I over 10 years older. We did talk about attending the U.S., but he could not afford it.

@easygoingpal I will find the name of the film this weekend.

Yes, Maxwell Caulfield played Sloan in an earlier production. I saw the play after he left, his replacement mostly kept his clothes on.

Yes. Chris Comack played the object of everyone's lust in "Entertaining Mr. Slone" off-Broadway about a decade ago.

You watch too many TV shows. Gay or straight, being forced to perform sexually is necessarily automatic.

For some men, not all men.

Is this a more personal relationship than you realized @topinla? After all, you are topping him a lot!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet Shop Sign in News Culture Reflections November 26, 2018 Issue How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts. By Bill McKibben California is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Above: The Woolsey fire, near Los Angeles, seen from the West Hills. Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man. I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments. For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”