360 DEGREES Weblog

We have grown up with this character – a few generations have, indeed. Mickey Mouse is not just an animation from Walt Disney but a legend who has amused and tickled the senses of many over decades, since his birth in 1928. In honor of the great mouse, a restored 1932 Mickey Mouse Stock Poster has been snapped up for $35,850 from the Heritage Auction Galleries, falling in the estimated range of $18,000 – $38,000. This three sheet poster is just one of 12 that the United Artists studio has created before Disney signed up with RKO. It is extremely rare and had been restored under professional overlook to conserve it. This was also the year that Mickey Mouse had won an Academy Award and so it is considered to be a unique addition for animation enthusiasts.

If you have a couple of millions to spare, here’s a dream buy for you. For sale at Sotheby’s in New York is a vehicle slightly damaged but offers extremely high mileage. We are talking about a historic Soviet space ship, worth every penny. There seems to be much fascination for space objects among the wealthy. Previously an original Space Shuttle Orbiter, a Russian spacesuit and Nasa’s space shuttle were all known to go under the hammer. Sotheby’s will auction the spherical Vostok 3KA-2 Space Capsule on April 12th, the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight by Soviet pilot Yury Gagarin with a pre-sale estimate of $2 million to $10 million. The battered craft served as the model used for the final dummy run before Gagarin left on his mission and is probably the only example outside of Russia of the world’s first spacecraft. Ahead of the auction the craft can be viewed in the Manhattan lobby of Sotheby’s.

An important re-discovered Andy Warhol self-portrait crowned a big art week in London, selling for £10.8 million pounds ($17.4 million) at Christie’s. The piece which dates from 1967 is a red square six-foot acrylic and silkscreen piece showing Warhol staring thoughtfully at the viewer, two fingers covering his mouth. Christies had estimated the work to sell for £3 to £5 million as part of its 64-lot auction of contemporary works. Legendary art dealer Larry Gagosian snapped it up, bidding in the room and wresting it away from another client on the telephone.

This week a couple of new Banksy pieces have showed up in Hollywood, in time for the Oscars, for which the artist’s film has been nominated this year, as reported by Curated. Next to the Crayon Boy piece, a new Charlie Brown piece has also been spotted.

A sale of prints by the late photographer Richard Avedon sold strongly at auction this week at Christie’s Paris. The sale brought in 5.5 million euros (approximately $7.5 million). The top seller at the sale was a huge print of a photograph taken in 1955 of the model Dovima posing with elephants at a circus (it sold for $1.15 million). Other top sellers including multi-colored Beatles shot from 1967 which sold for $608,000 and the third highest seller,a semi-nude photograph of model Stephanie Seymour. The sale also featured images of Marilyn Monroe and Rudolf Nureyev among others. The auction raised money for the Richard Avedon Foundation.

Find out the secrets of your ancestry and get a gallery-worthy art piece at the same time with DNA Ancestry Portraits ($440 and up). This new service from our pals at DNA 11 uses a cheek swab or existing ancestry test to create a personalized ancestry page detailing your maternal lineage, and then creates a 2D barcode that’s transferred onto a custom canvas in one of three sizes and in one of 25 stunning color combinations, and when scanned with a smartphone will lead you back to your custom ancestry page. A true conversation starter, in more ways than one.

A rare sheet of 10 stamps depicting Audrey Hepburn brought €430,000 ($606,000) at a charity auction in Germany on Oct. 16, two-thirds of which will go to educating children in sub-Saharan Africa, a cause about which the late actress was deeply committed.

The sheet of 10 stamps features Hepburn with her typical waifish smile, and a long, black cigarette holder dangling from her lips. The stamps are rare because they are part of a to a botched stamp series that were to have been destroyed many years ago.

The image of Hepburn was meant to evoke her role in the 1963 thriller “Charade,” in which she co-starred with Cary Grant and the characters are seeking a set of rare stamps.

Two-thirds of money raised will go to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, and one-third to UNICEF Germany.
The German postal service printed 14 million of the Hepburn stamps in 2001 actually showing the actress in her most famous role as Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Only after the stamps were printed was Sean Ferrer, Hepburn’s son and the chair of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, contacted to grant copyright. He refused, arguing that the image had been altered in a way that he did not approve of.

In the original photo, Hepburn has got sunglasses hanging from her mouth, but they had flipped the negative and replaced the glasses with the cigarette holder, Ferrer said.

Ferrer suggested using either the original photo or an alternative, but the postal service ended up scrapping the stamp and ordering those produced destroyed.

Starting November 5th, colette will offer an exclusive Chuck Taylor All Star shoe designed by British artist Damien Hirst for Converse (PRODUCT)RED. Drawing from his

Kraken Opus, that luxury publisher that produces premium, outsized editions on subjects including sports teams, celebrities, fashion and art, is pushing the boundaries of luxury to a new level this year. For $75,000, they are offering a book celebrating the cricket star Sachin Tendulkar?s career. A pint of Tendulkar?s blood was mixed with paper pulp for the signature page of the book. Only 10 editions of the Tendulkar Opus are made and all of them have been sold out already. Kraken will also be offering a $40,000 limited edition book about the Ferrari automobile for the Ferrari fans. The ?Enzo? edition book will showcase rare images of Enzo Ferrari?s villa, Formula One racing pits action and the signatures of all living Ferrari champion drivers. Only 399 copies of the Ferrari Opus will be made available. Sought by the most careful collectors, the luxury publications by Kraken Opus are bought as investments and at times, they sell for prices that are you normally pay for original works of art.

Art collector Charles Saatchi is famous for his patronage which has made the careers of British artists like Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, fueling the trend for young British artists in the 1990s. Now the ad man has announced that his lifetime of collecting will be Britain’s gain. He has announced plans to donate his London gallery and 200 works as a new public art museum. The impressive gift is worth more than 25 million pounds. The Saatchi Gallery will be renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, London.

Pieces being donated include Emin’s “My Bed” and Richard Wilson’s “20:50,” a room filled with oil. Saatchi, who is married to celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, is an insatiable collector and even after the donation he will still own many, many works. The donation, no doubt, will allow him to go on collecting while helping insure that contemporary art has a place in Britain’s future. The works that Saatchi favors are at time controversial and often challenge the nature of what really makes something “art.”According to an article in Art Daily, Rebecca Wilson, associate director of the Saatchi Gallery, said that the gift also includes other works that can be sold to buy new acquisitions to help grow the collection. She referred to is as being a “very agile collection that can respond quickly to developments in contemporary art from all over the world.”

The owner of the building that houses the gallery on London’s King’s Road, Cadogan Estate is hoping that the new museum will stay put in the same place. The staff and management team are also staying the same. What is changing is the name and the knowledge that the gallery, while still the result of one man’s obsessive art collecting, is now a gift to the city he lives in.