Cy Twombley

I doubt the guy spending the money to purchase the work cares in the slightest what it looks like. It might even be a source of laundering, who knows there's so many crooks out there! His fund managers probably advised him to buy it for investment and tax reasons . .

I feel like that art market is a game of financial musical chairs to see who will be left holding the bag with the money losing art works. The risk taking is the excitement. Maybe they don't care because it will just be a tax-write off. Of course, it can also seem like a poke in the eye and rebellious which appealed to John Waters. However, I felt like John Waters' statements were a whole lot of talk about art, but Cy Twombly doesn't offer much to see. I really liked the picture in the video of the kids hard at work at their desks drawing circles. :giggle:
 
Here is something for you guys, those who knew all about it can raise their hands (virtually of course):
A British guy by the name Phillip Hoffman had an idea years ago: if buying shares in a listed company gives the buyer a percentage ownership of the company in question, why not do the same with works of art??
example: Sell a decent Picasso work worth $100 million to a million investors whereby each of them owns a fraction of a square inch of the canvas (as collateral) and when the piece is sold for $125 million, share the profit accordingly.
If you buy say 100 shares of Microsoft you become a 0.00000000001% (maybe I’m missing a couple of zeros?....) owner of Microsoft. (You can tell your wife that you do business with Bill Gates!).
Why not do business with (the late) Picasso?...
Well, it did not work for Hoffman. He resorted to being one more high end (traditional, whatever that is) art dealer...
 
Most Expensive Book Ever

Yep... the prices of Art objects has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the artistic merits of the work in question... unless Shakespeare's plays are less valuable in aesthetic terms than Twombly... or many other Modern paintings.
 
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Cy Twombly
 
Shakespeare wasn't concerned with aesthetics? That's funny. Tolstoy famously criticized Shakespeare for being far more concerned with aesthetics than with morality. Of course, Tolstoy was frustrated that he could not surpass the Englishman.
 
Tolkien described his writing as “an essay in linguistic aesthetics
 
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Yes, Goethe is up there. He's hard for the English-speaking world to fully evaluate due to the less than brilliant translations... especially of his masterpiece, Faust and his lyric poetry. Michael Hamburger, one of the finest German-to-English translators, translated some of Goethe's poetry but I wish he had translated more. Hölderlin, Rilke, Heine, and several other German poets have been better served when it comes to translations than Goethe. Having said that, his prose works are quite accessible in English. The Italian Journey, surely ranks with Rousseau's Confessions among Romantic-era autobiographical works and there are several good translations... including one by the British poet, Auden. I loved The Sorrows of Young Werther as a teen.

Other rivals to Shakespeare among Western writers would certainly include not only Goethe, but also Dante, Homer, Virgil, Tolstoy, Cervantes, William Blake, Flaubert, and Proust. I'd probably give the nod to Dante's Comedia and the Bible as the single greatest works of Western Literature, but overall, Shakespeare just has such breadth and depth.

Funny that a post on Twombly has turned to a post on literature.
 
Yeah, imagine any of the books by the great men you mentioned illustrated with Twomley’s!
 
Twombley did do a series of paintings presumably based upon Homer. I saw them in an exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I can't say they did anything for me. When I stopped off at the restroom there was a poster board over one of the urinals scrawled over with graffiti and a few post-it notes. At the bottom, some smart ass signed it Cy Twombly in a pretty good imitation of his signature. One of my old studio partners quite liked Twombly but had to admit that this series... and the work he did on the ceiling of the Louvre were absolutely miserable.

To be honest, I do like a few of Twombly's works... mostly earlier work...
 
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