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'Britain's Got
Loot' winner cracks under strain
By our celebrity talent-spotting correspondent,
Peerless Moron |
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Neil
MacGregor, the quiet, unassuming director of the British
Museum, who this week shot to global fame as the surprise
winner of the popular TV show 'Britain's Got Loot', is said
to be cracking under the strain of his sudden global
notoriety.
Mr MacGregor beat several high-profile acts to win the coveted
award after stunning the judges with the sheer size of his
booty. Just seven weeks ago he took to the stage as a shy
Scot, little known beyond the walls of his Bloomsbury enclave
where he has spent decades secreted away with just mile upon
mile of storerooms full of pillaged objects for company.
Although mocked and pilloried when he entered the contest, few
people had any idea that the unprepossessing little art
historian was in fact sitting on a hoard of treasures that
when revealed brought tears to the eyes of the judges and left
the British public squirming with embarrassment.
"Poor Little Neil has been under immense pressure," said Simon
Codswallop, the chairman of the judges. "We didn't think he'd
stand a chance, but when he opened up those Duveen Galleries
and showed us his Parthenon Marbles, we realised that his was
the most unethical museum in the world. He was a clear winner.
No contest."
The runner-up, Little Jimmy Cuno from Chicago, sang a medley
of popular hits from the Philippe de Montebello Cultural
Property Song Book, including ‘You’ve Lost That Euphronius
Feeling,’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’.
Neil MacGregor will be appearing in cabaret from June 20 at
the New Acropolis Museum in Athens supported by Rosetta and
The Stones.
Peerless Moron
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MP who put £22
million Picasso on expenses was "working within the rules,"
say colleagues |
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George
Rabelais, Conservative MP for Humberside, bought a £22 million
Picasso oil painting, Le Gourmand, (above) at
Sotheby's last year and then charged the purchase to expenses,
it was claimed today.
Accused of abusing the system and robbing the taxpayer, Mr
Rabelais insisted that the masterpiece had been bought for his
London residence and that at every stage he had worked within
the rules laid down by Parliament.
"I paid the requisite buyer's premium at the auction, which is
not cheap, I can tell you," Rabelais told a pack of slavering
newshounds outside his £100 million Kensington townhouse.
Stuffing foie gras between his fleshy lips, a bottle of
Bollinger dangling nonchalantly from his silk dressing-gown
cord, he bravely defended his purchase. "Frankly I can't
understand what all the fuss is about. I mean it's not as if I
had the loft insulated. This is a beautiful painting that will
enhance my investment portfolio...er, I mean my interior décor
which is used for official political functions. I have heads
of state round here all the time like that gorgeous pouting
Carlo Brunette. You can't have Vettrianos hanging on the wall
while you're entertaining lovely people like that."
The revelation is certain to spark fresh controversy after a
string of newspaper stories exposed Mr Rabelais's fellow MPs
of exploiting the taxpayer through outlandish expenses claims.
Others likely to be hauled before the Commons Committee on
Standards in Public Life include Dave Snott, MP for
Wolverhampton East, who bought a Damien Hirst-designed
diamond-encrusted cage for his daughter's pet hamster; Daphne
Scrotum, MP for Stoke Newington, who bought a £13 million
life-sized marble statue of the Virgin Enthroned by
Michelangelo for the front garden of her terraced house; and
Gordon Bennett, MP for Slime-on-the-Wold, who had a penis
extension and charged it to the taxpayer.
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War on Terroir:
'Wine Flu' spreads through art trade
By
our Black Death correspondent Danny Defoe |
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'Wine
flu', a variant strain of swine flu, is spreading like
wildfire through the international art trade, according to
scientists.
The
'Wine Flu' virus is thought to have originated from a bottle
of Château Pétrus purchased at a swanky New York restaurant
and has since spread like a contagion among art collectors,
art dealers, hedge fund managers and fine art auctioneers.
Thousands of art world luminaries have been affected by the
virus which causes them to spend too much money on very bad
contemporary art in the misguided belief that it will be a
sound investment.
"I've
lost millions," said one ailing collector from his bed at New
York's Richard Prince Hospital for Tropical Diseases, as a
nurse mopped his brow with a limited edition Murakami-branded
flannel soaked in Rémy Martin cognac. "I think I caught it
from a Russian hedge fund trader just before the Damien Hirst
auction last year," moaned the rapidly expiring millionaire.
"He persuaded me to invest in contemporary art and now I've
lost everything, my marriage, my beach house in the Hamptons,
my G3, and now my li....arrrgh, euurghssppp..."
A minute
later the man was pronounced dead. His body was promptly
doused in quick lime and flung onto a waiting flatbed truck
piled high with pin-striped corpses.
In a
further development related to the Swine Flu virus, dealers
and auctioneers have been advised to destroy any paintings
with pigs in them. One London fine art auctioneer said, "It's
not as bad as the Mad Cow epidemic when we had to burn
thousands of works by Thomas Sidney Cooper, or the Bird Flu
outbreak which forced us to incinerate all those lovely
Hondecoeters. Fortunately, pigs were never a favourite subject
for painters, but we can't be too careful. My advice to
collectors is, 'If in doubt, swill it out.'"
Swine
Flu has already led to the burning of hundreds of paintings by
Francis Bacon, while Ham House in Richmond, West London has
been evacuated "as a precaution" according to local
councillors. |
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Smalls are Beautiful:
Cultural heritage memorabilia gives much-needed boost to
ailing art
market |
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The extraordinary prices recently achieved for Mahatma Gandhi’s
personal effects (above left) has brought a flood of unique cultural heritage
memorabilia to auction at a time when the art market is flagging.
Now an opportunity has arisen to acquire underwear worn by some of
the greatest artists known to humankind. The following three lots
are the highlights of a sale of artists' smalls to be held at
Sotheby's New York saleroom in July.
A
spokesman for the auction house said, "Some people think we're
only interested in the rarefied heights of blue-chip fine art, but
actually there are no depths to which we will not stoop to drive
revenues and grow shareholder value. If you get the right
celebrity thong, it can make a huge packet."
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Bernini's codpiece, c.1650 (left)
A
true 'masterpiece' of early European underwear, this magnificent
studded leather codpiece is said to have been worn by the great
Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzi Bernini (1598-1629) while carving the
famous Ecstasy of St
Theresa in the
Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Bears small chisel marks and faint traces
of marble dust.
Estimate: $200,000-300,000 |
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Gauguin's Boxer Shorts
A
pair of stunningly vivid and typically 'primitive' boxer shorts
worn by the great French painter Paul Gauguin while resident in
Tahiti in 1895. Gauguin gave the shorts to his landlord in lieu of
rent. Thence by descent to the present vendor. A little baggy
around the gusset but otherwise in excellent condition and a
supreme example of post-Impressionist underclothing.
Estimate $1.5-2.5 million
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Donatello's thong
An
extraordinary survival from the highpoint of the Italian
Renaissance, this diminutive item of playful male apparel was
preserved by the sacristan of the Florentine Church of San
Lorenzo, with whom Donatello is said to have had a brief, illicit
liaison in the 1420s. The great Renaissance sculptor is known to
have had a taste for fetishistic underwear as can be seen from his
bronze statue of Amor-Atys.
Estimate $800,000-$1.4 million
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ratatouille |
Christie’s accused
of serving rodent to customers
By our Beijing culinary heritage
reporter Yoo Nesco |
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Christie’s, the fashionable
restaurant in Paris, has been accused of serving rat to wealthy
customers, it was revealed this week. To make matters worse, the
rat was said to have originated in China.
Visitors to the up-market Left Bank
eaterie were appalled to discover Chinese rat on the menu. “It’s
disgusting,” said Delia Llama, a Tibetan TV chef. “The rat is a
traditional part of Chinese culinary culture. To steal it like
this is disgraceful.”
Jackie Qianlong, the famous Kung Fu
film star, threatened reprisals, telling reporters, “Dawww! …Ayyyeee!
Kerpow! Ayaaaah!” He and a hundred colleagues wearing red Buddhist
robes then proceeded to glide gracefully though the air on wires
while smashing up the restaurant with their bare hands.
“C’est rien. C’est une amuse-bouche,”
muttered Christie’s Chief Executive Ed Dole-Queue, as he lounged
in a $50 million Eileen Gray armchair, rubbing Yves Saint
Laurent’s ‘Opium War’ perfume into his naked loins. “Vive la
Récession!” he moaned.
Yoo Nesco
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Encyclopedic museums “put children’s lives at risk”, archive
reveals |
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Reckless ‘encyclopedic’ museums sent
vulnerable young children into highly dangerous jungle
environments to capture wild animals for their collections,
according to devastating new photographic evidence released this
week.
Artnose has been given exclusive
sight of the archive, only now open to public view, which shows
how young schoolboys, dressed in short trousers and often armed
with only a catapult and a pea-shooter, were sent deep into the
African and Asian jungles to hunt down and capture man-eating
lions, tigers and other carnivorous wildlife. They were then
expected to drag their kill back to South Kensington where
curators rewarded the children with a Sherbert Fountain or a bag
or gobstoppers.
The extraordinary late
nineteenth-century photograph shown above typifies the dangerous
situations young children encountered while helping assemble the
so-called ‘Encyclopedic Museums’ so often lauded as the great
achievement of the European Enlightenment.
The children can be seen transfixed
with fear as a ferocious beast emerges from the undergrowth and
prepares to pounce, seemingly intent on ripping their tiny frail
bodies limb from limb with awesome power prior to mercilessly
devouring them.
A hand-written account of the
incident shown above, which took place in the sweltering,
stinking, halophytic mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans in West
Bengal in 1897, recounts how the plucky pupils overpowered the
animal before beating it to death with conkers on strings. It was
later mounted in a glass case in the Natural History Museum.
The archive is expected to fuel the
thorny debate about the unethical practices used by 'Encyclopedic'
or ‘Universal’ museums in assembling their collections.
James Cuno is 110.
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Picture of the week
This colossal sculpture of a lovely
white elephant is to be erected near the Eurostar terminal in
Ebbsfleet, Kent. |
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Artnose
In The News
The Guardian
De Morgen
ATG
The Future of the Art Market
thrashed out at Haunch of Venison
Guests at an open forum held at the
London gallery of Haunch of Venison last week
heard that despite tremors throughout the art trade brought about by the
recession, the art market is in fact in a healthier state now than it has
ever been and that contrary to malicious rumours spread by seedy Evening
Standard journalists there are no conflicts of interest and no back-room
deals being done.
"The art market has nothing
whatever to do with money, it is all about beautiful sacred objects that
send a shiver up your spine and give you a murmur in your chinos," said
Matt Medici, a director of Haunch of Venison who lives in a caravan in
Essex and claims income support.
"People think we're rich," added
Elliott Ness, the curator of a leading corporate collection in the City of
London. "But the truth is that I shop at Lidl and live on pot noodle and
trouser fluff."
"You're all lying bastards,"
concluded panel chairman Scott Torquemada as he closed the discussion and
passed death sentences on the contributors who were led away to the
dungeons of Burlington House by London dealer Ivor Braka dressed as Alice
Cooper and carrying a bullwhip.
Afterwards at a polite champagne
reception everyone agreed to carry on as normal by bending the rules and
making loads of money out of credulous millionaires with no taste. The
smoked salmon blinis and chicken satay sticks were very tasty, but I'm not
so keen on those celery things with the black bit stuck on the end. What
was that? Caviar? Yuck! Next time, can we have chocolate rice krispie
cakes and would it be OK if the waitresses went topless like at Gagosion
Gallery receptions in New York?
Godfrey Bonkers is 108.

Out Now!
The New Artnose
Monthly Magazine










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