This has been called the most expensive private art collection ever sold and for good reason 🤯

Transcript

In Episode 3, I discussed the Paul G. Allen collection that was going up for auction at Christie’s in November. The estimate was that everything that was sold would all fetch $1 billion cumulatively.

Well, the auction was split into two separate parts: November 9th and November 10th. On the 9th, it surpassed the $1 billion mark. The total total for the day was $1,506,386,000.

So, on the second and final day of the auction, the total from that day was $115,863,500.

For both parts of the auction, all sales totaled $1,622,249,500.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.

Even though it’s been identified as being hung upside down, curators are hesitant to turn “New York City I” by Piet Mondrian right side up…but why? 🤔

And, is there *actually* a right and wrong way to hang this piece?

Transcript

A museum curator at Germany’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 museum announced that the exhibition’s highlight piece, “New York City I,” has been displayed upside down since it was first seen in public in the 1940s.

There are actually two versions of “New York City I.” One of them is painted and it hangs in the Pompidou in Paris. That one, apparently, is proper side up.

The other one, though, was made of adhesive tape and is the one that’s seemingly upside down.

The curator saw a photo of the artists’ studio taken in 1944 that showed “New York City I” on an easel in the background with the tightly grouped yellow, blue, and black stripes at the top.

Now, knowing this, you’d think they’d turn it upright, right? It’s a little more complicated than that.

Turning it over to the correct side up could actually damage the artwork because it’s made of adhesive tape. Turning it upside down, the gravity would, essentially, just pull it apart.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.

Google hasn’t yet confirmed when the Wonder app will be released. I’m curious, though, if there’s a big enough need for it. Is this app actually something you would want?

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Within the last year, you may have heard about AI-generated art. Google just announced they’re launching a new app called Wonder to create AI-generated artwork.

They have a few different key features in this app, so it’s going to be the same thing where you can type a prompt into their prompt area.

Not only are they doing that, but they’re also, apparently, building cities with it’s City Dream feature. And then you can also create cartoon monsters with its Wobble feature.

There isn’t a release date for the app yet. It was just announced. I’ll let you know as soon as I know!

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.

This is going to be a very tricky copyright case because whatever’s decided will set the precedent for how content creators get paid for their work!

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So, within the last year, you may have heard about AI-generated art, especially with OpenAI’s platform, DALL-E.

AI image generators scrape publicly available pictures across the web to train their algorithm. These images that are sampled are typically copyrighted works that come from a variety of websites, most namely Getty Images.

Getty Images actually just banned AI-generated art due to these copyright issues. So, where the issue comes from is that there is no credit or compensation for content creators who make these original images.

Like I said, Getty is banning AI-generated artwork. They’re using the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which is a project that was just formed in February 2021 by Adobe, Sony, BBC, Microsoft, Twitter, and a bunch of other companies, in order to filter out AI-generated content.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.

How does a museum not have knowledge or at least footage of the people who broke over $77 million worth of priceless artifacts?!

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Imagine breaking about $77 million worth of stuff that isn’t yours.

This is a really strange kind of story. Over the past 18 months, a bowl, a teacup, and a plate from the Ming and Qing dynasties were broken in 3 separate incidences at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum.

The director of the museum has been accused of instructing the staff to cover up the incidences and to treat all paper work of these as classified. They deny covering things up. They just say it’s kind of been a “process.”

What’s also sketchy about this, though, is that even though they’ve allegedly checked all their CCTV footage, they were unable to idenitfy who was responsible for 2 out of the three accidents.

They were able to identify who was responsible for one incident, though!

It was apparently a senior staff member who placed an artifact on a 3-foot high desk and it fell off of it. So, there’s one mystery solved!

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.

I have an update to the fake Vermeer painting that I covered a few weeks ago! 🎨🖼️

Transcript

So, in Episode 5, we talked about a fake Vermeer painting. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. figured out that the painting, “Girl with a Flute,” that’s in their collection wasn’t actually painted by Vermeer.

They used formal analysis, which I’ve talked about before in some of my TikToks, where they looked at the physical, visual attributes of the artwork in question.

That is how they were able to identify that this painting may not have been painted by Vermeer. There are some sceptics, though!

So, even though the National Gallery of Art stated that they don’t believe this was painted by Vermeer, the Rijksmuseum stated that they believe this is inconclusive.

The director of the Rijksmuseum stated that because Vermeer took so many different approaches in his career, we shouldn’t rule out that this was painted by Vermeer.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here.