Cave News

The gun 'Van Gogh killed himself with' to be auctioned in Paris Wednesday

From a report at the link below:

The revolver with which Vincent van Gogh is believed to have shot himself is to go under the hammer Wednesday at a Paris auction house.

Billed as "the most famous weapon in the history of art", the seven mm Lefaucheux revolver is expected to fetch up to 60,000 euros ($67,000).

___________________________________

Copy of a ‘Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear' framed painting by Vincent Van Gogh

___________________________________

Van Gogh experts believe that he shot himself with the revolver near the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, where he spent the last few months of his life in 1890.

Discovered by a farmer in 1965 in the same field where the troubled Dutch painter is thought to have fatally wounded himself, the gun has already been exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Link

Checkmate

Burning Man - 2018

Burning Man occurs once a year when 50,000 or more people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City. According to the Burning Man web presence a temporary metropolis is created that is dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.

In reality a more apt description would be a collection of incredibly gifted artists and builders along with wild sex parties that take place in and around the infamous ‘orgy dome.’

Two VW 'microbuses' - one oversize and one undersize

One of the Burning Man rules: if you brought it in - you take it back out.

Organized parking is a must with 50,000 or more in attendance.

The photo above shows evidence of the dust storms that plagued Burning Man 2018.

No photos of the Orgy Dome - sorry.

Celebrating obesity with a fat girl on first digital cover of Self magazine

Self magazine recently switched from print to digital-only. This is the first digital cover showing fat model Tess Holliday.

Needless to say the cover is not likely to get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Holliday, who proudly weighs in at 280 pounds, poses revealingly on the cover. Next to her, a headline declares that her “Health is none of your business.”

Link

Kim Jong-un 'takes his own toilet to summit so his poop won’t be ‘spied on'

In addition to taking his own food to Singapore, the north Korea leader has reportedly brought along his own portable toilet to prevent anyone from spying on his personal waste. You just can’t make this stuff up!

The necessity for a personal portable toilet allegedly stems from Mr Kim's fear that foreign agents will look at his stools to gain an insight into his secretive life.

Rather than fly from Pyongyang to Singapore via Shanghai, which only takes six hours, the North Korean leader and his entourage flew the longer route via Beijing, as this requires less flight time over water, which is harder to protect.

Link

Tiny oil paintings inside empty Altoids tins

The Lilliputian world of one landscape artist in Colorado who paints tiny masterpieces inside empty Altoids tins.

Heidi Annalise quit her government job in Washington DC and returned to her home state of Colorado to paint– out of empty Altoids mint tins.

“When your paintings are this tiny, you don’t have to worry about lugging any solvents around,” says Heidi on her blog. “And the mint tin also doubles as storage for your wet painting.”

Link

Schools in the UK switch to analog clocks students can’t tell time on digital clocks

Schools go ‘hands free’ removing traditional clocks with because students can't tell the time using analogue clocks.

Schools go hands free replacing traditional analog clocks with digital ones in exam halls because students can't tell the time.

Students need to be as relaxed as possible during an exam and it adds to their stress if they cannot tell the time.

Poor babies, they are about as helpless as American students. Perhaps teachers should just supply the exam answers so the students will be able to relax even more.

Link

French museum finds that more than half its collection of paintings are forgeries

A museum in Southern France has discovered more than half its collection of paintings thought to be by a celebrated local artist are counterfeit. And investigators say that works attributed to other regional artists could also be fakes.

The quaint French village of Elne near the border with Spain is proud to be the hometown of Catalan painter Étienne Terrus. He was a late-19th-century artist who specialized in local landscapes and was friends with the painter Henri Matisse.

After a $365,000 renovation, the town was set to celebrate the grand reopening of the museum bearing Terrus' name — one of Elne's main attractions. Instead, the big reveal was that 82 paintings attributed to the artist in the museum's collection were fakes.

Art experts estimate that at least 20 percent of paintings owned by institutions — either on display or in their vaults — could actually be the work of someone other than the purported artist.

Full report here.

The Rockefeller collection may be the first Art Auction to Top $1 Billion

A century ago John D. Rockefeller, one of the original robber barons, became one of the world’s first billionaires at a time when the U.S. government’s annual budget hovered at around $700 million.

This month, the vast art collection amassed by his grandson David Rockefeller (Pictured above) could make history of its own by selling for as much as $1 billion at when it runs at Christie’s in New York over May 8th, 9th and 10th. No other estate auction has ever crossed that mark.

Peggy and David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller and his wife Peggy were consummate connoisseurs who collected masterpieces across myriad categories: 19th- and 20th-century European and American paintings, English and American furniture, European porcelain, Asian art, pre-Columbian ceramics, silver, textiles, decorative art, folk art, and Native American art.

While the grandfather’s name became synonymous with capitalism, the grandson’s became synonymous with giving back. Proceeds of the massive collection will go to charity.

Full report here.

Some say the first sign of spring is a robin. Another sign is a bicycle rider out on a first serious long ride

I miss riding a bike but the last time I was able to ride was 20 years ago.

I worked up his whimsical mosaic as a tribute to those who are able to ride.