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Rare medal from the first modern Olympic Games sells for $88,580 at auction
BOSTON, MASS.- An extremely rare second-place winner's medal from the first modern Olympic Games sold for $88,580 , according to Boston-based RR Auction. At the inaugural modern Olympiad in Athens, Greece, in 1896, first-place winners were awarded silver medals, and second-place finishers earned these bronze prizes; there was no award for a third-place result. Unlike today's games where thousands of athletes compete, just 250 were featured at the first modern games. "Any winner's medal from the historic debut of the Olympic Games remain exceedingly rare―this being just the second we have ever offered," said Bobby Livingston, Executive VP at RR Auction. Additional highlights from the sale include, but are not limited by: St. Louis 1904 Olympics silver medal sold for $82,499 . Oslo 1952 Winter Olympics torchone of only 95 made sold for $73,864. ... More

Clarke Auction Gallery offers cure for winter blues at 'Awesome' Feb. 6 auction
LARCHMONT, NY.- Winter blues and freezing temps got you down? Clarke Auction Gallery promises to heat things up with its Awesome estate auction on Sunday, February 6, at 10 am, featuring nearly 500 lots of fine art, antiques, decorative arts, jewelry and silver, Asian arts and more. Online bidding is available through ClarkeNY.com, LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, and Bidsquare. Fine art from the last few centuries is well represented with listed artists from America, Europe and Mexico in all media. Classic portraiture and landscapes will vie for attention with bold and colorful acrylics by Peter Max, figurative gouaches from Gert Wollheim and much more. The most important painting, which is already attracting much presale attention, is a circa 1954 gouache by Fernand Leger, Les loisirs, depicting figures engaged in leisure activities. The painting ( ... More

Fontaine's Auction Gallery to offer fine & decorative arts at auction
PITTSFIELD, MASS.- Fontaines Auction Gallery will present its first auction of the new year on Saturday, January 29, at 11 am. Featured in this important 19th/20th Century fine and decorative arts auction are 19th and 20th Century lighting, art glass, leaded glass windows, silver, marble and bronze statuary, American and European furniture. Buyers may bid online or via the phone and absentee. More than a dozen fine and rare examples of Tiffany Studios lighting, not surprisingly, are on offer here, led by a Studios Byzantine floor lamp ($150/250,000), early 20th Century. The leaded glass lamp stands 78 inches tall and its patinated 26-inch domed shade is decorated with over 2,000 small copper-foiled glass tiles. The tiles are arranged in an elaborate design made up of four vertical wide bands that form a cross when viewed from above. The elaborate ... More

Saatchi Gallery explores decades of social change in the U.S. with exhibition
LONDON.- America in Crisis brings together 40 leading American photographers and over 120 works exploring social change in the U.S from the 1960s till today. Organised by Saatchi Gallery, the exhibition is curated by Sophie Wright, Gregory Harris from Atlantas High Museum of Art, and LA-based photographer and academic Tara Pixley. America in Crisis was a ground-breaking group initiative originally conceived in 1969 to assess the state of the nation. This Magnum Photos project was led by American photographer Charles Harbutt and Lee Jones, then Magnums New York bureau chief. In 1970, Charles Harbutt said of the original project: Several of us felt that the 1968 elections would be somehow special; that deeper questions for America were riding than just electing a president. I felt that the basic issue was that the traditional American ... More

In 'Whisper House,' the living are the pawns of the dead
NEW YORK, NY.- The ghosts, at least, are having fun. Sunken-eyed, in moldering Jazz Age whites, they slink and shimmy around 59E59 Theaters petite stage about the size of a backyard swimming pool luring characters to their various dooms. There are only four living characters and a limited supply of calamity, but still these spirits put in overtime. In Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrows pocket Gothic, Whisper House, the ghosts (Alex Boniello and Molly Hager) deliver 12 of the 14 songs, each a hymn to a wicked hereafter. Its good to be a ghost, they sing. Its better to be dead. A chamber musical planted in Maines stony soil in the early 1940s, Whisper House had its world premiere in 2010 at the Old Globe in San Diego and played London in 2017. It has spent the past couple of years in a kind of limbo, having clocked a single 59E59 performance ... More

Ann Arensberg, insightful novelist of mysteries and manners, dies at 84
NEW YORK, NY.- Ann Arensberg, a novelist equally at home writing Gothic mysteries set in dark corners of New England and airy satires set in her native territory, the Manhattan publishing and cultural scene, died Jan. 14 at a hospital in Sharon, Connecticut. She was 84. Her brother, Walter W. Arensberg, said the cause was complications of COVID-19. Arensberg came to writing relatively late in life, after an early career in museums and more than a decade as an editor at Viking Press. After publishing a few short stories in the 1970s, she finished her first novel, Sister Wolf, in 1980, when she was 43. The tale of a young Hungarian American heiress who establishes a wolf sanctuary on her familys estate in rural Massachusetts established her reputation for conveying eccentric, detailed plots in witty, confidently unadorned prose. She ... More

Racial turmoil mars signs of progress at the U.S. Mint
WASHINGTON, DC.- The U.S. Mint celebrated a milestone this month when it announced the first shipment of a new batch of quarters bearing the image of writer and poet Maya Angelou, the first Black woman to be depicted on the 25-cent coin. The announcement came weeks after President Joe Biden said he would nominate Ventris Gibson to lead the mint, where, if confirmed, she would serve as its first Black director. But beneath the public signs of social progress is an agency that has struggled for years with racial tension, with Black employees saying they feel threatened, marginalized and professionally disadvantaged. Although instances of racism at the mint have surfaced in previous years, a new internal report that was reviewed by The New York Times depicts an institution rife with tumult over allegations of racist behavior. A draft ... More

A reimagined 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' for the COVID era
NEW YORK, NY.- Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey Into Night is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwrights own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family by disease, ego, addiction and codependency through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered ONeills masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours. Writer-director Robert OHara, a Tony nominee for his direction of Slave Play, is doing it in under two. Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre, Long Days Journey Into Night has reunited OHara with fellow Slave Play alums, actor Ato Blankson-Wood and designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production ... More

At Sundance, two films look at abortion and the Jane Collective
NEW YORK, NY.- Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe but illegal abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need. I dont think we were crazy, said Arcana, now 78. I dont think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls. We were radicalized in the arena of womens bodies, she said. We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal. Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting ... More

Debbie Gibson goes shopping for vinyl records
NEW YORK, NY.- Debbie Gibson, a 1980s pop sensation and multihyphenate, stood outside Rockefeller Center last month, singing an a cappella carol when a man in his 20s, born at least a decade after her peak stardom, stopped her. Had he recognized her? No, but she didnt seem to mind. That very cute gay boy just said, You look amazing, she said. Ill take it! Gibson, 51, had flown in from Las Vegas to appear on Foxs New Years Eve Toast & Roast 2022. Fox had canceled the special, citing the surge in omicron cases. But she planned to make the most of her time in the city I dont imprint disappointment, she said visiting family and shopping. She hoped to pick up a few treats for herself, which had brought her to the doors of Rough Trade NYC, a vinyl-record store, which recently relocated from a cavernous space in Brooklyn ... More

A new coalition amplifies disability culture in the music industry
NEW YORK, NY.- For singer, songwriter and producer Lachi, the acronym was everything. She helped start the organization that would become RAMPD Recording Artists and Music Professionals With Disabilities in July 2021, but it was a few months earlier, after moderating a panel for the Recording Academy about disability inclusion, that she came up with the name. After that aired, musicians with disabilities were coming out of the woodwork and following me on Instagram, DMing me, going, What are we going to do? Are you going to lead this charge? Whats next? Lachi said in an interview. Everyone was energized. And thats when the spark came, of the acronym. RAMPD, which Lachi co-founded with singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, alongside a dozen or so founding members, works to amplify disability culture and advocate ... More