Arts Notes: Faberge egg gets record-setting price
A rare enamel-and-gold Faberge egg that had been in the Rothschild banking family for more than a century sold for a record-setting $18.5 million at auction Wednesday in London.
The sale of the translucent pink egg topped with a diamond-studded cockerel was a record for a Faberge work of art, Christie’s auction house said.
The price also broke the record for Russian artwork, excluding paintings, easily beating the $9.6 million paid for a Faberge egg in New York in 2002, according to Christie’s.
Russian Czar Alexander III commissioned the first of the elaborate eggs from craftsman Peter Carl Faberge as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, in 1885.
The czar continued commissioning the eggs every Easter until his death in 1894. His son Nicholas carried on the tradition until the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The Rothschild Faberge Egg is one of no more than 12 such pieces known to have been made to imperial standards for private clients, Christie’s said.
Dylan pic tops Spirit picks
The whimsical Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” featuring Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and four others playing incarnations of the enigmatic singer, leads the nominees for the 2008 Spirit Awards honoring independent film.
“I’m Not There” was nominated Tuesday for best feature; supporting actress for Blanchett; supporting actor for child performer Marcus Carl Franklin; and best director for Todd Haynes.
Also nominated for best film were two others about real people: Angelina Jolie’s “A Mighty Heart,” in which she plays the wife of slain reporter Daniel Pearl; and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” chronicling the life of French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby after a paralyzing stroke.
The other best-film nominees: “Juno,” featuring Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Ellen Page in a comic drama about a pregnant teen planning to give up her baby for adoption, and “Paranoid Park,” director Gus Van Sant’s drama about a young skateboarder tormented by an incident in which he caused a security guard’s death.
The Spirit Awards will be presented Feb. 23, the day before the Academy Awards.
Hitler sex scene hailed
The conception of Adolf Hitler was never going to make for easy reading. But Norman Mailer’s explicit rendition of the incestuous encounter between the genocidal German dictator’s parents has won the late author one of the world’s most dubious literary prizes.
Mailer, who died last month at age 84, is the recipent of Literary Review magazine’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which honors crude and tasteless descriptions of sex in modern novels.
In a ceremony at the In & Out Club in central London, the judges paid homage to a “great American man of letters,” adding: “We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humor.”
The excerpt is taken from one of Mailer’s last works, “The Castle in the Forest,” a fictionalized exploration of Hitler’s family, narrated by a demon. In the passage, the demon describes the moment Adolf is conceived, as Klara embraces Alois, a man the novel says was her uncle, “with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One.”