An amazing moment in modern art....

Tracy Emin finds her lost cat poster has become an art form

By Joanna Bale (The Times)

WHEN Tracy Emin’s beloved cat, Docket, disappeared from her home in Spitalfields, the artist thought nothing of pinning up a few posters on lamp-posts, appealing for help in finding him.

Perhaps the outrageous doyenne of BritArt should have realised that when your most famous work of art is an unmade bed deemed to be worth £150,000, there is no end to what people might regard as your latest masterpiece.

For no sooner had the notices gone up, than they were torn down as rumours circulated that they could be worth a fortune. A neighbour in Miss Emin’s trendy East London artists’ enclave, which also houses Gilbert and George, said: “Apparently people have been quoted £500 a poster.”

Docket has, after all, appeared on a previous work by Miss Emin when she donated signed Polaroid photographs of herself holding the black and white cat to a charity raffle at the opening last year of the exhibition Ant Noises 2 at the Saatchi gallery.

While enthusiastically endorsing her other works, including a tent embroidered with the names of all the people she has slept with, Miss Emin’s agent insisted that this time, the poster was definitely “not art”.

A spokeswoman for the White Cube gallery, which also handles the works of Damien Hirst, said: “Tracy does deal with memorabilia, but the posters are not works of art, it’s simply a notice of her missing cat to alert neighbours. It’s not a conceptual piece of work and it has nothing to do with her art.”

Luckily for Miss Emin, the misunderstanding — and the fact that no reward was offered for the cat’ — did not prevent her finding Docket. The two were reunited earlier this week. The spokeswoman added: “Tracy was very upset about losing her cat, but Docket has been found.”

And perhaps not a moment too soon: Jake and Dinos Chapman, local residents and Emin’s BritArt contemporaries, helped to cement their controversial reputation with a gruesome series of paintings depicting tortured moggies.

It's been pretty rough lately. The big guys are dropping like flies. Yesterday, the man who taught me how to swear properly, Dudley Moore, died.

Check out the great man's obiturary in The Times.

Dudley Moore, CBE, comic, film star, composer, musician and cunt, was born on April 18, 1935. He died on March 27, 2002, aged 66.

Gig Posters is an unbelievable gig poster site.

I'm back! Is Tom Cruise an alien? Here's something from Salon's Oscar coverage....

"I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as diamond drill-bits. The new braces on his teeth suggest that he is erasing all that remained of his tiny imperfections, and he is now metamorphosing into Ultra Super Perfection Man 3000. I fear his intense, mind-beating politeness, his titanium imperviousness to human weakness, his barking power-laugh.

"Movies make a little bit of magic touch our lives," he commanded us to acknowledge, with steely resolve and Mach-5 mega-humorlessness.

People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the post-Sept. 11 whither-the-Oscars conundrum head-on. "Should we celebrate the magic the movies bring? Now?" Tom asked, his eyes boring into the eyes of the TV multitudes and implanting rays of total domination. "Dare I say it?" He flashed a smirk with his robotically flawless teeth. "More than EVER," he hissed, laying on his most Extreme Scientological Unction. He had been commanded by the Elders to Obi-Wan-Kenobi-ize the audience into rebelieving in the importance of the obscenely superfluous Oscars. Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary Flaming Eye from "The Lord of the Rings," and I fear that nobody can stop him."

Go to Rate My Gas Mask now! Not as exciting asRate My Poo but still worth the effort....

It was brilliant to see the O Brother soundtrack win best album Grammy last week. The wonderful bluegrass album's overwhelming word of mouth popularity could be a warning to lazy record company people (too often, people who don't like music) to lift their game. Even in Australia, the O Brother soundtrack spent some time in the ARIA top 40.

In an essential article, Newsweek agrees....

"So what can the industry learn from “O Brother”? Probably nothing. For one thing, authenticity can’t be cloned without turning it into “authenticity,” and smart listeners can hear quotation marks a mile away. For another, record executives must be among the slowest learners on the planet. Only 5 percent of major-label releases make a profit; a big company needs to sell 500,000 copies of a CD just to break even. Hmm: could any of this have to do with dumb decisions? Virgin Records bought Mariah Carey for $80 million in 2001, only to give her an extra $28 million last month to go away. Meanwhile, Sheryl Crow and Don Henley have felt compelled to found the new Recording Artists’ Coalition, an organization of high-profile performers hoping to protect musicians from their own labels."


Discuss

"A Las Vegas man who admitted stealing a monkey last year and trading the animal for crack cocaine and marijuana has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison."

Go to Boing Boing for the link to the full story.

Rain

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in,
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin.

- Spike Milligan 1918 - 2002