Show Me the Monet

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a famous French painter whose work gave a name to the art movement Impressionism, which was concerned with capturing light and natural forms.

His 1899 oil painting "The Japanese Footbridge" (above) immerses us in the physical experience of being in a garden. 

With the bands of the blue bridge suspended like a canopy near the top of the canvas and no sky to be seen, the water and billowing foliage fill the visual field, immersing the viewer in the verdant, brightly colored waterscape. 

Cool blue and green tones predominate, but are balanced by the pink, white, and yellow lilies floating in complex pattern across the surface of the water from near to far. Controlled, vertical dabs of paint define the sparkling greenery and its fleeting reflection in the water, while the more fluid lilies are rendered with broad, textured, horizontal strokes that emphasize the shared physicality of the paint and the landscape.

 

Then we have Banksy's 2005 painting "Show Me the Monet" which riffs on that particular artwork – it features shopping carts and a bright orange traffic cone ditched in a pond – and which was sold at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday for a cool $9.8 million. 

Five collectors bidding during the final minutes of the auction drove up the price to make it the second most expensive Banksy sold at an auction. 

“The work is such a complex and strong comment on the institution of art, but also a comment on consumerism versus culture”, pronounced Jacob Thage, the director of the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark where “Show Me The Monet” was most recently displayed to the public. 

It’s the priciest of Banksy’s works to sell at auction since his painting Devolved Parliament, depicting MPs as chimpanzees in the House of Commons, was sold for $12.1 million on October 03, 2019, and which marked the artist’s record auction price.

 

Celtic were left frustrated on Sunday when they could only manage a draw in a six-goal thriller in their Scottish Premiership match against Aberdeen. 

The Dons took a first-half lead before Callum McGregor surged through to equalize in the fifty-second minute. Again, the Dons scored in the sixty-fifth minute but eleven minutes later, Leigh Griffiths received Tom Rogic's pass inside the box to fire in Celtic's second equalizer, his rising shot flying past the goalie. Ryan Christie's penalty in the seventy-eighth minute put Celtic ahead for the first time but the Dons levelled with an injury time penalty. 

Oh well, that's football!