Neil Pendock: March 2007
Oh, and that cheesy pair of wet white tennis socks on his feet. Still, if emerging from the waves in a "snuggly fitting bathing suit leaving very little up to the imagination" (Fox News) can confirm Daniel Craig as the new James Bond, perhaps Brad's bulging boxers can atone for his bomb as Achilles in that $100 million Hollywood epic, Troy.
Of course December's Vanity Fair is not about Art at all, but rather Money. But then so is WINE, judging by the January edition of this organ: breathless double page spreads from Mrs Robinson on Mr Big's icon auction in Manhattan and an elegantly penned Cold Ferment from Mr F which kicks off with the memorable line "South Africans do not have an appetite for expensive wine". Which must have raised a chuckle from friend Alan Pick, of Butcher's Shop & Grill fame, whose wine list supplies the contradiction.
Oh for the naughty '90s when Mr Big was Carrie Bradshaw's moody shag in Sex and the City and Sex was widely used to sell both Art and Wine. Sex is still big news in Art with Lisa Yuskavage (classified as a Supernova artist by Vanity Fair, along with Marlene Dumas, sister of Pinotage pioneer Cornelis from Jacobsdal) making millions from "provocative works [that] toy with soft-core porn". But when it comes to Wine, lust has largely been replaced by greed.
Which is the Warholian option. As Andy noted: "I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200 000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall." After reading about Mr Big wrapping his precocious 30-year-old fungiform papillae around bottles of 1911 Romanée-Conti (at R726 000 a pop, in magnum), a discrete Sotheby's sticker stating auction price paid, would be nice.
While three quarters of a bar might seem excessive for something to drink (provincial politicians paying R96 000 for lunch excepted), Wine pales into insignificance when confronted with Art. Last year, an "obsessively private Mexican financier", David Martinez, paid $143 million (R1 billion) for a Jackson Pollock painting called No. 5, 1948, executed in brown and yellow drips. Jack the Dripper was the creation of '50s New York art critic Clement Greenberg, who constructed the intellectual framework for Pollock which climaxed with Aussie PM Gough Whitlam purchasing his "blue poles" drip for the National Gallery - even if the eponymous poles were added by Barnett Newman after an evening of drunken collaboration.
With Wine imitating Art, it took two Bobs (Mondavi and Parker) to supply the intellectual framework rich folk require to justify the price for icons like Opus One. The epiphany wine for Mr Big - to such an extent that after his first sip, he cornered the market within his event horizon.
Which is the deeper reason that SA wine is priced, at its most expensive, in the hundreds, rather than hundreds of thousands, a bottle: the lack of a commentator of sufficient gravitas to provide the intellectual support structure for a credible price hierarchy. For the mega rich may be long on bucks but are often short on cultural confidence, and a stellar price confirms the exquisiteness of their taste. Or at least excludes poorer palates from protesting that the Emperor wears no clothes. Or boxer shorts, at best.
Which is happily not the case with SA Art: Marlene's moody oils are priced in the millions of US dollars and William Kentridge is rumoured to have shifted R70 million worth of product last year alone. Price tags to make them both extremely collectible.
