David Hockney pool painting soars to $90 mln, record for living artist

NEW YORK:  An iconic 1972 painting by British artist David Hockney soared to $90.3 million at Christie’s on Thursday, smashing the record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.

With Christie’s commission, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” surpassed the auction house’s pre-sale estimate of about $80 million, following a bidding war between two determined would-be buyers once the work hit $70 million.

The previous record for a work by a living artist was held by Jeff Koons’ sculpture “Balloon Dog,” which sold for $58.4 million in 2013. Hockney’s previous auction record was $28.4 million.

The 1972 work by the 81-year-old British artist, one of Hockney’s most famous paintings which depicts a man in a pink jacket looking down on another figure swimming underwater in a pool, was reported to have been consigned by British billionaire currency trader Joe Lewis.

Christie’s did not identify the seller or the successful bidder, who was bidding via telephone during a nearly 10-minute contest for the work.

Morgan Long, senior director of art investment house Fine Art Group, hailed “a great result for Christie’s,” saying it achieved its predicted $80 million price “through a combination of clever marketing and what looked like sheer determination on the part of (a) phone client to take the painting home.”

In a virtually unprecedented move for such a valuable painting, “Portrait of an Artist,” which was on exhibition at Tate Britain, the Pompidou Centre and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art over the past two years, was sold with no reserve, the minimum price at which the consignor agrees to sell a piece.

The price went far to boost the success of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction, which took in a total of $357.6 million, roughly the middle of its expected range, with 41 of the 48 lots on offer finding buyers.

“What we have learned from this week is that demand for great art remains global, with strong participation from American bidders and good activity from Europe and Asia,” Chief Executive Guillaume Cerutti said after the sale.

Other sale highlights included Francis Bacon’s “Study of Henrietta Moraes Laughing,” which sold for $21.7 million against a pre-sale estimate of $14 million to $18 million, and Alexander Calder’s “21 Feuilles Blanches,” which more than doubled its high estimate, selling for just under $18 million.

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Oh boy – vintage Mickey Mouse posters to fetch thousands at auction

LONDON: Seven rare vintage posters of Mickey Mouse are expected to fetch thousands of dollars at an auction that coincides with the 90th anniversary of the cartoon character’s first film appearance.

The seven posters, dating from the 1930s and 1940s, went on display on Friday at a commemorative exhibition in London organised by Disney.

They are going under the Sotheby’s hammer in an online auction that runs until Nov. 26. A price list in a statement from the auctioneer and Walt Disney Co. UK & Ireland suggests they could fetch more than 130,000 pounds in total.

“We’re expecting a lot of interest… There are collectors who collect animation posters from all over the world and Mickey Mouse historically is the most valuable of all the animation characters,” Bruce Marchant, Sotheby’s film poster consultant, told Reuters.

“They’re particularly rare posters from England, France, Belgium and two of them are the only known surviving examples and for three of the others, there are certainly less than five known.”

Such posters were reused several times at cinemas and, being made of paper, most eventually fell apart and were thrown away. “So they were never meant to be looked at 80-90 years later” or viewed as works of art, Marchant added.

The exhibition, “Mickey’s UK Art Collective Exhibition”, is also showcasing new Mickey-inspired works by established and emerging UK artists including Jimmy C, Michael Bosanko and Pal Kumar.

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Saudi women mount ‘inside-out’ abaya protest

RIYADH: Saudi women have mounted a rare protest against the abaya, posting pictures on social media wearing the obligatory body-shrouding robe inside out.

The conservative petro-state has some of the world’s toughest restrictions on women, who are required to wear the typically all-black garment in public.

Powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in March said wearing the robe was not mandatory in Islam, but in practice, nothing changed and no formal edict to that effect was issued.

Using the hashtag “inside-out abaya”, dozens of women have posted pictures of flipped robes in a rare protest against the strict dress code.

“Because #Saudi feminists are endlessly creative, they’ve come up with new form of protest,” activist Nora Abdulkarim tweeted this week.

“They are posting pictures of (themselves) wearing their abayas inside-out in public as a silent objection to being pressured to wear it.”

Another woman on Twitter said the online campaign, which appears to be gaining traction after it surfaced this week, was an act of “civil protest”.

In an interview to CBS Television in March, the crown prince said: “The laws are very clear and stipulated in the laws of Sharia: that women wear decent, respectful clothing, like men.”

But, he added, this “does not particularly specify a black abaya. (It) is entirely left for women to decide what type of decent and respectful attire to wear.”

After his comment, prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Ahmed bin Qassim al-Ghamdi added a new wrinkle to the debate when he dismissed the long-held view that black was the only colour for abayas permissible in Islam.

Prince Mohammed, currently facing global criticism over the murder of critic Jamal Khashoggi, has spearheaded a liberalisation drive in the conservative kingdom.

In June, women celebrated taking the wheel for the first time in decades as the kingdom overturned the world’s only ban on female motorists.

The kingdom has also allowed women to enter sports stadiums, previously a male-only arena, and is pushing for greater participation of women in the workforce as it seeks to diversify its oil-dependent economy.

But in tandem with the reforms, the kingdom has seen a wave of arrests of women activists in recent months as it steps up a crack down on dissent.

The country also faces criticism over its male guardianship system, which allows men to exercise arbitrary authority to make decisions on behalf of their female relatives.

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Nepal’s first robot waiter is ready for orders

“Please enjoy your meal,” says Nepal´s first robot waiter, Ginger, as she delivers a plate of steaming dumplings to a table of hungry customers.

The poor Himalayan nation is better known for its soaring mountain peaks than technological prowess, but a group of self-taught young innovators are seeking to change that.

Local start-up Paaila Technology built Ginger, a 1.5 metre (five-foot) tall robot, from scratch and programmed her to understand both English and Nepali.

The bilingual humanoid robot — named Ginger after a common ingredient in Nepali cuisine — can even crack jokes like Apple´s Siri or Amazon´s Alexa.

Three ´Gingers´ work at Naulo restaurant in the dusty capital Kathmandu, where pot-holed roads and crumbling buildings still bear the scars of a powerful earthquake that hit more than three years ago.

“This is our testing ground. We are fine tuning it with responses from our customers,” Binay Raut, CEO of the company, told AFP.

The team of 25 young engineers — Raut is the oldest at 27 — worked for months to build the robot, welding and moulding the prototype by hand in their tiny three-roomed office.

What Nepal lacks in tech infrastructure the engineers made up for in ingenuity — Ginger´s sleek-looking plastic body was painted in a neighbourhood car workshop.

Naulo opened its doors four months ago and their robot waiters have been a big draw, attracting curious customers of all ages.

Ginger, who is able to sense movement and obstacles, deftly navigates the crowded restaurant carrying trays laden with food.

Customers order via a touch screen menu fitted into the tables, and Ginger is called to the kitchen when dishes are ready.

“It was a completely new experience,” said 73-year-old Shalikram Sharma, who was born before televisions were available in Nepal.

Ginger has become quite a selfie-star and is often distracted from her work by children keen to get a photo with the sleek robot.

“They look so good. I could not believe they were made in Nepal,” said Neelam Kumar Bimali, a diner enjoying an evening meal with his family.

With its eyes on the global market, Paila Technology is in the process of patenting its design to sell at home and abroad.

The World Economic Forum recently predicted that by 2025 more than half of all jobs will be performed by robots — almost twice as many as today.

That is a trend Ginger´s creators are banking on.

At present, a few human waiters help Ginger but an upgrade is in the works that should make Naulo entirely robot-run.

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Facebook denies hiding Russian sabotage, but fires lobbying firm

WASHINGTON: Facebook on Thursday denied allegations in the New York Times that it tried to mislead the public about its knowledge of Russian misinformation ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, but severed links with a Republican consultancy.

The Times detailed obfuscation by Facebook’s top bosses on the Russia front, said the company has at times smeared critics as anti-Semitic or tried to link activists to billionaire investor George Soros, and also tried to shift public anger away toward rival tech companies.

In a statement in response, Facebook disputed “inaccuracies” in the story, but said it was ending its contract with a Republican lobbying company named in the article, Definers Public Affairs, which specializes in opposition research.

The Times, in a lengthy investigative piece based on interviews with more than 50 people both inside the company and with Washington officials, lawmakers and lobbyists, argued that Facebook’s way of dealing with crisis was to “delay, deny and deflect.”

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Cheryl Sandberg were both so bent on growing Facebook that they “ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view,” the report said.

On Russia, Zuckerberg declared in the fall of 2016 that it was “crazy” to think Facebook had been used to help Donald Trump win the US presidency, but the report said in-house experts knew this not to be the case.

In fact, the Times said, Facebook had amassed evidence for over a year of Russian activity through an investigation led by its former security chief, Alex Stamos.

But it was only belatedly that the company’s board was informed of the full extent of the meddling, the Times said.

In its statement, Facebook said it had ended its contract with Definers as of Wednesday night. It did not explain why, but insisted it had long taken the Russia factor seriously and was committed to fighting fake news.

“We’ve acknowledged publicly on many occasions -– including before Congress -– that we were too slow to spot Russian interference on Facebook, as well as other misuse,” it said.

“But in the two years since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve invested heavily in more people and better technology to improve safety and security on our services.

“While we still have a long way to go, we’re proud of the progress we have made in fighting misinformation, removing bad content and preventing foreign actors from manipulating our platform.”

– Going on the attack –

The Times said that when criticism of its belated Russia admission grew, Facebook mounted a lobbying campaign led by Sandberg, pushing negative stories about its political critics and making rival companies like Google and Apple look bad.

In July of this year, as a Facebook executive testified before a congressional committee, anti-Facebook demonstrators barged into the room and held up a sign depicting Zuckerberg and Sandberg — who are both Jewish — as the twin heads of an octopus with its tentacles around the world.

Facebook responded by lobbying a Jewish civil rights group — the Anti-Defamation League — to publicly label that criticism as anti-Semitic, the Times said.

Facebook was also said to have employed Definers to discredit activists, partly by linking them to the liberal, Jewish Soros, who has become a favored target of Trump supporters and far-right conspiracy groups.

The company’s statement said any suggestion that its own counter-offensive embraced anti-Semitic tactics was “reprehensible and untrue.”

Before and since this month’s midterm elections, which saw the Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives, Facebook has shut down dozens of accounts on its own platform and on Instagram which it said were aimed at influencing the vote.

The world’s most popular social media platform has been on the back foot for months, including over the allegation that data from millions of Facebook users was abused by the consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help drive Trump to the White House.

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Silicon eyed as way to boost electric car battery potential

The race to build a better electric car battery is turning to silicon, with several companies working to engineer types of the material that can boost driving range and cut production costs.

About 500,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were sold globally in 2016, a figure that is expected to jump sevenfold by 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

That increase is forecast to be helped by government mandates to cut tailpipe emissions by banning gasoline and diesel-powered cars. But many drivers have so far been put off by the high cost of EVs and worries about driving range, which so far is limited to a few hundred miles (kilometers) before needing a charge.

But silicon could, if adopted en masse for EV batteries, help boost energy storage.

One such company, California-based Sila Nanotechnologies, aims to have its technology in over a million electric vehicle (EVs) batteries by the middle of the next decade, Chief Executive Gene Berdichevsky said in an interview.

Silicon has a higher energy density than the graphite traditionally used as part of battery anodes. Batteries are comprised of an anode and cathode, the negative and positive parts, respectively, between which electrical current flows.

Sila, which started at a laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says it has developed technology that can replace graphite entirely, helping to boost capacity and range.

Researchers at Vrije University in Brussels estimate that using silicon can cut the cost per kilowatt hour of EVs by 30 percent.

Sila, which counts BMW AG (BMWG.DE) and Amperex Technology Limited (300750.SZ) – the world’s largest producer of batteries for consumer goods – as key customers, aims to launch its silicon products in consumer goods next year.

“The year we have our eye on for being in the first vehicles is 2023 so we’ll need to get up to many gigawatt hours of capacity to make a meaningful impact in the automotive space,” said Berdichevsky, a former Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) engineer who helped design the electric carmaker’s Roadster model.

While Sila’s product replaces graphite entirely, Canadian graphite material producer Elcora Advanced Materials Corp (ERA.V) is one of a number of companies working on boosting the capacity of graphite anode powders by adding silicon.

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