In 1962, the Beatles were told by their manager, Brian Epstein, to up their style ante with sleek matching suits. But before that, the Fab Four took a more rebellious route, often wearing leather jackets on stage.

Now, thanks to Bonham’s, you can bid on one of the bad boy pieces from the Beatles’ formative years. George Harrison’s black leather jacket that he acquired in Germany during the early ’60s will be part of Bonham’s Entertainment Memorabilia sale on December 12 in London.

George wasn’t the last owner of the jacket, which comes with the label “Meyer-Schuchardt Sport und Leder Hamburg Monckebergstr. 6 Lubeck Breitestr. 37.” He gave it to his older brother Harry in 1964, and Harry then handed it down to his son Paul, who often flaunted the jacket at school in the ’70s. It remained in Harrison’s family until now.

That’s not the only Beatles piece that will be offered at auction. George’s leather boots (circa 1964) and a western-style orange shirt that he wore during the 1971 benefit show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the Concert for Bangladesh, will also be up for bid.

The Harrison pieces won’t come cheap – the jacket is estimated at £90,000-120,000 ($143,235-190,980), the boots at £12,000-15,000 ($19,098-23,873), and the shirt at £6,000-8,000 ($9,549-12,732). But hey, at least the winning bidder on the jacket will also walk away with a copy of the documentary about Harrison’s life, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World.”

Click on the slideshow to see items included in Bonham’s Entertainment Memorabilia sale on December 12.

LONDON — The ongoing protest against the Tate sponsorship agreement with oil and gas giant BP again took center stage last week, when fifteen Tate Members sent a letter to the Tate Members Council, chaired by broadcaster Jon Snow, to raise the issue before last Friday's Annual General Meeting. 

Last December, BP announced a new sponsorship deal with several major art institutions, including Tate, to run over the next five years. The signatories argue that, since BP received a $4.5-billion criminal fine following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the company’s sponsorship is in breach of Tate Ethics Policy, which states that the institution will not accept money when “the donor has acted, or is believed to have acted, illegally in the acquisition of funds, for example when funds are tainted through being the proceeds of criminal conduct.”

The letter reads: “We pay our subscriptions to be Tate members because we feel good about supporting an institution that benefits the wider public. It is difficult for us, however, to feel good about our support when we also feel that by so doing we are legitimising the activities of BP. By helping BP to create a ‘social license to operate’ through its sponsorship programme, Tate is playing an active role in BP’s global environmental and human rights controversies and in accelerating the climate crisis.”

Among the specific questions the Tate members have raised are the following: “Has the Council discussed the issue of BP sponsorship and, if so, what were the outcomes of those discussions? Has the Council sought to discover how much sponsorship BP is giving Tate so that a more open discussion can take place about finding alternative sources of funding? Will the Council engage with concerned members about the controversy of BP sponsorship of Tate and provide a public forum for this debate to take place?”

These questions remain unanswered. Representatives of the signatories appeared at Tate Members AGM on Friday night at Tate Modern to reiterate their concerns. 

“As a member of the Tate I find it increasingly abhorrent that the celebration of human culture is tainted by a source of sponsorship in the form of BP, that is condemning humanity to a future devastated by climate change. Now, it is tainted further by hypocrisy,” commented Jamie Kelsey-Fry, who is one of the members behind the letter.

On Friday afternoon Platform and Liberate Tate  — the two organizations that have been leading the protests against Tate’s ties with BP — staged a “mass listening” of their alternative audio guides, “Tate a Tate,” produced in collaboration with Art not oil and artists including Ansuman Biswas, Mark McGowan, and Phil England.

These events continued a long line of actions against the sponsorship deal. Last July, over 100 Liberate Tate members installed a 54-foot-long wind turbine blade in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The piece was offered to Tate as a “gift to the nation,” supported by a petition signed by 1,310 people. Although the institution kept archival documentation of the event, it turned down the gift.

Over the last two years, Liberate Tate has staged spectacular demonstrations, including pouring an oil-like substance over a naked performer, and sending members to the Tate Summer Party with oil gushing out from under their dresses. And in 2011, a petition signed by over 8,000 people asking Tate to sever its links with BP was presented to Tate director Nicholas Serota.

When contacted by ARTINFO UK, Tate sent an already released statement. It reads: “The Tate Trustees first agreed a sponsorship policy in 1991, and more recently incorporated its principles within an Ethics Policy in 2008. The Board and Ethics committee regularly review compliance with the policy. BP has worked with Tate since 1990 and fits within the guidelines of this policy.”

A bold red lip is undeniably sexy, but you risk smearing your lipstick on your boyfriend's face with one innocent peck... 

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A: Perfume is meant to linger on the skin, which is unfortunate if you’ve gone overboard or sprayed on a stinker. Soap and water don’t usually take it all off. But Brooklyn perfumer Anne McClain, founder of MCMC Fragrances, has a couple of foolproof solutions...

Every 12 months, the editors of Art+Auction assemble a list of the individuals who have stood out in the art world over the last year, and publish our results as our Power List. On December 2, we published our Introduction, explaining the thinking that went into this year's list and our process of judging. Today, we offer the eighth of nine installments to be published on ARTINFO, of rising figures within the art world: “Power to Watch.”

To see Part 8 of Art+Auction's Power 2012, click on the slideshow.

For full coverage of the Power 100, visit the page here.

This has been the year of Cara. Ms. Delevingne was everywhere. Beloved by Karl, Azealia, and everyone in between, this London native has seen her star rise faster than a Brandt boy accepts an invite (we’re talking light speed). With Chanel and Blumarine campaigns under her belt and innumerable runways beneath her feet, Delevingne stands poised to take her goofball attitude, razor-sharp looks, and signature eyebrows well into 2013. We’ve seen a lot of her this year, and here, ARTINFO picks her best and brightest looks from 2012.

Click on the slideshow to see our favorite Cara looks. 

– India's First-Ever Biennale Launches With M.I.A Assist: Tonight, India will kick off its first-ever contemporary art biennale, which is set to take over the southern city of Kochi for the next three months. In a region where artists often complain the art scene is too market-focused, the biennale is intended to "launch a discourse on art," said co-curator Riyas Komu. The festival will debut with a performance by British musician and sometime artist M.I.A. [WSJ]

– Censored Kara Walker Work Uncovered in Newark: A mural by Kara Walker on loan from New York-based collector Scott London to the Newark Public Library was censored last November following complaints from library employees. The institution had a change of heart yesterday, however, and removed the cloth that had been covering the work. "I didn't realize I'd be opening up a can of worms when I installed [it]," said library director Wilma Grey, who plans to hold a discussion about Walker's art at an upcoming staff meeting. "I would love to have Kara Walker come," she added. [AiA]

– Inside David Lynch's Historic French Studio: David Lynch is hard at work on a new series of etchings that he's producing at a very historic site: a two-floor Parisian workshop built in 1880 that was once used by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, and Miro. "Everybody that comes to this place, they feel it ... I can feel the past. I can feel the whole art of life going on here," he said. "In people's dream of Paris, this place would fit in that dream perfectly." [Reuters] 

– LACMA Sells Warhol, Kelly, and More: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is quietly selling 15 works from its collection at L.A. Modern Auctions on December 16 to benefit future acquisitions. Among the works headed to the block are an Isamu Noguchi chess table (est. $150,000-$250,000), an editioned screenprint of Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol ($10,000-$20,000), and a benefit lithograph by Ellsworth Kelly from 1983 ($3,000-$4,000). [The Art Law Blog]

– Love Affair Between Brands and Art at an End?: While the 2000s were filled with collaborations between top-shelf contemporary artists like Takashi Murakami and luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, those days may be over as the middle market for such goods shrinks and artists think carefully about their own brand. "Artists who consider marketing themselves should think twice," says Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr. "Warhol had an instinctive grasp of just how to play the game and played it with genius. Lesser talents may, in the short term, laugh all the way to be the bank. But in the long term they may wake from their pipe dreams of fame and fortune as ‘period’ laughingstocks while their work floods the flea market." [TAN]

– Elgin Marble Sells at Sotheby's: A marble portrait bust of Germanicus that Thomas Bruce, the 7th Lord Elgin acquired from Rome in 1799, was sold at Sotheby's in New York last week for $8.2 million, far above its $3-$5 million estimate (and only a fraction of the cost of a Gerhard Richter abstract). Unlike the marble sculptures removed from Athens's Parthenon by Lord Elgin and then sold to the British Museum in 1816, the Germanicus bust has never been the subject of an ownership feud and had remained in the Elgin clan since its original acquisition. [Telegraph]

– Peter, the Wolf, and Will Cotton: For its latest production of Prokofiev's "Peter & the Wolf," a tradition going back six years, the Guggenheim Museum tapped artist Will Cotton to design the set and characters of the beloved children's musical story. The show is narrated by Isaac Mizrahi and conductor George Manahan leads the 13-piece Julliard Ensemble. The painter known for his candy- and nudes-filled cloudscape paintings toned down his aesthetic for the tykes: The entire narrative is set in a gingerbread house-cum-chalet, and all the characters are sepia-toned flat cut-outs that suggest children's pop-up books. [WSJ]

– Met Gets Benton Masterwork: "America Today," a 10-panel mural by Thomas Hart Benton that is considered among the most prominent examples of American scene painting, has a new owner. After languishing in storage for almost a year, the work has been gifted to the Metropolitan Museum from insurance company AXA Equitable. It will hang in the Met's temporary satellite space at the Whitney's landmark Breuer building in 2015 — but it won't be seen until then, since the museum is so squeezed for space. [NYT]

– V&A Appoints Critic as New Curator: London's Victoria and Albert Museum has appointed Kieran Long, the Evening Standard's architecture critic, as its new senior curator of contemporary architecture, design, and digital, a post he'll take up in the new year. "Our challenge will be to understand what contemporary objects and projects the V&A should be collecting and how we give the museum strengths in particular fields of contemporary practice," Long said. [TAN]

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Top Ten Highlights From the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial

Art+Auction's Power 2012, Part 6: Power Patrons

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

QUEENSLAND, Australia — Established in 1993, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art’s flagship international contemporary art event, and the only major exhibition series in the world that focuses exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. This year celebrating its 20th anniversary, APT7 took the opportunity to reflect on changes over the past two decades, including the transformation of landscape and adaptation of local cultures to a modern globalized world.

Featuring 75 artists and groups from 27 countries, special exhibits include a collection of contemporary works from Papua New Guinea; “0 – Now: Traversing West Asia,” which brings together artists from the Middle East and Central Asia to focus on shifting borders and regional volatility; and “The 20 Year Archive,” interpretations of varied archives throughout the region. Opening this past Saturday, APT7 will occupy the Gallery of Modern Art and spaces at Queensland Art Gallery through April 14, 2013. 

To see the top ten highlights from the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial, click on the slideshow.

While there’s no shortage of sips made in the good ol’ U.S.A., some have a more distinctly American flavor and character than others. When it comes to whiskey...

All are available at retailers in North Texas. Wine from Trader Joe's, for instance, is $2.99 and not all that bad to serve late in the evening. The holiday party season is here! We combed through our recent Wine Panel picks to give you some tips on what

NEW YORK — Sanrio’s internationally famous mouth-less, bow-adorned, white cat Hello Kitty was born in 1974 — a full 14 years after the brand itself was founded — but her birth launched a cultural phenomenon that has become iconic over the past 37 years. The joyful bobtail cat has been a muse for many artists over the years, appearing in front of the Lever House in monumental white sculptures by Tom Sachs and most recently in this year's hit graphic novel “The Nao of Brown,” by Glyn Dillon. Now the New York book publisher Abrams has teamed up with Roger Gastman and Sanrio to release a compendium of Hello Kitty-inspired artwork as well as New York’s first Sanrio-themed art exhibition, set to debut tonight at Openhouse Gallery in SoHo.

The company — whose name actually has Spanish origins — describes the adorable character’s minimal facial features and mission on their website by saying, “Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She’s Sanrio's ambassador to the world and isn't bound to any particular language.” Some artists and enthusiasts have embraced this ethos, including Gastman, who compiled Abrams’s “Hello Kitty Hello Art!” book and says, “Hello Kitty is a blank canvas. There is no mouth, so you can put whatever emotion on to her.”

Others have explored this blank canvas in different ways, projecting darker, more political, often-personal narratives onto her. The work in “Hello Kitty Hello Art!” shows the far-reaching influence of the character and wide range of interpretation. Japanese-born graffiti artist AIKO contributes her artwork and an essay to the book, explaining how Hello Kitty has not only acted as an artistic source, but also a cultural anchor connecting her to home. Her painting “Hello Kitty Block Party” shows Kitty and several friends partying and tagging a Brooklyn wall.

Kitty's general cuteness also makes her an irresistable target for subversion. In Angry Woebots’s “Angst Kitty,” she’s a hissing and spitting feline surrounded by three apples (signifying her weight) and her big red bow. Bobby Chiu’s “Imposter” depicts Kitty as a grotesque, wrinkly monster wearing fuzzy kitty ears and terrorizing her friends.

Work by blue chip names and graffiti legends, like Niagara, Ron English, Scott Campbell, Shepard Fairey, appear in the book. The show at Openhouse will include many of the book’s artists and more, like Paul Frank, DABS MYLA, RISK, Tristan Eaton of Tokidoki, and Nina Chanel Abney. The anthology of work in “Hello Kitty Hello Art!” and tonight’s exhibition stands as a testament to the versatility of Sanrio’s visually inspiring icon, which, after 37 years, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. 

To see artwork from the book, click the slideshow. 

– Two-Year Jail Sentence for Tate Rothko Vandal: Vladimir Umanets (a.k.a. Wlodzimierz Umaniec), the outspoken Yellowist who defaced Mark Rothko's "Black on Maroon" (1961) at the Tate Modern on October 7, has been sentenced to two years in prison for the act of vandalism, which will require conservation work costing up to £200,000 ($322,500) to the prized painting, recently estimated by Sotheby's to be worth between £5-£9 million ($8-$14.5 million). Judge Robert Chapple said it was "wholly and utterly unacceptable" to promote Yellowism's philosophy that all creative production is equal by damaging a work of art. [Telegraph]

– No More Visas for Young Artists in England: A new U.K. immigration law excludes young artists from obtaining visas to work in the country. A successful applicant must be "an established, world-class artist." (By contrast, "promising" young scientists are welcome to apply.)  "[I] couldn’t think of anything dafter," says Jude Kelly, artistic director of London's Southbank Center. France and Germany, she notes, "are much more welcoming to young artists from emerging countries like Brazil, India, and South Korea." [TAN]

– DMA May Soon Own "Salvator Mundi": The Dallas Museum of Art has made an offer to buy Leonardo da Vinci's rediscovered painting "Christ as Salvator Mundi" (c. 1499). The museum must now wait to see if its offer — known only to be in the "tens of millions" — is acceptable to its unidentified dealers. If the DMA is successful, it will become one of only two institutions in the United States (along with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.) to have a work by the Renaissance master on public view. [D Magazine]

– Aspen Art Museum Gets $2.5 Million: Collectors Bob and Nancy Magoon are donating $2.5 million to the Colorado contemporary art institution to endow its CEO and director position in perpetuity. Their gift follows an earlier $500,000 donation made toward the capital campaign to construct the new, Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum facility currently underway in downtown Aspen. [Press Release]

– Pro-Labor Mural Removed for Good: Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage was within his rights to remove a large, pro-organized-labor mural from Maine's Department of Labor building, a federal appeals court ruled. Five Mainers, including three artists, filed a lawsuit claiming the removal violated the painter's First Amendment rights. The court concluded that the governor's actions qualified as "government speech." The mural featured a 1937 shoe strike in Maine. [AP]

– Hammer Acquires Suzanne Lacy's Rape Map: The Hammer Museum has bought artist and activist Suzanne Lacy's 1977 work "Three Weeks in May," on which she collaborated with Leslie Labowitz and which mapped Southern California rape cases. Last year it was included in L.A. MOCA's "Under the Big Black Sun." At the time, then-chief curator Paul Schimmel had hoped to acquire the piece for his institution, but did not have sufficient funds. [LAT]

– Tate Launches Youth Program in Response to Riots: Seeking to remedy the situation that helped spark last year's riots in the U.K., Tate has begun a four-year, £5-million ($8-million) drive to connect with 80,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25 through a series of festivals and artist workshops. "It’s a program that recognizes we still have a very long way to go in terms of the provision of arts in this country particularly to certain kinds of communities," said director Nicholas Serota, who hopes the project will “spark a long-term transformation in the way young people engage with art." [Independent]

– Artist's L.A. Light Rail Bridge Rolled Out: The new extension of Los Angeles's Metro Gold Line, a concrete bridge straddling the I-210 freeway and designed by Minnesota-based artist Andrew Leicester, will open to the public this week, though motorists have been passing under the completed infrastructure-as-public artwork project for weeks. The 600-foot-long structure, whose patterns and details alternately evoke a woven basket and the scales of a snake, took two years and $690 million to build. [LAT]

– A Tie for Russia's Top Art Prize: For the first time in its five-year history, the annual Kandinsky Prize, Russia's equivalent of the Turner Prize, has two winners: artist collective AES+F and the sculptor Grisha Bruskin. They split the €40,000 ($52,300) prize money, while Dimitri Venkov receives the €10,000 ($13,000) under-35 prize. [BBC]

– The Problem With Collecting Khmer Antiquities: Sotheby's ongoing legal fight with federal prosecutors over a Khmer statue that may have been looted from a temple in Cambodia has cast a shadow over a well-known collector in the field. Douglas A.J. Latchford, a bodybuilding impresario and expert in Khmer works of art, is depicted in court documents as a scheming collector who lied to import stolen objects into the country. "This is somebody's imagination working overtime," he countered. [NYT]

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For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.