– Frank Gehry, Poster Designer?: The world’s most famous living concert hall designer has taken on another music-related task: designing the official poster for the 54th Grammy Awards. The poster, which depicts the Grammy's trademark golden gramophone in the middle of what appears to be a Gehry-designed city, is reminiscent of the starchitect’s 1991 Chiat/Day building. (Both pair a bizarre, oversize object — the Grammy or, in the case of Chiat/Day, a pair of binoculars — in the middle of a Gehry design.) Gehry designed the L.A. Philharmonic's Walt Disney Concert Hall and sits on the board of the philharmonic, which is this year nominated for a Grammy. [LAT]

– Alex Prager Gets Naughty for T Magazine: The self-taught photographer Alex Prager shot T Magazine’s cover and online video gallery devoted to cinematic villainy. Inspired by nefarious icons and featuring the best performers from the year in film, the feature depicts Rooney Mara as Alex from "A Clockwork Orange," George Clooney as Captain Bligh from "Mutiny on the Bounty," and Brad Pitt as Henry Spencer from "Eraserhead." [NYT]

– French "Googleplex" Hosts Cultural Institute: A team of engineers at Google's newly-inaugurated Paris headquarters has been put in charge of the distribution and preservation of culture online. "We offer, for example, virtual museum visits with high res-pictures of landmark artworks," said cultural institute director Steve Crossan. Google has said it will foot the digitisation processing bill. Perhaps it's an attempt to enroll so-far-reluctant French museums in Google Art Project? [artclair] 

– A New President for London's Royal Academy: Christopher Le Brun has been elected the 26th president of the Royal Academy. Le Brun, who is the first ever painter to get the job, said he wanted the RA to become "a major force in contemporary art." No small task. [BBC] 

– Will Casinos Destroy Miami’s Art Scene?: Anti-casino advocates gathered in Wynwood, Miami’s cultural district, over the weekend to discourage lawmakers from approving a bill designed to bring three $2 billion casino resorts to South Florida. “It’s too big, it overwhelms the entire arts concept we had there,” said Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center board chairman Mike Eidson. [Miami Herald] 

– The Arts of Occupation: The Nation assesses the range of methods, styles, and tactics adopted by the artists of Occupy Wall Street and probes the tensions surrounding the very category of art itself relative to what might be called the “spatial politics” of OWS. A must-read for anyone interested in the aesthetics of the movement. [The Nation]

– Washington Post's Best of 2011: To kick off the requisite barrage of end-of-year "best of" lists, Philip Kennicott selects the best in art and architecture for the Washington Post. The list ranges from the expected (de Kooning at MoMA, the National September 11 Memorial) to the unlikely (a contemporary Mexican photography exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas and "Xu Bing: Tobacco Project" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). [WaPo]

– Huntington Damaged: The Huntington Library and its surrounding gardens were hit hard by last week’s Santa Ana winds, which caused at least $40 million in damage across Southern California. The library is launching a public appeal for donations to pay for the removal of 50 trees that fell in the storm. [LAT]

– Reasons to Love New York: For New York Magazine’s annual “Reasons to Love NY” issue, Jerry Saltz waxes poetic about the city’s galleries, which he calls “the greatest single machine ever invented for exhibiting art.” [NYM]

– Art Dubai's Inaugural Residencies Announced: Artists Hadeyeh Badri, Fayçal Baghriche, Zeinab Al Hashemi, Nasir Nasrallah, Deniz Uster, and Magdi Mostafa have been selected for a three-month residency in the lead-up to Art Dubai, and commissioned to contribute a piece for Art Dubai Projects. Alexandra MacGilp has been selected as curator-in-residence. [e-flux]

– Yoko Ono at the London 2012 Festival: The show, scheduled at London's Serpentine Gallery next summer to coincide with the Olympic Games, will be Ono's most important exhibition in a decade. It will include "SMILE," a large installation taking place simultaneously online and in the gallery, which invites people to submit photos of themselves smiling. [ArtLyst]

– Worst Album Covers of 2011: Pitchfork rounds up the worst album covers of 2011. Our favorite is Limp Bizkit’s cringe-inducing cover art for its album “Gold Cobra,” which is “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” meets Gauguin meets creepy middle-school doodle. [Pitchfork] 

– Art Detective: The Boston Globe profiles Victoria Reed, the MFA Boston’s curator of provenance. Her job “is to make sure the MFA is not embroiled in any of the controversies that have swirled through the museum world in the last decade” with respect to looted artworks. To read ARTINFO’s interview with Reed, click here. [Boston Globe]

– Phyllida Barlow Receives the Aachen Art Prize 2012: The €10,000 ($13,310) biannual award is given to an artist "whose works have continually given new impetus to the international art scene." The award ceremony will take place on May 13 at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen. [Press Release]

At long last, new media art in the UK is getting a prize of its own — though the conception of the term is as open-ended as it gets.

The shortlist for the inaugural Samsung Art+ Prize was announced today. Neil Cummings, Doug Fishbone, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Torsten Lauschmann, Lucky PDF, Aura Satz, Hiraki Sawa, Semiconductor, Erika Tan, and Thomson and Craighead are all in the race to bag the £10,000 ($15,569) prize, which will be awarded during a ceremony at London's British Film Institute on January 25, 2012.

The focus is on the UK which, until now, had been lagging behind in terms of new media art platforms. Nominees have to be citizens of, educated, or based in the country. "The Samsung Art+ Prize will certainly generate interest in media art more generally," said Gary Thomas from London's Animate Projects, who sat on the nominators' panel. "This cannot help but inspire a wider constituency of artists engaged in innovative practice throughout the UK."

If Hiraki Sawa, best known for his dream-like animations, and Lucky PDF, the hot young collective who broadcasted live TV online throughout the last Frieze Art Fair, seem like natural choices, other nominations might surprise. Doug Fishbone's latest project, the narrative feature "Elmina," shot in Ghana with an all-African crew except for the artist (who played the lead role of a Ghanaian farmer), would sit more happily in a traditional film competition. Likewise, Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard's pithy short films are clearly part of the not-terribly-new medium of experimental filmmaking.

The question is thus: what is new media art? For Samsung Art+ Prize's organizers, the term encompasses, "but is not limited to, digital art, computer animation, virtual art, and interactive art." Despite the shortlist, film isn't mentioned in the official blurb, nor the relevance of the BFI as the venue explained.

Still — and whatever the label — the celebration and encouragement of artistic production can only be welcomed when art and education funding in the UK is being squeezed left, right, and center.

Shortlisted artists Thomason and Craighead have expressed their concern that the country might not be able to sustain its creative industry with the forthcoming cuts in higher education: "The UK has a long tradition of punching well above its weight in art and design and this has always included experimenting with and exploring new media in all its forms," they said. "Perhaps it can be put down in part to having some of the best art schools in the world. We do hope this can be allowed to continue in light of such severe government reform of higher education, where public funding for the arts is in such steep decline."

On January 25, the judging panel — comprising Tate curator of film Stuart Comer, Financial Times arts editor Jan Dalley, artist Sooja Kim, and ZKM CEO Peter Weibel — will also present an artist with a £5,000 ($7,784) lifetime achievement award.

An exhibition of the shortlisted artists will take place at London's BFI from January 18 to January 29, 2012.

Toward the long-awaited end of the new semirevival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” which opened on Sunday at the St. James Theater, an eminent psychiatrist proposes that what we have been watching was perhaps only “my own psychoneurotic fantasy.

Rather than an "installation" or "exhibition," "Le Cabinet de Curiosités" is best described as an immersive experience. Studded with relics from another era, all from Paris's Steinitz Gallery, the mise-en-scéne includes 18th-century French walls, the 1810 Empire Table on which Napoleon Bonaparte mapped his battles, and a circa-1770 Hercules table created for Philippe Henri, marquis de Ségur, as well as a fitting soundtrack by 18th-century French composer Marin Marais. But far from a musty antiquarian's showcase, "Le Cabinent" is in fact the vision of the Marlborough Gallery and one of its artists, Thierry Despont, who is also a French architect, designer, and antique collector. Marrying old and new, the show weaves Despont's art — along with that of his gallerymates Manolo Valdes and the late Claudi Bravo — amid the relics, transporting viewers to a difficult-to-define time and place.

At the entrance of its offbeat location at the New York Mercantile Exchange, an enormous creature hangs from the ceiling — it could perhaps be a menacing spider or some underwater oddity, depending on who’s looking at it — both to greet visitors and set the tone of the rest of the experience. It’s a prime example of Despont’s signature sculptural bricolage work, with various unidentified animals and insects sculpted from a variety of household objects: workshop tools, farming equipment, hollow gourds, and the like. In one room, the glass vitrine in the corner appears to be the specimen case of an entymologist, only to reveal upon closer inspection that the critters inside are sculptures rather than beetles and butterflies. It a distinctly otherworldly touch, as are his oil-and-acrylic paintings of planets not findable in any real solar system that hang on the walls.

Inside the space, trompe l’oeil abounds with work by Valdes and Bravo (who, sadly, passed shortly before the "Le Cabinet" opened). Like Despont's, their pieces appear to be one thing from afar but turn out to be something else when seen up close. Bravo contributed his hyperrealist paintings, shockingly sharp depictions of simple objects: brown paper envelopes, crumpled foil, a plate of red onions. Valdes exhibits his 2010 “Libreria” series, shelves lined with pieces of various exotic woods roughly cut to resemble books. Valdes’s other featured sculptures invoke Spain’s royal heritage, with rounded wooden figures of women in elaborate period hoop skirts and regal caballeros referencing paintings by Matisse and Picasso.

A seamless blend of blue-chip antiques and contemporary art, the entire experience has a transportative quality to it, reminiscent of those recent summer blockbusters “Savage Beauty” and “Sleep No More.” 

It's a rare achievement to see a sell-through rate of 100 percent, but that's just what happened at Sotheby's contemporary sale here last Wednesday evening — both by lot and by value. The room resounded with applause when the sale ended and all 27 lots  sold after having been furnished with cautious estimates. The two-day sale totaled €15.4 million ($20.6 million) including buyer's premium.

The top lot was Pierre Soulages's oil painting "3 décembre 1956," which fetched €1.6 million ($2.1 million) including buyer's premium, beating its high estimate of €1.2 million. A second Soulages work, "13 novembre 1969," more than doubled its low estimate of €400,000 ($535,000) when it soared to €840,750 ($1.1 million). Jean-Michel Basquiat, who is usually represented in every fall contemporary auction in Paris, was also fought over, with his "MP" surpassing its high estimate of €900,000 ($1.2 million) to sell for €1.3 million ($1.7 million). Part painting and part Xerox collage, the piece serves as an interesting transition between Basquiat's figurative work and his late collages. It was created in 1984, just after the artist signed on with the Mary Boone Gallery, and its provenance was simple and impeccable: the seller bought it from the gallery the very same year.

Zao Wou-Ki's oil painting "12.12.67" sold for €432,750 ($579,000) including buyer's premium, just reaching its high €400,000 estimate. This was a respectable outcome, though not as spectacular as the artist's performance at Sotheby's last May, when his work smashed pre-sale estimates to reach prices of €1.96 million ($2.62 million) and €1.52 million ($2.03 million). However, Chu Teh-Chun's 1998-1999 work "Sombres nuées" ("Dark Clouds") floated beyond its high estimate of €600,000 to fetch €744,750 ($996,500). It was a nice auction début for a work that the seller had purchased directly from the artist.

Last February at Christie's in London, Martial Raysse set an auction record for a living French artist when his 1962 portrait "L'Année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)" fetched $6.4 million. At Sotheby's last May, another female portrait by Raysse reached €1.74 million ($2.33 million). In last week's sale, his 1963 work "Espace zéro" — a Pop image of an astronaut with a real flashing red light on his spacesuit — achieved a more modest €480,750 ($643,250), though it did lift off beyond its high estimate of €400,000 ($535,200).

The sale continued Thursday afternoon with 114 lots, achieving a sell-through rate of 85 percent by lot and 95 percent by value. Thursday's auction featured an Andy Warhol dollar sign that could just as easily have been part of the evening sale. The 1981 work, inscribed "To Iolas, Love Andy, 82," rose far above its high estimate of €200,000 ($267,600) to attain a price of €348,750 ($466,645), including buyer's premium. Chu Teh-Chun was back with a vengeance, with his painting "Ilots noyés de brume" ("Islands Shrouded in Fog") more than doubling its high estimate of €60,000 ($80,300) to reach a price of €144,750 ($193,700).

Think Damien Hirst is overexposed now? Just wait for January 12, when a gargantuan exhibition of his “Spot” paintings opens at every Gagosian gallery in the world. Details have already emerged about the boundary-breaking show, and Hirst himself is getting the word out to the press — but he's going off-message too, opining on artist’s resale rights and divulging details about private conversations with his dealer Larry Gagosian.

Hirst’s plan to dominate the world with his dotty art began more than 10 years ago, when he floated the idea to executives at the Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery. Though the show didn’t come to fruition then, the artist broached the idea a few years ago with Gagosian, who leapt on opportunity. After more than six months of intensive searching, calling, and cataloguing all over the world, the dealer will unveil an survey of approximately 300 spot paintings at his 11 galleries worldwide. A spot painting catalogue raisonné will accompany the exhibition (try to contain your excitement). In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Hirst estimated that he has created about 1,400 of the paintings over the course of his career. 

While a small portion of the works will be for sale, the vast majority are on loan, largely from private collectors. And since the gallery sought to exhibit the paintings at the gallery closest to where they live in the world, the show will offer a kind of map of where spot paintings have ended up. The process led to some interesting trends: “A lot of the controlled substance paintings — the irregularly shaped canvases — are in Europe and London,” Gagosian director Millicent Wilner told ARTINFO. “So those will be shown at the London gallery.” Similarly, many of the circular spot canvases ended up in the United States along the East Coast, so they will be featured at Gagosian’s New York space. The international search even led one collector to uncover a spot painting he didn’t know he had. “That kind of discovery is always exciting,” said Wilner, who declined to provide any additional details.

It is, perhaps, all too appropriate that Hirst’s spot paintings — a body of work made almost entirely by his machine-like army of assistants — will be shown at the world’s largest machine for selling art. Hirst told the L.A. Times that the series is “a battle between the machine made and man-made. From a distance they look machine made, and then on closer inspection you can see trace of the human hand, pencil lines, and [compass] holes.” The exhibition will include Hirst’s first spot painting (created on board in 1986) as well as more recent ones, like a 12 by 16-inch canvas featuring 18,000 spots that Hirst expects to have finished just in time for the opening.  

According to Wilner, the artist has been very involved in the exhibition: “I have, in my office, scale models of all 11 galleries around the world with scaled-down images of the paintings, and we have meetings and move things around,” she said.

Presumably in an effort to drum up interest in the show, Hirst has been chatting with reporters about more than just spots. He recently opened up to Artlyst about his opinions of the U.K.’s recent expansion of its resale law, which offers artists and their families the right to collect a royalty on the resale of their work. He also gave a bizarre but intriguing anecdote to the L.A. Times about working with Larry: “I remember Larry once phoned me up, and he said he was worried about my production,” Hirst told the paper. “He said: You are making too many paintings. And then, at the end of the conversation, he said: We need more paintings.”

Hirst's tale does touch on an important question about the upcoming show: what effect will this flood of spot paintings have on Hirst’s market? The artist doesn’t seem too concerned. “I've looked at the amount of artworks I've made in my life: 4,800, not including prints,” he told the Times. “I know Warhol did 10,000 not including prints, and Picasso did 40,000. So I have a way to go.”

The global financial crisis has slowed the pace of building in much of the world, ensuring that 2012 won’t exactly go down as a boom year for architects. But there are plenty of eagerly anticipated projects slated for completion, and Architectural Digest...

Yeah, baby! Mike Myers is in talks to bring "Austin Powers" to the Great White Way, the New York Post reports.

Myers, who wrote and starred in the groovy spy spoofs, plans to be involved in the musical, but unfortunately not on the stage as the snaggletoothed, shaggy-haired Powers.

"Mike would be heavily involved in writing the show, but he will not star in it, even though he has quite a good singing voice," a source close to the actor told the New York Post. 

Should "Austin Powers" hit Broadway, it would follow several other movies that have gone from the big screen to the stage, like "Sister Act," "Priscilla Queen of the Desert," "The Lion King," and "The Producers." While several stage adaptations of films went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical — including “Monty Python’s Spamalot” in 2005 and “Billy Elliot the Musical” in 2009 — others flopped, like “Carrie: The Musical” did in 1988.

The Austin Powers trilogy — which started with “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” in 1997, followed by “The Spy Who Shagged Me” in 1999, and “Goldmember” in 2002 — grossed more than $676 million worldwide, according to the New York Post. Myers recently signed a deal with New Line to produce a fourth movie. We’re guessing the dancing, music, and costumes will have no problem translating to the stage, just as long as Julie Taymor isn’t involved.

It has been suggested that love hotels are one of Japan’s more resilient businesses, but even they sometimes succumb to hard times. And in many of the areas liberally dotted with them, the competition must be intense; each one attempting to outdo the...

 If you plan on dining out on Christmas...

Guests participate in two Physique 57 classes per day on a deck overlooking the ocean. "Fitness" and "vacation" aren’t words that usually go hand in hand, but when a fitness retreat takes place on an island called Paradise...

Sotheby's evening Impressionist and Modern sale last week totaled €14.4 million ($19.3 million), landing in the high end of its pre-sale estimate of €11,184,000-15,705,000. The sell-through rate for the sale was 74 percent by lot, or 85.7 percent by value. Three works by Max Ernst anchored the sale, and all surpassed their estimates, with the top lot reaching $3.4 million. (To compare, Sotheby's Paris's two-day contemporary sale fetched €15.4 million, with a 100 percent sell-through rate.)

Ernst's 1927 oil painting "La Carmagnole" — which depicts strange characters in a grotesque and spirited battle — graced the catalogue's cover and was the evening's top lot, bounding past its high estimate of €1.8 million ($2.4 million) to reach €2.5 million ($3.4 million) including buyer's premium. Ernst's "Fleurs exotiques" from 1928, from a private Parisian collection, sold to an anonymous European collector for €840,750 ($1.1 million), against an estimate of €400-600,000. The third Ernst, "La Nature à l'Aurore" from 1937, went for €564,750 ($757,000), nicely outpacing its high estimate of €400,000.

Another hotly anticipated lot, Matta's 1942 work "The Hanged Man," boasted a prestigious provenance from MoMA. Purchased by New York's Byron Gallery, the work then wound up in a private European collection, and was loaned to the Pompidou Center in 1991 for a show about the Surrealist writer André Breton. Breton was a big influence on the Chilean painter, and "The Hanged Man" was inspired by Matta's friendship with Marcel Duchamp, providing an interesting French Surrealist connection to this work. The painting was estimated at €1-1.5 million ($1.3-2 million) and was purchased by an anonymous European collector for €1.8 million ($2.4 million). 

A  record for a Man Ray watercolor was established when his mysterious 1941 piece "Le Beau Temps" sold for €516,750 ($692,750) to an American collector (est. €120-180,000). A preparatory piece for his painting "Les Beaux Temps," this work shows Cubist and Surrealist influence while also anticipating Futurism and Pop Art in an apocalyptic landscape evoking the Second World War.

There were also some impressive results in drawings. Vincent van Gogh's "Tête d'homme au chapeau," which was included in the letters he sent to his fellow artist Emile Bernard, was estimated at only €40-60,000 ($54-80,000), but ended up selling for €192,750 ($258,400). Johannes Theodore Baargeld's small pen and ink drawing "Eine Frau / Frauen / Frauentüll" surpassed its diminutive estimation of €6-8,000 ($8-11,000) to sell for €72,750 ($97,500). The work was shown at MoMA way back in 1936 for the exhibition "Fantastic Art: Dada, Surrealism."

Massive protests have erupted after Russia’s December 4 elections, in which Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev’s United Russia party received a reported 49 percent of the popular vote and 77 seats in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature. Following cries of election fraud and violations of electoral law, and in reaction to Putin’s announcement that he will return to the presidency in March 2012 for what could be another 12 years, thousands of Russians have hit the streets, demonstrating in public squares against the president’s increasing domination of Russian politics.

The country's artists have reacted to the growing unrest as well. Just as posters, photojournalism, and performances have given a face to the Occupy protests in the United States, Russia’s creative community has defined the election protests with a series of powerful images and media projects.

Much of the protest’s agitprop takes Putin directly to task for his transgressions on Russian democracy, appropriating the leader’s image into a series of mocking political satires and Photoshop cartoons. One of the most visible (and timely) mashups saw an anonymous artist putting Putin’s face (from his 2007 Time "man of the year" cover, no less) on Muammar Gaddafi’s body, drawing a direct line from the recently killed Libyan dictator to the Russian president.

One protest poster takes from classic Soviet graphic design, showing a stiff-lipped Putin with the words “They stole our vote!” emblazoned down his forehead, the exclamation point over his lips like a silencing finger. Another visual protest meme is a poster that plays on the extension of Putin’s reign, showing an artificially aged portrait of the president with “2050” in the bottom right-hand corner (if 2024, why not longer?). “NET!” reads the poster’s top — “No!” in Russian.

Russian artists, known for their absurdist political disruption tactics, are also participating in the protests, albeit in a quieter, subtler way than painting a penis on a St. Petersburg bridge. Art collective Chto Delat (Russian for “what is to be done”) is gathering coverage of the protests on their Web site, chtodelat news, part of an activist media platform that the collective maintains. They practice aggregation as protest, publishing news clips, videos, and photos that have been ignored by Russian press at the behest of the government. Anarchist art collective Voina has also been using their blog to agitate for the protests, recently publishing a post about human rights activist and election protest participant Philip Kostenko, who is being held illegally beyond the 15-day period of administrative arrest.

There is a particular media aesthetic to the protests, as well. The photo documentation of the election rallies is dominated by shots of road-cramming crowds, exploding flares, and the yellow-and-white traditional flags of Russian nationalists who have supported the rallies. Some of these images have been created by the crowds themselves — a Russian Web site called Abyss has published aerial photos of the protests taken from a homemade helicopter-mounted camera, which, they note, was shot at several times by police.

Protest art rock has even gone viral with Russian punk band Rabfak’s anthem “Our Madhouse is Voting for Putin,” a driving rock song with a video that sees average Russians flailing around with the beat in a collection of bizarre clips, a cigarette-smoking grandma swinging along to the lyrics, and a riot police dance-off. On the The words to the song say that the band would be happy to have Putin — he would fit right in to the “madhouse.”

For a more cynical take on the Russian political scene (and the state of humanity as a whole), Russians are looking to a series of YouTube cartoon videos under the title of “Mr. Freeman.” The sketchy, black-and-white animation is an adult, anarchist version of late-'90s cartoon "Invader Zim," with a single humanoid figure (Mr. Freeman himself?) acting out a satire of oppressive politics and dictatorship, ruminating over how the  public has given up their basic freedoms willingly. “Freedom today is the ability to change thousands of channels, freely download porn, and just do anything without consequences. That’s it. And the herd has complied with this,” the figure says, grinning. The Russian-only “Mr. Freeman, part 1,” uploaded on October 11 of this year, already has over 1.4 million views.

While citizens still protest in the streets, the fight for freedom in Russia is also being carried out online and in print, with a clash between images and visual symbolism. On one side, the profusion of satirical art, posters, and videos created by those fighting to keep their voices heard, while on the other, as of yet, only riot police and silence. 

To see a selection of Russian protest art, click here or on view slideshow. 

The original contract ushering Apple Computers into the world, signed by founders Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, sold at Sotheby's books and manuscripts auction Tuesday afternoon to a phone bidder (an iPhone bidder?) for $1.6 million — over 10 times the $100,000-150,000 pre-sale estimate. That sum, while impressive, is of course infinitesimal compared to the profits achieved by the historic tech enterprise formed on April 1, 1976, when Jobs and Wozniak each claimed 45 percent of the company, giving Wayne 10 percent.

Another document, filed 11 days later to remove Wayne from the partnership, was also included in the lot. Wayne originally received $800 for his 10 percent, and later got a second payment of $1,500.

Today, Wayne's 10 percent would be worth $36 billion, based on Apple's $360 billion market capitalization (the company's estimated worth).

This evening, Christie’s is holding its landmark sale of late actress Elizabeth Taylor's legendary jewelry collection, estimated to be worth $30 million. The evening's final lot, a 33.19-carat, internally flawless "Elizabeth Taylor Diamond" that was a gift from Richard Burton, alone could fetch $2.5-3.5 million. Watch live on ARTINFO as Hollywood’s "crown jewels" hit the auction block.

Follow @artinfodotcom for auction updates on Twitter, and use the hashtag #liztaylorauction to join the conversation.

TIME magazine announced its "Person of the Year" this morning, debuting the cover of its popular annual special issue at the same time. The winner is "The Protester," named in honor of 2011's wide-ranging Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent Russian election rallies. And — surprise, surprise — the "Protester" cover was created by none other than Mr. Hope man himself, street artist and designer Shepard Fairey.

The cover itself is a portrait of an anonymous protester masked in a mouth-covering scarf and wearing a thick woolen hat set against a monochromatic background of collaged rally scenes — signs are visible in the background reading "we need good jobs" and "people power, not ivory tower." Below the face of Fairey's anonymous protester are the outlines of maps showing the battleground of political struggle. The style is classic Fairey, taking influence from Soviet-era propaganda and mixing it with a graphic street-art style and flat blocks of color straight out of stencil culture. The center-weighted portrait is reminiscent of other works Fairey has created in support of political protest and struggle: see his poster of imprisoned Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi for comparison.

This isn't the first time Fairey has thrown his design weight behind the recent political protests. The artist's poster for Occupy Wall Street riffed on his now-classic Obama poster, featuring a protester in a Guy Fawkes-style mask  with the words "Mr. President, we hope you're on our side" emblazoned below it, alongside a "we are the 99 percent" pin. A poster Fairey made for an October "Occupation Party" recycled the artist's earlier work with a woman gazing out into the distance. In contrast, the TIME image seems to demonstrate a much stronger, more generalized support of global protest. The magazine cover is unspecific but direct, attempting to find a common visual language for events occurring all over the world.

And how are the critics greeting Fairey's effort? Christopher Knight of the L.A. Times writes of the cover, "Questioning authority never looked more corporate and conventional." One argument in the artist's favor might be that the widely-distributed magazine cover format is perfect for his bold, graphical style and the simplicity of his symbolism — all the image takes is one glance to understand. So maybe the cover is not so much "corporate and conventional" as stylized, iconic, and accessible — the perfect symbol for a generality.