Monster Mash: Warhol self-portrait tops $32 million; world's most expensive stamp to go up for auction

-- Hot market: Andy Warhol's 1986 purple "Self-Portrait"-- offered by fashion designer/director Tom Ford -- has sold for $32.6 million at Sotheby's in New York. Mark Rothkos' 1961 "Untitled" went for $31.4 million. (Bloomberg)

-- Tiny treasure: An 1885 Swedish "Treskilling Yellow" -- considered to be the world's most expensive stamp -- is expected to go for up to $7 million when it is offered at auction next week. (Telegraph)

-- War stories: Works of art and other objects created by Japanese Americans confined in World War II internment camps are on exhibit in the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery in Washington. (NPR)

-- High notes: Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra, composer Kaija Saariaho and the late tenor Philip Langridge are among the winners of this year's Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, which honor excellence in live classical music in Britain. (Gramophone)

--Freshening up: Sue, the world's most complete -- and famous -- Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on display, is getting a cleaning to celebrate her 10th anniversary at Chicago's Field Museum. (Associated Press)

And in the Los Angeles Times: Bay Area critics weigh in on Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the battle between Kristin Chenoweth and Newsweek goes viral; the Huntington Library acquires a French Baroque-era portrait whose artist and subject were misidentified for centuries.

--Karen Wada

Photo: "Self Portrait" by Andy Warhol. Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

How appropriate, Warhol and a stamp. Aren't they the same thing, design? Except Warhol's cult pimps him up as an artist, he never said he was. He was a designer, through and through, with a very limited skillset. He was of the entertainment world, not art. He could have been a judge on American Idol, a sick slick descendant of his fifteen minutes of fame. The lowest common denominator,not creative arts highest.

art collegia delenda est