The Top 10 of Everything » Top 10

Astonishing art, astonishing prices

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:59:02 +0000

I have been tracking the mega-prices paid at auction for paintings since Top 10 of Everything began back in 1989, when Van Gogh’s Irises, which had sold two years earlier for $53.9 million, held the record. Now, that sort of price wouldn’t get anywhere near the Top 10, the latest version of which I have just compiled and looks like this:

	Artist/ painting/ sale year	Price ($)
1	Pablo Picasso, Garçon à la pipe, 2004	104,168,000
2	Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar au chat, 2006	95,216,000
3	Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 2006	87,936,000
4	Francis Bacon, Triptych, 2008	86,281,000
5	Vincent van Gogh, Portrait du Dr Gachet, 1990	82,500,000
6	Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, 2008	80,379,591
7	Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, 1990	78,100,000
8	Sir Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 2002	75,930,440
9	Mark Rothko, White Center (Yellow, pink and lavender on rose), 2007	72,840,000
10	Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash – Green Burning Car I, 2007	71,720,000

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was revealed as the buyer of Francis Bacon’s Triptych. The price he paid is a record for a post-war painting. The previous day he had purchased Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for $33.6 million, a record price for a work by a living artist.

Even higher prices are reputed to have been paid for works of art sold privately. Such sales are rarely publicized, but it is believed that in 2006 US music mogul David Geffen sold Jackson Pollock’s No.5, 1948 for $140 million.

A private sale that never happened was that of Pablo Picasso’s painting Le rêve. Its owner, Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn, agreed to sell it privately for $139 million, but while showing it to a group of friends, Mr Wynn made a sweeping gesture and accidentally poked his elbow through the canvas, resulting in a 15-cm (6-inch) tear – and the cancellation of the sale.

A sneak peak at the movies

admin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:20:25 +0000

Ever since I started compiling Top 10 of Everything, I have been maintaining a database of films in which I list details about them – especially how much they made at the world box office. I update this constantly and from it I am able to create Top 10 lists based on film genres, the highest-earning films of particular years or decades, of actors and actresses, directors, studios and so on. With the release of the animated film, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the number of entries in the database has just hit 10,000!

Among the recent Top 10 film lists I have based on this information is one on the Top 10 Films Based on Computer Games – with pretty much every one of them earning upwards of $100 million worldwide, the link between computer games and films has proved hugely profitable:

Top 10 Films Based on Computer Games

	Film	Game*	Film
1	Lara Croft: Tomb Raider	1996	2001
2	AVP: Alien Vs. Predator	1999	2004
3	Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life	1996	2003
4	Resident Evil: Extinction	1996	2007
5	Resident Evil: Apocalypse	1996	2004
6	Mortal Kombat	1992	1995
7	Resident Evil	1996	2002
8	Hitman	2000	2007
9	Street Fighter	1987	1994
10	Silent Hill	1999	2006

* Original if series

I have also been working on other film lists on everything from Top 10 Horror Remakes to the 10 Latest People to Receive a Posthumous Oscar. We all know about Heath Ledger’s for his role in Dark Knight, but spare a thought for poor old Raymond Rasch and Larry Russell, who got theirs for the music for Limelight. The film was made in 1952, but the blacklisting of the film’s star, Charlie Chaplin, meant that it was not released and the Oscars not awarded until 1972, by which time both men were dead. Even that’s not the end of the story: it was recently claimed that another arranger, Russell Garcia, should have been credited and that Larry Russell received his Oscar by mistake!