POLL - Artistic Grant to Alizée

[FanDeAliFee]

There is an interesting news item from a year ago I thought I'd bring to your attention. Certainly you know that one of the <i>UEdS</i> album songs about Andy Warhol's "factory girl" is titled <i>Grand Central</i>.

Reuters <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE52N5SI20090324">reports</a>:
<blockquote><i>NEW YORK
Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:15pm EDT

A can of Campbell's soup, it's not. But Andy Warhol still considered the BMW 'art car' he designed to be a masterpiece... The car goes on display on at Grand Central Terminal Tuesday along with three other BMW art cars... After the installation at Grand Central, the BMW art cars will go on a three-museum tour in Mexico.</i></blockquote>The reason I bring this up is how quickly Warhol executed his design. As explained <a href="http://www.bmwdrives.com/artcars/bmw-artcars-warhol.php">here</a>
<blockquote><i>All previous Art Car artists created their designs on 1:5 scale models, called maquettes, and had technicians reproduce their designs on the real cars. Warhol insisted on painting the real M1 himself. He is reported to have spent all of 23 minutes painting the car. He ran his fingers through the paint to leave a personal touch.</i></blockquote>I have no evidence how much BMW paid Warhol, but I bet it was a LOT more than $1,000 or even $10,000. Or do you really think he agreed to do the job for less than the cost of one unit of this luxury automobile?

I don't know what you think of the design work of Andy Warhol or any other artist. But for whatever reason, "The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises... $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved." according to <a href="http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14941229"><i>The Economist</i></a>.

Now I want to remind you of the 11 year-old girl from Ajaccio who won the <i>Air Outre-Mer</i> "Art Airplane" design contest, beating out 7,000? other contestants. I don't know if she took longer than Andy Warhol did for his design, but her prize was a roundtrip to the Maldives for her whole family, worth thousands of dollars.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to own an original design executed by this girl? Well, if you are among the Fortunate Fifty, you do! Dedication names aside, no two designs are the same. And it even includes Fairy Dust.

So when some here have suggested it is not appropriate to award Alizée an Art Grant, but ONLY compensate her on a <i>quid pro quo</i> basis for her <i>products</i>, then it seems to me they have just argued that the people who accepted her original album cover designs owe her some money as a prize-winning visual artist, for her produce is not simply restricted to her singing, dance, and theatrics.

The only debate is how much her "23 minutes of painting" compares to Andy's 23 minutes of painting. (And he didn't even hang around with his clients!) I have suggested that if <i>auctioned</i>, the customization she applied to the CD cases could have added thousands of dollars to their value among the membership of Alizée America. That being the case, the Alizée entourage should not be too bashful to accept a fee of € 1000, if not more, for similar 30-minute private meetings during which one can commune with these artists on a personal level, and also take away 50 unique pieces of visual art, when provided with 50 pedestrian <i>UEdS</i> CDs.

How much is an original "Alizée" worth to you?