Fab Has Its First Million-Dollar Day; Selling $6.5M+ In Products This Past Week

Design-focused e-commerce site Fab released a number of data this morning, and it’s impressive to say the least. Fab has sold more than $6.5 million worth of product this past week, up from $1.7 million during the same period last year. That’s up 300 percent from last year.

Fab also hit an all-time, single-day high of more than $1.3 million in sales on Cyber Monday, November 26. That compares to $350,000 on the same day last year, up more than 3.5 times. That also marks Fab’s first million-dollar day. Average order value was up more than 10 percent from previous weeks.

Read more on Techcrunch.

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Investors Put Their Trust In Contemporary Art

Jeff Koons' Stainless Steel "Tulips" | Image: Christie's

NEW YORK — Never underestimate the amazing amount of cash swirling around the world in search of a home. This week, close to $1 billion was spent on contemporary art.

At Sotheby’s where 58 works of art brought $375 million on Wednesday evening, the session opened with works by Alexander Calder and Franz Kline.This set the stage for a session characterized by a rage to buy famous names without any preference for any particular kind of art. The character of the work is irrelevant. What matters is the volume of the echo that it has received in the media.

Christie’s followed up on Thursday with a stunning performance. Perhaps emboldened by the remarkable session at Sotheby’s, bidders jumped into the fray with a zest not witnessed since the recession that began in 2008. Sales added up to $412.25 million, the highest auction score ever in contemporary art.  

The most striking record though was achieved with “Tulips,” a stainless steel bunch of brightly colored elements looking like enormous toys. Credited to Jeff Koons, it was executed in “1995-2004.” At $33.68 million, the unique Koons of which other examples were somehow produced, eclipsed the $25.76 million paid at Christie’s London in June 2008 for “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” datable to the years 1995-2000. 

What made the Christie’s sale different from any so far was not just the readiness of bidders to go for virtually anything that came up, but the prolonged competition that involved several contenders over many lots. Perhaps some reasoned that it is better to grab a jokey picture than to keep sinking shares. This gives the buyer a gratifying feeling of cultural enlightenment, as long as the art is taken seriously.

Read more at The New York Times. 

Disney Recruits Fashion’s Biggest Names In New Film

Anna Dello Russo in Electric Holiday. Image: British Vogue

DISNEY has teamed up with US department store Barneys to immortalise a host of fashion's key names through a cartoon film that will be broadcast in the shop from Wednesday, November 14.

The short, entitled Electric Holiday, follows Minnie Mouse as she dreams her way to Paris Fashion Week. Along her travels, she comes across a selection of the industry's most famous faces - including Lady Gaga, Alber Elbaz, Carine Roitfeld, Sarah Jessica Parker and Mario Sorrenti.

The film will be played on repeat on LED tiles that cover the two-story ground floor façade, WWD reports.

  

VIEW THE SLIDESHOW 

Artfully Inspired: Cardboard Ergonomic Seat

This cardboard chair with red, oxblood and fuchsia pops of color was spotted on Twitter Saturday evening, from Design Milk.
The ergonomic paper creation is one of many innovative highlights on the well-known design channel. 

‘Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock’ Exhibit in East Hampton

Pollock’s “Untitled (Bald Woman With Skeleton)   Courtesy of The Hood Museum of Art, 2012 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jackson Pollock is best known for the paintings he made from 1947 to 1951 in which he poured and dripped enamel paint onto large, unprimed canvases tacked to the floor of his studio, which at that time happened to be in Springs, N.Y., a hamlet in the town of East Hampton. These are the works that broke the ice for other painters of his generation, as Willem de Kooning put it, and that turned Pollock into a legend: “Jack the Dripper,” according to a 1956 Life magazine article, whose approach signaled the end of easel painting for many younger artists.

But beyond these Pollocks — there are others. For instance, there is the Pollock of the 1930s, a student looking at the work of Los Tres Grandes — the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. 

Pollock first saw Orozco’s work in the summer of 1930, when he was living in Los Angeles and went to see “Prometheus” (1930), a new fresco Orozco had painted in the dining hall at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. The fresco depicts the figure in Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humankind. The flames, painted in deep, warm colors, were central to Orozco’s aesthetic — hence his nickname Man of Fire, and the title of this small but absorbing show at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, in East Hampton.

Next: A review of “Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock,” at New York Times Arts.