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The result will come as a relief to the world’s largest auction house and the contemporary art market in general, for which this week’s Frieze Art Fair in London and related auctions were seen as a key test of confidence.

LONDON (Reuters) German artist Gerhard Richter may have called the prices his works fetch “daft” this month, but that did nothing to dampen collectors’ enthusiasm at a Christie’s auction in London on Friday.

His 1982 “Kerze,” one of a series of images of candles seen as a key part of his canon, sold for 10.5 million ($16.5 million) at the auction house’s post-war and contemporary art sale, compared with pre-sale expectations of 6-9 million pounds.

It also proved that high prices for rare works of art are still possible amid global economic turmoil.

Stripping out the buyer’s premium, which is only included on the auction results, the painting still came in at the top end of estimates and set a record for Richter at auction, Christie’s said.

That was comfortably within the 43.3-62.1 million pound price target set in advance even after buyer’s premium was stripped out.

Sotheby’s held its smaller day sale on Friday, raising 6.7 million pounds on top of the 39.5 million at Thursday’s main auction.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Jill Serjeant)

British sculptor Antony Gormley also saw his auction record tumble when a human-sized version of his giant “Angel of the North” structure sold for 3.4 million pounds.

Surveys have shown investors are more wary of spending money on art amid the debt crisis and volatility on other markets, but Christie’s results could help soothe the worse of their fears, at least in the short term.

Overall Christie’s sold art worth 55.7 million pounds at its combined sale of post-war, contemporary and Italian art, according to preliminary results posted on its website.

The combined tally of 46.2 million pounds was within expectations of between 42.1 and 58.4 million, although taking into account buyer’s premium the final result was at the low end of estimates.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. A federal judge has ordered the immediate removal of a prayer mural displayed in the auditorium of a Rhode Island public high school.

Teenage atheist student Jessica Ahlquist had sued Cranston city and Cranston High School West officials, demanding they remove the banner because it promotes a religion. She calls it offensive to non-Christians.

City officials claimed the mural is a historical artifact from the school’s early days and serves no religious purpose. The prayer encourages students to strive academically. It begins with the words “Our Heavenly Father” and ends with “Amen.”

A senior U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday ruled in the atheist student’s favor.

The student has 20 days to file counsel fees and costs. City officials will have 10 days to respond. The court will enter judgment after these issues are resolved.

CONCORD, N.H. As candidates crisscross New Hampshire in their quest for votes, an Academy Award-winning writer thinks the time is ripe for “Political Suicide.”

That is the title of four one-act plays Ernest Thompson who wrote “On Golden Pond”_ will stage beginning Sunday at Pitman’s Freight Room in Laconia.

The plays are dark comedies that parody politicians and protesters alike.

One is about taking the best attribute from each of the candidates to make one candidate who might excite two jaded polling place workers. Another is about a small-town protester who longs to be part of a movement but attracts the attention of no one but the police chief.

Thompson told the Associated Press on Friday that the plays each take a different angle on where our culture is at, but called them “equal opportunity offending plays.”

“I like stirring things up a little,” Thompson said.

Thompson bills his plays as “funnier than the debates” and said the debates inspired one of the plays “Mr. Potato Head” about rolling all the candidates into one dynamic candidate.

“They were pretty funny to watch those debates but also pretty sad, because you kept thinking someone has to stand up and say something profound,” Thompson said.

Thompson says he purposely did not shape his characters to resemble any of the current candidates.

“What I’m hoping is that four years from now we can do these same plays and they’ll have the same resonance,” he said.

Thompson wrote one of the plays_ about a disillusioned senator _six years ago. He says he wrote the other three recently, as campaigning intensified.

The 1981 movie “On Golden Pond” filmed in New Hampshire netted Oscars for Thompson and stars Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Last summer Thompson directed the stage production of the play, which he wrote in 1978 for a summer stock theater in Holderness.

Thompson, 62, moved to New Hampshire from Los Angeles 21 years ago.

“The fun part of being in New Hampshire is that you really get to see those characters up close and personal,” he said of the candidates.

Thompson said he chose Pitman’s Freight Room in downtown Laconia in part because of the short commute from his home and production studio in New Hampton. He said the venue holds about 70 and features a stage they assembled for the 16 performances, including one the night of the primary Jan. 10. The play runs through Jan. 15,wholesale Ed hardy sunglasses, then reopens for six additional performances in early February.

Pitman’s owner Dick Mitchell said that there is a lot of buzz around town about Thompson’s production and that it’s exciting for the renovated train depot to host its first theater production.

“It’s very timely, and I think his message is on target everything is screwed up,” Mitchell said.

Thompson he had a run-in with the Mitt Romney camp Friday not over politics, but turf.

Romney campaign workers wanted to take over Pitman’s Freight Room for nine hours Friday to set up for and stage an evening rally, Mitchell said. But Thompson has dibs on the property.

“The show has to go on,” Thompson said, laughing.

WASHINGTON Executing a classic Washington dodge, Newt Gingrich told Americans that Medicare and Medicaid could be kept solid merely by ending fraud in the system, a promise of gain without pain that ignores the aging population and other great forces pressing on the programs.

Mitt Romney told voters he’s done the math supporting his claim that he created more than 100,000 jobs in the private sector, but didn’t share it. And Ron Paul came up with a shocking figure on Fed “bailouts” that bears little resemblance to reality.

A look at some of the claims in a pair of weekend Republican presidential debates and how they compare with the facts:

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GINGRICH: “The duty of the president is to find a way to manage the federal government so the primary pain is on changing the bureaucracy. On theft alone, we could save $100 billion a year in Medicaid and Medicare if the federal government were competent. That’s a trillion dollars over 10 years. And the only people in pain would be crooks.”

THE FACTS: Those who have crunched the numbers believe that squeezing every last penny of fraud from health care programs would not solve long-range problems that are at the heart of the federal government’s budget woes and imperil Medicare and Medicaid.

Those problems are driven by an aging population, the cost of high-tech medicine and what some researchers see as a pattern of overtreatment the widespread use of medical tests, procedures, drugs and devices that wind up being of little or no benefit to patients.

If policymakers once viewed health care fraud as akin to a cost of doing business, that hasn’t been the case for years. President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law toughened penalties and gave law enforcement agencies new tools to combat fraud. That built on earlier efforts by the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Health care fraud investigations are a major source of money recovered for taxpayers by the Justice Department, surpassing fines and penalties collected from defense contracting fraud.

Although cracking down on fraud and abuse will help to maintain Medicare and Medicaid, the administration and lawmakers are convinced it is not a magic elixir to restore the financial health of the programs. Knowing that has not stopped a succession of presidents and lawmakers of both parties from ducking tough choices and promising painless dividends by going after “waste, fraud and abuse” in government.

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PAUL: “I don’t see how we can do well against Obama if we have any candidate that, you know, endorsed, you know, single-payer systems and TARP bailouts and don’t challenge the Federal Reserve’s $15 trillion of injection bailing out their friends.”

THE FACTS: First, there are no fans of government-run, single-payer health insurance in the Republican field, despite Paul’s suggestion otherwise Sunday. Newt Gingrich once endorsed the idea of requiring everyone to have health insurance, and Romney introduced a mandate for health coverage as Massachusetts governor. But that’s a far cry from a Canadian-style health system that makes government the primary payer of people’s medical bills.

TARP is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that was proposed by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2008 to help rescue imperiled financial institutions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Paul’s slam against the Fed ignores the fact that most of the $15 trillion he is talking about involved loans that were quickly repaid, sometimes the next day. And that’s if these Fed transactions can even be considered loans in the conventional sense.

When the Fed lends money to banks, it creates the money out of thin air. When the banks pay it back, the money disappears from the system. If a bank borrows $5 billion from the Fed one day, then pays it back the next, and a week later borrows $5 billion more and quickly pays it back, the total would be listed as $10 billion, even though it’s just the same money going back and forth and the treasury is in no sense being emptied.

That’s how a federal report counted a running total of about $15 trillion in emergency Fed loans to domestic banks and their foreign subsidiaries between 2007 and 2010. The actual loan total, once paybacks are accounted for, is estimated at $1.1 trillion.

___

ROMNEY: “In the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs…. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.”

THE FACTS: Romney has never substantiated his frequent claim that he was a creator of more than 100,000 jobs while leading the Bain Capital private equity company. His campaign merely cites success stories without laying out the other side of the ledger jobs lost at Bain-acquired or Bain-supported firms that closed, trimmed their workforce or shifted employment overseas.

Moreover, his campaign bases its claims on recent employment figures at three companies Staples, Domino’s and Sports Authority even though Romney’s involvement with them ceased years ago.

By that sort of charitable math, President Barack Obama could be credited with creating over 1 million jobs even though employment overall is down about 2 million since he came to office. But Romney accuses Obama of destroying jobs while using a different standard to judge his own performance cherry-picked examples that leave everything else out.

By its nature, venture capitalism often results in lost jobs because profitability and efficiency are key to investors, not how many people are on the payroll. Bain Capital profited in cases where employment went both up and down.

Staples, now with close to 90,000 employees, and Sports Authority, with about 15,000, were startups supported by Romney. The direct workforce at Domino’s has grown by nearly 8,000 since Romney’s intervention. But Romney got out of the game in 1999, which has not stopped his campaign from crediting him with jobs created at those companies since then.

Romney toned down the braggadocio in the Saturday debate, saying that of the Bain-supported companies that grew, “we’re only a small part of that, by the way.” But he mentioned a few more successful companies, again without giving voters a breakdown of his “net-net” calculations.

No one has been able to produce a full accounting of job gains and losses from the scores of companies Romney dealt with at Bain. But a Los Angeles Times review of Bain’s 10 largest investments under Romney found that four of the big companies declared bankruptcy within a few years, costing thousands of jobs and often pension and severance benefits.

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GINGRICH: “Under Obama, 2011 was the highest price of gasoline in history. It is a direct result of his policies, which kill jobs, raise the price of heating oil and gasoline, weaken the United States, increase our dependence on foreign countries and weaken our national security in the face of Iran trying to close the Straits of Hormuz.”

FACT CHECK: It’s true that the average price of gas last year was a record: $3.52 per gallon. Tying that completely to Obama is a stretch because some of the reasons for expensive fuel have nothing to do with him or the United States.

Oil and gas prices jumped early last year due to the political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The revolt in Libya, for example, cut off about 1.5 million barrels of daily oil exports. While that’s only a small part of what the world uses, global demand was rising at the same time as fast-growing economies in the developing world, such as China and India, needed more oil.

The Republican candidates almost uniformly blame Obama for hindering U.S. energy development, taking their cue from his moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a ban now lifted. Oil and gas companies have been ramping up extraction of oil and gas from shale rock deposits in states such as North Dakota and Texas.

All told,wholesale Ed hardy scarves, there is now a boom in oil drilling and extraction of natural gas in the U.S. Active U.S. oil rigs increased 22.5 percent in 2011, and the oil and gas extraction industry added 25,000 jobs, up 12 percent.

___

ROMNEY: “I cut programs, a whole series of programs. By the way, the number one to cut is Obamacare. That saves $95 billion a year.”

THE FACTS: That math looks like it doesn’t add up. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that House Republicans’ legislation to repeal Obama’s health care law would have actually increased federal deficits by $210 billion from 2012 to 2021.

Romney’s statistic approximates how much the government expects to be spending annually once the law’s provisions are fully rolling. But it appears to ignore the law’s revenue-generating provisions, such as a tax on the most generous insurance plans and fees imposed on parts of the health care industry.

___

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Tom Raum, Christopher S. Rugaber, Nancy Benac, Charles Babington and Jim Drinkard contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) Geek chic will soon be back when Napoleon Dynamite returns in an animated TV show and joins “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons” on the Fox network’s “Animation Domination” night.

“Napoleon Dynamite,” the 2004 independent film about a socially awkward teenager in a small town, directed by Jared Hess and starring Jon Heder, became a hit and received praise for bringing something fresh to the teen comedy genre.

The film is about a high-school loser, Napoleon, who becomes a bit of a winner while retaining his geekiness. The original cast is voicing their animated characters in the TV shows that debuts on January 15.

They are joined by new characters and guest stars including Amy Poehler, Sam Rockwell and Jemaine Clement.

Heder, 34,wholesale Burberry, talked to Reuters about returning to play Napoleon and working in animation.

Q: Napoleon is back! Why now?

A: “We played around with the idea of an animated series or live-action series for a sequel, but we never played around seriously because we made this with a bunch of friends, so we weren’t thinking cash franchise. But it came out and became a success, and I think all these years later, when Fox came to us, we said, ‘Hey, we’d talked about it. We think the time is right, let’s do it,’ and we were all on board.”

Q: Why animation over live action, especially with the original cast?

A: “Honestly, because it’s probably cheaper and we’re probably all old and flabby now! A live-action show still has a certain lifespan, but with shows like “Family Guy” and “King of the Hill,” successful animated shows can go on forever.”

Q: Where does the new series pick up from after the film?

A: “Napoleon is already friends with Pedro and Deb, and he still has a rivalry going with Summer and Don, but Kip really hasn’t met LaFawnduh yet. The idea was that Kip might have lots of potential female romantic interests. It’s kind of a prequel, in between the end of the movie and the wedding (between Kip and LaFawnduh), because the wedding at the end of the movie, that could have been much later, even years later, so maybe they took some time apart to try out some different mates.”

Q: What can we expect from Kip’s online dating adventures?

A: “We just like the idea that Kip is always online, especially because he doesn’t really know what he’s getting into. In one of the episodes, he’ll be talking to Tatiana from Russia, and he has no idea who she is, she could be a man, so we’re playing with the idea that Kip is clueless. It also lends itself to stories where Kip and Napoleon are going after the same girl, some sibling rivalry there.”

Q: Do you ever feel pigeonholed by playing Napoleon?

A: “He’s very much like me. He’s not pretentious. He was raised in a small town, and he’s an outsider. So, I relate a ton to the character. It is kind of a part of me and it probably will be for the rest of my life. That’s why I have no problem coming back and doing Napoleon again.”

Q: How do you think fans will respond?

A: “… I think true fans will like it, hopefully. It’s animated but it’s trying to capture the feeling and the integrity of the movie. There’s an innocence that’s still there and the naivety of the characters and there’s such a lovability about them.”

Q: Does Napoleon’s iconic dance to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat” make an appearance?

A: “Sadly, because it’s animated, unless they do some motion-capture on me, that was the only thing I was a little bit bummed about. I’m playing the part, but it’s only the voice, and so much of the Napoleon character is capturing the image and the physical movements. But from what I’ve seen, the animators are doing a pretty funny job.”

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Patricia Reaney)

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened its doors, at long last, to one of its most highly anticipated exhibitions: “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” Even in its first few weeks, this show has broken attendance records. Organized by curator Andrew Bolton, the retrospective celebrates one of the fashion industry’s most important designers, the late Lee McQueen, founder and creative director of the label Alexander McQueen. His unprecedented designs marked a critical shift not only in fashion design, but in the reception of fashion as a form of installation, performance, and art.

Nearly 200 items are featured in the exhibition,Replica Bulzeye, which spans the 19 years of McQueen’s career that was cut short in February of last year by his suicide. Rarities from his graduate collection at Central St. Martins are displayed alongside work from the unfinished final collection of 2010, his swan song. While “Savage Beauty,” on view through July 31, showcases the designs within the context of the label, it is clearly homage to the man himself, and the creative intuition that produced one of the most innovative visions of contemporary fashion.

Despite the commercial aspirations of the show — “Savage Beauty” was funded almost entirely by the label whose clothing it features — it is nevertheless difficult to look at a single one of the designs without being mesmerized, intrigued, or provoked into some response, oftentimes confusion. No designer has better embodied Yves Saint Laurent’s incisive dictum that while fashion is not exactly art, it requires the creativity of an artist in order to exist. McQueen’s originality and genius derived from the fact that his tremendous talent as a designer was matched by his capacity as an artist.

His technical training as a tailor’s apprentice on Savile Row formed the basis for the attention to craftsmanship and expert tailoring that have become synonymous with the label’s aesthetic. At the same time, fashion served him as a medium to explore complex ideas. Despite his background as a tailor, he was able to see beyond the garment itself and its construction, and as a result his understanding of fashion extended far beyond clothing. Each piece had an individuality about it, but was nonetheless part of a sustained vision that governed the aesthetic of a collection as well as that of the final runway presentation.

His Spring/Summer 2001 collection, for example, was based on avian imagery (which he revisited frequently) and the gothic aesthetics of a mental institution, with garments including extraordinary pieces such as a dress with taxidermy eagles protruding from the shoulders as though in flight, as well as head bandages and embellished, asymmetrical jackets that were vaguely reminiscent of nurses’ uniforms. Models paced around inside of a boxed, mirrored room clawing at the glass walls as though trying to escape from their asylum-like runway. In the final moments of the presentation, the walls of another box within the faux psychiatric ward collapsed to reveal a startling tableau vivant inspired by the Joel-Peter Witkin photograph “Sanitarium”: a reclining, masked nude breathing through a tube and surrounded by fluttering moths.

Other presentations included snarling wolves, life-sized chess boards, and rain pouring down over models as they walked the runway. The famous showing of his Spring/Summer 1999 collection featured two automated robots who shot a model clad in white with sprays of green and black paint.

The artistry of McQueen’s artistry vision is also seen in his love of an idea over (or at least as much as) its product. Many of his designs had little or nothing to do with fashion, and their translation into clothing design was far was from obvious or literal. Plato’s account of Atlantis, Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” Lucien Freud’s paintings, films such as “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” and elements of 19th-century Victorianism (McQueen would refer to himself as the Edgar Allen Poe of fashion) were incorporated into his designs. Historical events were of great influence as well, and one of his early collections, “Highland Rape,” was based on what McQueen called the “rape of Scotland” by the British Empire during the Jacobite Risings and the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Another source of inspiration that McQueen drew heavily on throughout his career was Medieval and Renaissance art, specifically Flemish painting. His last collection, presented posthumously, was unofficially titled “Angels and Demons,” and the references to the work of Botticelli, Hieronymous Bosch, Jean Fouquet, and Hans Memling were clear both materially and in concept. New textile technologies were used to photograph the paintings and weave their images into jacquard fabrics and embroideries that were cut into highly tailored garments. Moreover, the collection mirrored a theme present in the works McQueen was focusing on: death and the afterlife. In a way, it is this set of source images for his last collection that best illustrate McQueen’s view of fashion. Major characteristics of Flemish painting include highly detailed imagery, sumptuous colors, and fantastical narratives that often focus on the grotesque, and McQueen’s work offers an aesthetic that values and masterfully combines all of these aspects.

The innumerable tributes to the designer since his death aim both at commemorating his contributions to fashion and securing his legacy. It is somewhat difficult as a result to keep sight of the man beneath the weight of so many accolades — commercial as well as critical — and in a sense, there is little need for these displays of recognition; Lee McQueen’s legacy was ensured long before his death. One of the most important aspects of this legacy was the nature of his vision, which related fashion to art in a way that few designers, or artists, have been able to do. McQueen created a new class of designer, and in so doing expanded the field for those to come.

NEW YORK New Yorkers pride themselves on their blasé — nothing will phase a well-trained city pedestrian. But artist Zefrey Throwell’s urban intervention turned even the most stoic of heads: those of Wall Street traders. Throwell’s “Ocularpation: Wall Street” saw 50 performers strip down and mime different Wall Street-related professions (traders, yes, but also janitors, secretaries, and everything in between) in a critique of the financial industry, a piece inspired by the plight of the artist’s mother, a 60 year old woman who lost her retirement savings in the economic crash, and was forced to come out of retirement to look for a job.

Throwell’s piece caused some gawking on the street, and shocked viewers into reconsidering their relationship to what Throwell calls “the most mysterious street in America.” “Ocularpation” was developed while the artist was in a residency given by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council: for 6 months, Throwell worked in a basement studio at 14 Wall Street and investigated the area’s significance, social, political, and artistic. ARTINFO spoke to the artist just hours after the “Ocularpation” performance ended, and chatted about the inspiration for the performance, the immediate reaction, and why it wasn’t “just a flash mob where people run up and take their clothes off”: 

What was the inspiration for the “Ocularpation” performance?

My mother put away her money, like a good American, into retirement, and she retired in mid-60s. Then the stock market crashed, and she lost almost all of her savings. She had to come out of retirement and look for a job, but no one wanted to hire a woman in her mid-60s. It took her a long time to find a job. First she was depressed, but then she was furious. Over the course of the past 3 years, there has been no change in the system that caused the damage that violently altered her life. She feels she was straight up swindled by people who had nothing happen to them.

This project is a direct response to the opacity of the financial industry in the United States. It’s call “Ocularpation Wall Street”, a combination of ocular, as in sight, and occupation, meaning job, and the taking of a site, the military term. Aggressively performing your profession in public.

How did the actual performance get started?

The first half was a survey that I took of Wall Street, to find out who actually works on Wall Street. I went business to business, asking what jobs they did there. I came up with a chart listing who works on the most mysterious street in America. Then I got performers to perform those jobs, in the percentage that they were represented, on the street itself.

There were 10% personal assistants, 8% stock traders, and 2% prostitutes, for example. The actual project had 200 people in it, 50 performers, and then there were helpers, and there were people documenting it. We met up in a park beforehand, then walked down to Wall Street, and everyone was spread out evenly down the whole street. Right at 7 a.m. people began working their professions, I was a hot dog vendor. Lawyers, federal workers,Cheap Ed hardy Shoes, museum workers, janitorial was huge. The performers started clothed, after about a minute, they start stripping down, they were naked for maybe a minute, then they started putting clothes back on. At 7:05 it was all over.

Who were your volunteers?

Mostly artists I know, a few people who contacted me about the performance as well. Drea Bernardi, she’s an artist that helped me a lot with the performance.

I heard a few people actually got arrested. What was the reaction like?    

There were three arrested out of 50, they were taken to 1st Precinct, charged with disorderly conduct, and something else I haven’t heard of before, exposure of a person. [Note: Throwell followed the three and later bailed them out.]

The general reaction was fantastic, actually. The NYPD was very excited, very supportive. They wanted to talk about it, to know what I think about it. Public reaction was also fantastic. I’m a fan of the absurd; I think it’s something audiences really get. Still, a lot of people didn’t even stop and look, they just kept walking, Blackberries blazing. If an army of naked people can’t get you to stop, I don’t know what can.

Did you warn anyone before the performance started?

No. These are public streets. Part of my practice is reclaiming public property for us. As our culture is slowly devoured by corporations and all the public things begin to disintegrate, it’s our responsibility as citizens to aggressively reclaim space for ourselves.

Was the performance just about the Wall Street crash, or are there other political factors?

It’s no coincidence that we scheduled a performance for the day that America was going to default. My personal feelings are that, with these mechanics that affect our current financial state … it’s just not this abstract concept. My mother is this woman who was derailed from the reward of being a hard working American. It’s very concrete, very real. It’s easy in the news to get lost in the abstract pie graphs of unemployment, but that’s definitely not the case here.

So this is your way of putting Wall Street’s machinations in front of people’s faces?    

Yeah.

See the slideshow at left for photos of Zefrey Throwell’s “Ocularpation: Wall Street” performance. Warning: They definitely feature naked people. 

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NEW YORK In 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse, an outbreak of spots is going to spread across the world. And Damien Hirst is to blame.

That’s right, next January the Gagosian Gallery will mount simultaneous shows of the YBA’s “spot” paintings in of its 11 outposts around the globe, displaying the complete collection of the works produced between 1986 and 2011. Only about half of the collection will be for sale, with the rest on loan.

It will mark the beginning of a gargantuan comeback attempt by the artist,wholesale Ed hardy jeans, whose Tate Modern retrospective opening in April — which will coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London — will allow crowds to take in the full breadth of work by the former bad-boy artist. His output in recent years has been overtaken by his evidently growing obsession with the art market — a market he became synonymous with after his $200 million one-man Sotheby’s sale in 2008.  

Hirst claims to have been batting around the idea of a major spot  retrospective of his spot paintings for a long time, and even had a show planned years ago in two venues in London — the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Britain — but they never happened. When Hirst recently proposed the idea to Larry Gagosian, the megadealer recognized an opportunity. Gagosian rarely has a show span two of his galleries, let alone 11, but such is the star power of Hirst.

If the exhibition succeeds in gathering the full collection, the art world will finally be able to solve the mystery of how many spot paintings Hirst’s factory has produced. While many guess the number is in the high hundreds, even 1,000, no one knows for sure.

While the transnational show is certainly an attention-getting concept, the lingering question is how it might affect the market for Hirst’s work. Clearly, it’s a risk to flood the market with an extraordinary supply of similar paintings. Then again, it has been well-known for years that Hirst mass-produces his spots, and that doesn’t seem to deter collectors from paying over $1 million for them. Last February, “Arginine Decarboxylase,” a Hirst spot painting from 1994, sold for over £880,000 ($1.4 million) at Christie’s in London, 50 percent above its high estimate.

NEW YORK (Reuters) After receiving tepid reviews for his first book of fictional short stories, actor James Franco has sold his debut novel to Amazon Publishing, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The novel is titled “Actors Anonymous” and will be published in 2013. The spokeswoman for Amazon declined to say how much money the book deal was worth and whether the novel would be published in e-book as well as print form.

Franco’s collection of short stories “Palo Alto,” released last year, received a mixed response by reviewers with some commenting it lacked insight and depth.

Other critics said that while the 33-year-old, Oscar-nominated actor is yet to match the standard of his work in films such as “Milk” and “127 Hours,” it was a promising literary debut.

Franco has earned recognition not only for acting,Replica Abercrombie t-shirts, but also for branching into unexpected career terrain including directing a documentary and short films, creating multimedia, dance theater projects and curating art exhibits while continuing to study at various U.S. universities.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

In my last article on InterOil (NYSE: IOC – News), I discussed how close the company was to finalizing its $6 billion Papua New Guinea LNG project. Now, they have struck another preliminary sales agreement with Chinese company ENN and moved even closer to investing in the project.

Moving closer with each deal
The Papua New Guinea LNG project is InterOil’s joint venture with Pacific LNG and will have an initial capacity of 5 million tons per annum (mtpa), to be expanded to 10 mtpa in phases. InterOil plans to invest $6 billion in its newest venture. Generally, for investing in any LNG project, companies look to secure around 85% in supply agreements of the total capacity.

After striking preliminary sales pacts with Gunvor, Noble (NYSE: NBL – News) and Philippines’ EWC, InterOil has sealed a commitment for 2.3 mtpa. With the ENN deal, whereby InterOil will supply 1 to 1.5 mtpa of LNG for a period of 15 years, the commitment stands at 3.3 mtpa to 3.8 mtpa, just a tad short of 4.25 mtpa or around 85% of the total capacity. So, InterOil is now very close to realizing the project.

The riches
The world’s primary energy mix is going through a drastic change, with natural gas the fastest-growing resource and almost coming at par with coal and oil.

The surge in demand is expected to be the steepest in Asia,wholesale Burberry bags, especially China and India. No wonder, then, that oil companies have been flocking to areas that promise rich natural gas reserves. The South Pacific, with countries like Papua New Guinea and Australia, is one such region. ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP – News) is already working with Australia Pacific LNG, while Chevron (NYSE: CVX – News), Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS-A – News; NYSE: RDS-B – News) and Apache (NYSE: APA – News) also got a foothold through the Wheatstone LNG project. Exxon (NYSE: XOM – News), too, is setting up an LNG export facility in the Papua New Guinea fields. What adds to the attractiveness of the area is its proximity to the lucrative markets of Asia.

Foolish bottom line
Given the prospects of investing in an LNG project in the South Pacific region, InterOil is on its way to boost its top line. The company has already secured a big percentage of its initial capacity, and is expecting to enter into more supply contracts in the next few months. So, Fools, keep an eye on this one.

To stay updated on InterOil and its future performance, click here.

Fool contributor Amitabha Chakraborty does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned in this article. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Chevron. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.