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Top Ten Most Expensive Artworks
  1. No. 5 de Jackson Pollock, 1948: vendu $151.8 millions à  un acheteur anonyme
  2. Woman III de Willem de Kooning, 1953: vendu $149.1 millions à  Steven A. Cohen
  3. Portrait d’adèle Bloch Bauer de Gustav Klimpt, 1907: vendu $145.3 millions à  Ronald Lauder et la Neue Galerie
  4. Portrait du Docteur Gachet de Vincent van Gogh, 1890: vendu $139.5 millions à  Ryoei Saito
  5. Bal du moulin de la Galette de Pierre Auguste-Renoir, 1876: vendu $132.0 millions à Ryoei Saito
  6. Garçon à  la pipe de Pablo Picasso, 1905: vendu $120.3 millions à  Guido Barilla
  7. Nu au plateau de sculpteur de Pablo Picasso, 1932: vendu $106.6 millions à un acheteur anonyme
  8. Portrait de Joseph Roulin de Vincent van Gogh, 1889: vendu $101.7 millions au MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
  9. Dora Maar au Chat de Pablo Picasso, 1941: vendu $102.7 millions à  Boris Ivanishvili
  10. Iris de Vincent van Gogh, 1889: vendu $102.0 millions à Alan Bond

Source: www.artprice.com

Top Ten Major Art Thefts. Most Wanted Art. (Major Rewards)
  1. Gardner Museum (Boston USA) 18 maart 1990 – o.a. Het Concert-Vermeer-beloning: $5.000.00
  2. Op een yacht (Antibes Fr) 11 maart 199 – o.a een Picasso-Saoudi-beloning: €530.00
  3. Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlijn D) 27 mai 1988 – Francis Bacon-Lucian Freud: €100.000
  4. Juna B Castagnino Museum of Fine Art (Rosario Arg) 24 mei 1987
  5. Museum (Bagnols sur Ceze – Fr) 12 nov 1972 – diverse impressionisten
  6. Museum of Fine Art (Montreal Can) 4 september 1972 – divers meesterwerken
  7. Oratorio de San Lorenzo (Palermo It) 19 oktober 1969 – Caravaggio
  8. Sint Baafskathedraal (Gent B) 11 april 1934 – paneel v/h Lam Gods
  9. Museum (Zurich Zw) 10 februari 2008 – o.a. Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh, Monet
  10. Oorlogsbuit – 1940-1945- o.a. diverse grote meesters nog op te sporen

Source: www.satz.com

Top ten most expensive books ever
  1. Comedies, Histories & Tragedies – William Shakespeare – London 1623 – €4.250.00
  2. Cosmographia – Ptolemaus – Bologna 147 -€3.300.00
  3. Atlas van Gerard Mercator – Duisburg 1595 -€652.000
  4. Drevnosti Rossikago Gosudastva – Moskou 1849 -€624.000
  5. Christianae Religionis Institutio – Johannes Calvijn – Bazel 1536 -€601.000
  6. Journey of Discovery to Port Phillip, New South Wales – William Blend – Sydney 1825 –€575.000
  7. Une saison en enfer – Arthur Rimbaud – Brussel 1873 –€537.000
  8. In hoc opera haec continetur geographie – Ptolomaeus – Rome 1507 –€531.000
  9. Cosmographia – Ptolomaeus – Ulm 1486 –€461.000
  10. Geographia – Strabo – Rome 1469 –€392.000

Bron www.forbes.com

Top ten most controversial statues
  1. “P***o Queen”: Any words I could write on this Paolo Schmidlin statue are completely inadequate. Defaming the Queen of the Commonwealth won’t end in you losing your head like it used to, but you’ll probably lose your lunch after seeing this thing.
    This has been a Guest Post by Steph Wood, writing on behalf of Ace Fancy Dress a UK-based provider of rather more tasteful Fancy Dress costumes.
  2. “We Are The Champions”: Bottom, backside, bum, keister, posterior, buttocks, fanny, tooshie, ass, arse. This David Cerny statue presents itself at the FUTURA gallery, Prague in Cerny’s native Czech Republic. If you climb the ladder and stick your head where the sun doesn’t shine, you’ll be treated to a musical loop of Queen’s We Are The Champions and a short film of two politicians ‘feeding each other slop’.
  3. “Miss Kitty”: ‘Miss Kitty’ is a statue by Paolo Schmidlin that features none other than the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI wearing stockings and a blonde wig and standing provocatively. Not surprisingly, the Catholic church took offense to the statue and forced an entire exhibition around it to be removed to Florence from Milan.
  4. “Iraq War Memorial: This fake tomb, depicting the third in line to the British throne as a soldier killed in action was attempting to catch anti-war sentiment in the UK over interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but mostly caught a lot of hot air from commentators who didn’t quite believe the artistic intent of its sculptor. It was manipulative and a little too heavy handed for its own good, and thanks to the installation being inside a hotel, it was quickly forgotten.
  5. “Streams”: You could probably make a pretty good ‘top ten’ of controversial statues by just listing David Cerny’s back catalog. These contoured gentlemen urinating into a Czech-shaped pond outside the Franz Kafka museum seem like a rather obvious joke, but they’re actually an ingenious interactive exhibit: their waists swivel and they can apparently write anything you text to them. Like Ghostbusters, you probably wouldn’t want to cross the streams.
  6. Any Weeping Statue, Ever: It seems that claims of sacred ‘weeping’ statues have increased of late: there have been eight cases in the last decade. Even those that aren’t proven as hoaxes meet skepticism from both sides of the secular / ecclesiastical divide. The church has been known to expel people who make claims about supernaturally crying statues, and science has repeatedly attempted to attribute the phenomenon to microscopic cracks and plain old fashioned hoaxes. It usually takes the church itself to step in to speak sense to the influx of pilgrims, but certainly, people want to believe.
  7. George Washington as Zeus: This rather over symbolic, bare-chested statue of the first President of the United States was originally intended for the U.S. Capitol rotunda, but widespread offense (or hilarity) kept it out of the country’s symbolic and physical heart. It debuted on the east lawn, jumping around from place to place throughout history. It can currently be found tucked away on the second floor of the National Museum of American History. Perhaps most ignominiously, the statue even made its way into Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.
  8. Michelangelo’s David: From the same school of ‘no list would be complete without it’ as number 9, we tend to identify ‘David’ as controversial for merely being very accurately sculptured in a certain important area. Turns out, art historians actually find David’s John Thomas a source of controversy for a different reason: why is this Judean King uncircumcised? Add to this the contemporary squabbles between the city of Florence and the Italian Culture Ministry over who owns it, and the statue is a little more worthy of inclusion.
  9. “Alison Lapper Pregnant” and the Fourth Plinth”: Back in the 19th Century, Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth was supposed to feature an equestrian statue of British Monarch, William IV, but a lack of funding and later feuding kept it empty for 150 years. Eventually, the plinth came to be used by a number of temporary statues, including a replica of the HMS victory in a giant bottle and a hundred day exhibition where members of the public had an hour to exhibit and perform.
    Was Mark Quinn’s ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ actually controversial? ‘Controversial’ is something of a throw-away adjective when it comes to statues. ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ depicted a woman (and fellow artist) who was born without arms and with shortened legs. Few voices criticized the subject, and most complaints were about the location, at a time when people were simply less used to the Fourth Plinth project. Perhaps no list would be complete without it, but there are definitely statues that outrank it.
  10. Saddam Hussein’s 65th Birthday Statue: The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square is one of the most symbolic events in the 2003 Iraq War. As the highly choreographed punchline of an already widely questioned war, the controversy surrounding the statue only increased when US troops hung the stars and stripes, only to quickly pop the old Iraqi flag up to placate the crowd. But, erected for Saddam Hussein’s 65th Birthday only a year previous, it’s undeniable that the Iraqi population held a certain contempt for it.

Source: www.toptenz.net