I updated Firefox the other day, and when it restarted, it did not give me the option to restore my previous session. So I lost the like 100+ tabs in five thematically grouped windows that I’d been holding onto, some for years. Others were fresh, things I was going to blog about. Now they’re gone, I’m sure they were going to be the best blog posts I’ve ever written.
Oh, actually, here’s one I’ve already written around: In 2021 I wrote about the signed exhibition poster from Cy Twombly’s 1974-75 show at Lucio Amelio’s gallery in Naples, which featured the swagged out artist striking a pose next to Castor and Pollux’s backsides. Amelio and his shows were instrumental in both the development of Twombly’s boat motifs, and the subsequent completion of Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) after two decades in the artist’s studio—and Amelio’s AIDS-related death in 1994.
This copy, ed. 56/80, belonged to Twombly’s friend Donald Baechler, who died in 2022. Much of Baechler’s collection was sold at Stair Galleries last fall, but for whatever reason, this one piece hung back. It’s a slightly weird thing, and it’s weird to see it twice.
And that reminds me, in that same auction are several highly unexpected 1970s, student-era paintings by Richard Prince, which are being sold by a former friend and Nasson College classmate. Among them: this self-portrait with a toilet flush valve coming out of his head, so either an oblique Duchamp Fountain reference, or a stoned unicorn Jesus, who am I to say? The longer it stares at me on my screen, though, the more i want it.