Christie’s auctions a piece of Apollo History for Pop Culture
“Christie’s Pop Culture auction on June 25 in New York will include a range of collectibles celebrating the diverse nature of American popular culture — from 1930s comic strips to the current craze for vinyl designer toys. Not only are Hollywood stars honored in the sale, but memorabilia from the stars of NASA are available with eight lots of photos autographed by astronauts. Coming from the estate of Lewis Hartzell, the former head chef at NASA during the Saturn, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, a highlight includes an official NASA photograph of the crew of the Apollo 11, singed and inscribed by all three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin (estimate: $3,000-5,000).”
Some of the lots:
750,000 Lego Bricks of Kennedy Space Center
It’s declared the Mother of all Lego Models.
- 750,000 Lego Bricks
- 2500 build hours
- 1506 sq ft
Wow, that’s dedication.
Cows, Angels and Shuttles
After successful public project art projects with CowParade and a Community of Angels, the space industry, notorious for being copycats to successful outreach and visibility projects, has caught onto the idea of public art. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is starting with a few hundred 8-foot Space Shuttle statues, to be sponsored and creatively dressed up. The Shuttles Orbiting the Space Coast project launched on June 19, 2008. Completed shuttles will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in November 2008. After that, the shuttles will go to the sponsor’s desired public locations for approximately 8 months.
Artists apply here!
Moon’s Mini Modern Art Museum
Guerrilla style, artist Forrest “Frosty” Myers stowed modern art on a lunar lander to the moon, in 1969. S contemporary artists in the Apollo days—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain—contributed a drawing each which were “miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.” Naturally NASA would reject a cool idea like that, which led Myers to secretly collaborate with an anonymous Northrop Grumman engineer who secretly installed the “museum” on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module. Some say that Warhol’s drawing was a squiggle of his initials but others say it’s his penis. Art is objective.
Astronaut/artist also left behind several rolls of undeveloped film on the lunar surface. Who knows what radiation has done to the film, but it would be great to get them processed and see what Bean documented. Humans like to mark their territory, and artists do it with their work.
Sergey Brin, Space Tourist + Google CoFounder
In a recent article via the New York Times, Sergey Brin has announced plans to fly aboard the Soyuz, to get to the ISS and hang out there while he conjours new technology and direction for Google while casually observing the Earth from above. There are concerns that if anything happens to Brin, that Google would be in trouble. It’s part of life—risk. Being a seasoned entrepreneur, there’s always more untrod ground to break. Perhaps, via the overview effect, Sergey will have ideas of lunar archiving or intergalactic search engine optimizations, that can really propel humanity forward faster and longer.
