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A travelling exhibition titled Life Without Tobacco Smoke arrived in Sofia after visiting 10 other Bulgarian cities, Focus news agency reported on November 10 2008.
Featuring 48 artists from 19 countries, the exhibition presents 55 caricatures and it is a collaborative effort of the Health Ministry and the House of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo. All works belong to the House's fund and come from Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Israel and Iran, among others.
"Smoking is a personal choice but let all smokers be more tolerant towards the non-smokers who surround them," Tatyana Tsankova, director of the House, has said during the exhibition opening as quoted by Focus agency.
She has also said that the collection of caricatures is revolutionary by spirit and it aims to stir a revolution in the smokers' mind.
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The Montpelier Center for Arts & Education recently opened "Holy Smokes: A World of Cajun Beauties, Brassy Blues n' Smokin' Joes." The show consists of 20 new acrylic paintings by Richmond artist Mike Coleman depicting Southern women and Catholic nuns smoking cigars. After painting the first in the series on a lark, Coleman says, "I told myself, 'I'm going to devote a whole year to painting women smoking cigars,' and I really enjoyed it because everyone who encountered them smiled."
This was issue No. 133 of "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen" -- the first to be written and drawn by the comics legend Jack Kirby. . . .
In the biography Kirby: King of Comics (Abrams, $40), the King's longtime confidant and assistant Mark Evanier writes of Kirby that "when a new idea came to him, he jotted it down on a scrap of paper and, usually, lost it. Once, he got careless with a cigar, started a small fire in his workplace and lost over 50 concepts" -- or, as his wife, Roz, put it, "'a whole day's work for Kirby.'"
Cigarette-maker BAT has built up an impressive collection of modern art at its factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar over the last 50 years. The art was used to keep workers from getting bored. But now the factory is closing, the art is up for auction and many are unhappy.
Cigarette brands Peter Stuyvesant and Lucky Strike will no longer be made in the Dutch town of Zevenaar. The closure of the British American Tobacco (BAT) factory marks not only the end of a major source of employment in the area but also the final curtain for an unusual piece of Dutch art history.
At the end of the 1950s, factory director Alexander Orlow started hanging works of art among the cigarette-making machines. The workers needed something interesting to look at to stave off boredom and increase their productivity, he felt.
The sale of the first four paintings in a major modern art collection owned by British American Tobacco is due to start on Saturday, reports the NRC on Friday.
The 1,500 works, including 150 internationally prized pieces, are believed to be worth between €15m and €25m. The art collection belongs British American Tobacco and was started in the late 1950s by Alexander Orlow who was director of the company’s Dutch cigarette factory.
Orlow started hanging paintings on the walls of the factory to prevent his workers from getting bored. But now the factory in Zevenaar is being closed and the art collection too must go.
Indonesian art collector Oei Hong Djien is planning his third museum. There isn't room in his existing two galleries and house for more than a fraction of the 1,500 works he acquired over the past three decades.
Oei, 69, was one of the first to systematically buy contemporary Indonesian art, long before prices for the nation's artists began to rise exponentially in 2006. . . .
Oei studied pathological anatomy in the Netherlands before returning to Magelang in 1968 after the death of his father to take over the family tobacco business. On the wall next to the entrance of his modern-art museum is a two-story marble relief by Widayat depicting the cycle of the tobacco plant, from seedlings through to the bales of dried leaves in a warehouse and, below, an art gallery.
Tobacco Warehouse
``We are turning tobacco into art,'' grinned Oei, looking at the mural. It's a tobacco warehouse that Oei plans to convert into the new museum. Work will probably start after the current harvest, he said.
When the Joffrey Ballet begins its national tour in Denver next week, the name of the largest cigarette manufacturer in the United States - Philip Morris Companies Inc. - will appear on thousands of the dance group's program guides and promotional posters.
Philip Morris bought this prestigious exposure for $200,000. . . .
Many health and anti-smoking groups, however, say the sponsorship of cultural activities by tobacco companies in general and Philip Morris in particular raises ethical questions. They say such gift-giving is a subtle advertising ploy intended to provide a patina of prestige to corporations marketing a lethal and addictive product. 'Serious Questions'
''The association of Philip Morris in arts and in philanthropy is indeed hypocritical,'' said a spokesman for the American Cancer Society, Irving Rimer. ''The company is engaged in manufacturing a product that has killed thousands, if not millions. The recipients should start to raise very, very serious questions about that association.''
Executives with Philip Morris, which is based in Manhattan, dismiss such criticism as the product of zealotry. . . .
''Do you take money from banks that do business in South Africa?'' said George Weissman, a former chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Philip Morris. ''Where do you stop? . . .
Besides the Joffrey Ballet, recipients include the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the American Association of Museums, the Morgan Library, the Guggenheim Museum, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theater, the American Museum of Natural History, Lincoln Center and scores of other cultural organizations. . . .
Perhaps the most famous and controversial donation by Philip Morris was a $3 million-plus exhibition of Vatican art treasures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. At the inaugural banquet, Terence Cardinal Cooke, then the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, led a prayer for Mr. Weissman and his Philip Morris colleagues. The benediction prompted a Philip Morris vice president, Frank Saunders, to say, ''We are probably the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal.''
Back in the '80s, when Sherrie Levine exhibited photographs she made of photographs by Walker Evans, and Richard Prince made photographs of Marlboro cigarette ads leaving out only the text, a new genre was born: Appropriation Art. . . .
"Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum: The Art of Appropriation" continues through Nov. 10 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.
An artwork intended to be a commentary on the smoking ban may never see the light of day - because of the smoking ban.
US artist Norma Jeane, whose previous works include a cheese made of breast milk and an invitation to 160 people to have sex on a Roman roof terrace, wanted to create three transparent booths, each just big enough for one person to stand in and smoke.
Norma Jeane, who takes his name from the fact that he was born on the day Marilyn Monroe died, intended to highlight the fact that the once social activity of smoking has been transformed through legislation into an antisocial act. The Straight Story, as the work is titled, was commissioned by Frieze, one of the biggest art fairs in the world . . .
Members of the public were to be invited to smoke inside the booths, which would stand within the Frieze tents. But Westminster council has rejected an application for the "smoking booth" art installation on the grounds that it has insufficient "artistic merit".
Rivers played fruitfully in the gap between high and low. See, for example, "Dutch Masters and Cigars III" (1963), the large-scale painting and collage representing a cigar box decorated with reproductions of Rembrandt's "Syndics of the Drapers' Guild." The insouciant conflation of art and commerce, executed by Rivers with a carelessly skillful touch, speaks volumes about the collapse of hierarchies already happening in American culture and society. . . .
A Camel cigarette package rendered in deep, rich shades of red on a square canvas (from 1962) becomes a hybrid Pop-Modernist icon.
The Denver Art Museum's two-year-old jutting addition designed by Daniel Libeskind looks like an Imperial Cruiser from "Star Wars," . . .
And if you happen to be having trouble giving up smoking, be sure to look for Damien Hirst's "Party Time" installation, an ashtray the size of a kiddie pool filled with thousands of burned cigarette butts. Dive right in.
There are people who have a fetish for watching women smoking. I can see why. Just watching this is addictive, and I have the uncomfortable feeling that it is a kind of pornography. I quit only a couple of years ago, so watching Akerman's film remains difficult. Neither an aversion-therapy film nor a pious warning to the arty crowd, Women from Antwerp in November is a full-on, love-it-to-death smoke-fest. Gissadrag.
The footage was originally produced for a multimedia performance by Antwerp artist and fellow smoker Jan Fabre, and Akerman has reused it for this 20-minute long installation, with its 20 little stories - each as incomplete and unsatisfying as a single cigarette.The camera has always loved a smoke, and the prop of the cigarette. . . .
But Women from Antwerp is more than a record of a dying habit. It celebrates smoking's conviviality and the splendid isolation of the smoker, the smoker's exhibitionism and her pensive introversion. Meanings curl and writhe and disappear into the night. After a while, the idea seems stale and repetitive; it leaves you empty but hungry for more. That's smoking for you.
Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.
"I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete." . . .
First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child.
With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech.
Van Ho Junior High School launched a competition on Tuesday in the capital looking for paintings by children, for children under the theme For an environment Without Tobacco Smoke.
The management board is hoping that children across the country will join the competition. Children from Hanoi and other northern provinces like Ha Tay and Hai Phong are already planning to make a giant painting (around 20m in length) to spread the word of the damaging effects of tobacco, according to Nguyen Thi Ha, head of the competition�?(TM)s management board.
Tasmanian artist Adrian Avenell needs 438,000 cigarette butts for an anti-smoking project he’s working on.
The trouble is, he only smokes 10 fags a day.
At that rate, Mr Avenell will never have enough butts for the job - a 4.5 metre-long, 1.8 metre-wide section of pavement and gutter covered with cigarette butts.
Plus a coffin made of fag ends.