Antique telephones ring a bell with collectors

Bell and Watson prototype phone, accompanied by original 1881 patent paperwork and a tag with Watson’s hand-written name and the date August 2, 1881, sold for $40,000 at an Aug. 4 auction. Photo courtesy Bruneau & Co. Auctioneers

NEW YORK – Have you seen the TV commercial where Alexander Graham Bell is at a play, sitting in the balcony and annoying everyone around him because he’s talking on the phone? The caller got a wrong number and Bell tells him, “No, no, my number is one. You must want two. Two I say!”

Continue reading

Julien’s to auction property from estate of metal god Ronnie James Dio, Sept. 14-15

NEW YORK – Julien’s Auctions, the Los Angeles-based world–record-breaking auction house, will pay tribute to one of the most influential heavy metal heroes and forefathers of the head–banging music genre with “Property from the Estate of Ronnie James Dio,” a two-day auction taking place Friday, September 14 and Saturday, September 15 live at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York and online at LiveAuctioneers.com.

Continue reading

Guggenheim awarded Mellon foundation grant for art preservation

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Image courtesy of the Guggenheim.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Photo by Jean-Christophe BENOIST, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

NEW YORK – The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has received a $750,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the public dissemination of new strategies essential to the long-term preservation, perpetuation, and display of variable, ephemeral, and fabrication-based artworks of the 1960s and 1970s. This vital scholarship was developed through the Guggenheim’s Panza Collection Initiative (PCI), a major three-phase study funded by the Mellon Foundation and launched in 2010 to develop groundbreaking research into the compelling questions surrounding the preservation of Minimal, Post-Minimal, and Conceptual art.

Continue reading