News and updates from around the arts and auction community:

• Artists are launching a crowd-funding effort to raise $1.25 million for a David Bowie memorial in London. The planned sculpture will be in the form of the iconic lightning bolt painted on Bowie’s face for the cover of his LP Aladdin Sane. [Read more from Associated Press/Breitbart]
  

• His luminous strokes produced masterpieces like Girl with a Pearl Earring. But Johannes Vermeer, the unique jewel in Dutch painting’s crown, copied ideas from his contemporaries like every other artist, argues a new major exhibit at the Louvre Museum in Paris that opened Wednesday. [Read more from Associated Press]

• When Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon, arrived in the United States in 1815, he brought with him his exquisite collection of 18th-century French paintings. Put on public view, the works caused a sensation, and a new American taste for French art was born. [Read more from the National Gallery of Art]
  

• Even Jackie Collins herself said that many of the adventures in her 32 best-selling romance novels were based on the Hollywood scene she knew from years of living in LA. Now the late Jackie Collins’ fans can vie for a piece of her flamboyant lifestyle when 1,000 lots of her jewels and other personal property cross the auction block in May. [Read more from Forbes]

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