Stormtroopers with an Edge, $645K Woolly Mammoth, and More Fresh News

Joana Vasconcelos, ‘Wool Trooper,’ 2017, resin cast Stormtrooper helmet, handmade woollen crochet, ornaments, polyester. Image: Sur Le Mur Gallery

News and updates from around the arts and auction community:

• Off-the-wall stormtrooper helmets worked on by 20 different artists are now on show at a West Hollywood gallery’s Art Wars exhibition. Among the contributors are two notorious street artists: LA’s Retna and the UK’s Chemical X. [Read more about Art Wars]
• The 10,000-year-old skeleton of a woolly mammoth was sold on Saturday for $645,000. The prehistoric set of bones was discovered by a hunter in Siberia about a decade ago. [Read more from NBC News]
• John Lennon’s very simple doodle of a plump budgie (parakeet) has sold for $29,445 in England. Originally drawn for inclusion in Lennon’s novel A Spaniard in the Works, it was later used as Christmas card art by the British charity Oxfam [Read more from the Express]
• A set of 12 landscape paintings created in 1925 by one of China’s best-known artists, Qi Baishi, was auctioned in Beijing on Sunday for $141 million. It’s a new world auction record for a Chinese artwork [Read about the bidding war from the South China Morning Post]

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