Image of the week: Crude Oil (Vettriano)
Image of the week this week comes courtesy of Banksy, whose painting Crude Oil (Vettriano) is set to go to auction at Sotheby’s in London early next month, having been put on the block by the man who has owned it since 2011, Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus.
The anonymous artist’s reimagining of The Singing Butler by Scottish painter Jack Vettriano with a message about the environment, pollution and capitalism is expected to be sold for between €3.6 million and €6 million, with Hoppus planning to use the proceeds from the sale to buy works by “younger, upcoming artists”. And, because he’s a rock star, he added: “I want to be a f**king Medici.”
A portion of the funds will also be donated to charities including the California Fire Foundation, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Cedars Sinai Haematology Oncology Research. Hoppus was diagnosed with stage four diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in June 2021, but announced he was free of cancer in September that year after months of chemotherapy.
The painting, which Hoppus says brings “joy and anger, and hope and scepticism”, was first exhibited in 2005. The original, much-reproduced Vettriano painting has an Irish connection, in that the “lady in red” was inspired by modelling work completed for the Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual in the 1980s by Irish actor Orla Brady. She was paid around £50 for her day’s work.
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In numbers: Swift dominance
5
Number of times Taylor Swift has now been crowned global recording artist of the year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), having secured the title for 2024 to go along with top spots in 2014, 2019, 2022 and 2023. Dazzling.
5.6 million
“Units” of her album The Tortured Poets Department consumed in 2024 via physical album sales, downloads and streaming, according to the IFPI, putting it way ahead of K-pop group Enhypen’s Romance: Untold, which was in second place with 3.4 million units. Nice try, K-pop.
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Swift albums that feature in the top 20 of the IFPI’s 2024 global vinyl album chart, which was headed by Tortured Poets and also featured 1989 (Taylor’s Version) from the year before, Midnights (2022), folklore (2020), evermore (2020) and Lover (2019). A vinyl sweep.
Getting to know: Mira Murati
Mira Murati is the former chief technology officer of ChatGPT darlings OpenAI who was also briefly its interim chief executive in late 2023 after its board fell out with co-founder Sam Altman. In the power struggle that followed, however, Murati (36) sided with Altman and only left OpenAI last September, saying she wanted “to create time and space to do my own exploration” – aka the ultimate dream.
She has now launched an artificial intelligence start-up called Thinking Machines Lab, which is a great title, having assembled about 30 researchers and engineers, most of them poached from competitors including OpenAI, Meta and French outfit Mistral.
The new start-up, we are told, will have a focus on “AI alignment”, which refers to the process of encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable. Which human values? Well, that depends on who you ask. A misaligned AI system, by contrast, is one that has unintended consequences, and no one wants that.
The list: Tourism slogans gone wrong
Not everyone is a fan of Tourism New Zealand’s latest tagline “Everyone must go!”, aimed at Australians, with some critics believing it’s a bit too close to the bone in a country that saw record emigration last year. But it’s far from the only tourism campaign to have, at best, a mixed reaction, as these five examples suggest.
1. Be Taken by Albania: Be enchanted by Albania? Well, yes, but also in the Liam Neeson vehicle Taken (2008), his character’s daughter and her friend are kidnapped by Albanians. Some 11 years later, Albania set out to correct this impression with a clumsy film-referencing slogan that just reminded everyone about the whole criminal gang thing.
2. So where the bloody hell are you? (Australia): This campaign slogan came a cropper in the UK in 2007, with regulators banning it from television and billboards. The Australian tourist minister at the time, Fran Bailey, expressed dismay at what she saw as “double standards” from a country that allows FCUK billboards.
3. #ThisIsEgypt: In this classic own goal from 2015, Egypt’s tourism minister started a hashtag-based campaign invoking beautiful landscapes. Egyptian social media users soon started to use the same hashtag next to images of state repression.
4. Always beautiful (Syria): In 2016, the Syrian ministry of tourism somewhat optimistically launched a don’t-mention-the-war campaign featuring aerial views of a beach with parasols, swimmers and jet skis, plus the claim that Syria is “always beautiful”.
5. Hong Kong will take your breath away: Back in 2003, the Hong Kong tourist board told magazine readers that a visit would take their breath away. Alas, it was unable to pull all the advertisements before the spread of Sars, one of the main symptoms of which is acute shortness of breath.
