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The Art World's Shark Man, Still in the Swim 

Damien Hirst's exhibition in Kiev -- his first major retrospective -- includes the signature animal-based works of the artist, who is shown above, as well as recent efforts in a relatively mundane medium: painting. . . .

Hirst also brought a number of works built around cigarette butts, including a six-foot-wide ashtray piled with thousands of stubbed-out smokes. The distinctive stink of stale tobacco fills the space.

"He's saying that by the end of your life, your ashtray is full," suggests Invanka Yakovyne, a 17-year-old sporting lime green fingernails and red sneakers.

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Art Review - Claes Oldenburg - At the Whitney, a Low-Cost Show Reinflates a Big Bag  

The Whitney, like many of us in the current economy, is finding new ways to use the things it already owns. It's recycling parts of previous exhibitions, but it's also sprucing up works that haven't been seen in decades with a good cleaning and the necessary repairs.

The strategy works well enough in a pair of shows devoted to Claes Oldenburg and his wife and collaborator, Coosje Van Bruggen, who died in January. . . .

A selection of drawings, nearly all from the Lauder gift, include Mr. Oldenburg’s fanciful yet pointed proposals for civic monuments. Many, like “Proposal for a Skyscraper in the Form of a Chicago Fireplug,” date from 1968 and are keyed to the social and political tumult of that year. Others are timelessly provocative; the stacked tubes of “Museum Design Based on a Cigarette Package” might have been dreamed up by a starchitect. . . .

"Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films" and "Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room" continue through Sept. 6 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.

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New Met Exhibit Traces a Decade of Change  

Five years in the making, ''The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984'' at the Metropolitan Museum Art is based on a 1977 exhibit at the Artists Space in New York City and takes its name from the Pictures Generation. This small group of New York based artists looked at the scope of the images around them, in advertising, media and art, and realized that the art world wasn't engaging with, or criticizing, what had become an image-obsessed world. . . .

Our reactions are stalled as we try to process how to react to what looks and feels like something from a magazine: Welling's series ''And Should'' (1974), where Winston cigarette ads are cropped and superimposed over photographs;

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Talk About Travel 

Upper Marlboro, Md.: Why did you highlight the WPA murals in New Jersey? There are WPA murals in the D.C. area (specifically, the Tobacco Cutters, done for the WPA Post Office in Upper Marlboro which is now the library). Some of us who grew up here know the scene is North Carolina Burley -- not Maryland Type 32 that's being harvested (different harvesting methods).

Nancy McKeon: We know there are New Deal murals (the Post Office paintings are, technically, NOT part of the Works Progress Administration commissions) all over the place. We just selected a group that might interest people looking at a Travel section

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Corporate art’s new realism 

Whenever they grew tired of the production line, workers in a cigarette factory in the Dutch town of Zevenaar could look up from their labours and gaze on avant-garde works by artists such as Karel Appel and Anton Henning, which decorated the factory. Now, no longer. The plant was closed by BAT Industries last year and the art – a collection brought together to improve the quality of employees’ working lives – has largely been sold off.

While a factory closure or a change in strategy may cause companies to sell their art, a more pressing reason is the turmoil gripping markets. Finance directors are looking afresh at these non-core assets and seeing the chance to release much-needed cash.

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Caricatures moralise about smoking with humour 

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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'Holy Smokes' collectionat Montpelier Center for Arts 

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."

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Comics 

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.'"

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• A Chapter of Dutch Art History Ends: A Tobacco Factory Closes, Sheds its Collection  

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.

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Cigarette factory’s art collection up for sale 

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.

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Indonesian Collector Oei Turns Tobacco Into Art, Sees Slowdown  

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.

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ANTI-SMOKING GROUPS QUESTION ETHICS OF TOBACCO CONCERNS' GIFTS TO THE ARTS  

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.''

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Art Review - Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Rum - At MoMA, Appropriation From Duchamp's Urinal to Photos of Photos  

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.

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Arts diary: Frieze falls foul of the smoking ban as it lights up for the art world 

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".

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Portraits Shockingly Intimate a Half-Century Ago Now Assume a Softer Patina  

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.

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