How the event that still spawns conspiracy theories lives on in popular culture

A famed red sweater that was worn by Princess Diana sold for $1.14 million at a recent Sotheby’s auction. The colorful jumper, which depicts one black sheep among a crowd of white ones, headlined an online sale called “Fashion Icons.”

The final amount for the sweater blasted past its high estimate of $80,000 and far exceeded the previous record for a garment worn by the former Princess of Wales. That amount was $604,800, more than six times its high estimate, for a deep purple strapless gown designed by Victor Edelstein that was also sold by Sotheby’s in January.

The knitted garment worn by Diana was created by British designers Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne for the pair’s brand Warm & Wonderful. Diana wore the sweater in June 1981 at a polo match, shortly after she and Prince Charles announced their engagement.

According to Sotheby’s, coverage of Diana wearing the wool item was “the advertisement of a lifetime” for the two-year-old company, and was later credited as giving the small business a “stratospheric launch.” The design was so popular that the American clothing brand Rowing Blazers reissued a cotton version in 2020. It was also featured in the television show The Crown.

Interest in items worn by Diana has skyrocketed, with a rare amethyst cross necklace auctioned by Sotheby’s in London earlier this year. A representative for Kim Kardashian beat four other bidders on the necklace, dubbed the Attallah Cross, worn by Diana at a charity event in October 1987. It sold for £163,800 ($200,000).

On Tuesday, the Pulitzer Prize Board expanded the eligibility for the books, drama, and music awards by including artists who are not US citizens. The new policy, which begins in the 2025 cycle, will include “permanent residents of the United States and those who have made the United States their longtime primary home.” Over 2,500 entries are submitted to the Pulitzer’s 23 categories every year, and only 8 receive the $15,000 cash award for books, drama, or music. There was some irony in the fact that the prestigious prize established in 1917 in the will of Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer to celebrate American art and journalism would exclude noncitizens. However, this policy has been a defining feature of eligibility for all the Pulitzer categories since their respective inceptions. 

Writers have denounced the Pulitzer’s citizenship requirement in the past but failed to solicit a response. But then, Javier Zamora, poet, and author of Unaccompanied and Solito, petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board to open its literature awards to noncitizens in a searing Los Angeles Times op-ed in July. His 2022 memoir, which hit the New York Times bestseller list, was nonetheless ineligible to receive one of literature’s highest honors because of Zamora’s citizenship status. “After 19 years here without a green card, then four years with an EB-1 ‘Einstein Visa,’ after earning a master’s degree in writing from New York University and fellowships from Harvard and Stanford, I still wasn’t enough to be equally considered among my literary peers,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

Zamora, who traveled from El Salvador to the US without his parents as a child in the late 90s, was soon joined by a coalition of high-profile authors who publicly petitioned the Pulitzer Prize Board and denounced the use of citizenship requirements. “Whether undocumented writers are writing about the border or not,” they wrote in Literary Hub, “their voices are quintessentially part of what it means to belong and struggle to belong in this and to this nation.” In response, the Board amended the citizenship policy and pledged their commitment to “ensuring that the Prizes are inclusive and accessible to those producing distinguished work in Books, Drama, and Music.” The same week the Pulitzer Prizes changed its policy, a federal judge in Texas declared DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created to protect thousands of undocumented youth from deportation, illegal. To Zamora, the two announcements—and the continued enforcement of restrictive citizenship policies at organizations such as the National Book Awards and PEN Amerca—are linked.

I caught up with Javier via Zoom to talk about Pulitzer’s announcement, nationalism in the literary world, and the work that remains to be done.

When did you first realize you were ineligible for the Pulitzer Prize for literature due to your citizenship status?

A German museum is facing right-wing backlash after creating a designated time for non-white visitors to view an exhibition about colonialism, the Washington Post reported last week. Police remain stationed at the museum.

The Zeche Zollern Museum in Dortmund dedicated four hours each Saturday as a safe space for BIPOC attendees to visit the show “This Is Colonial” with the purpose of being “considerate of people who are more affected by the topic of colonialism than others,” the director of local industrial museums Kirsten Baumann said on Facebook.

Visitors who arrive during that time, however, are not monitored.

The museum received international visibility when a TikTok video of two white men confronting staff about the time slot went viral. In it, the men accuse the museum of discrimination against white people.

The two white men were not asked or forced to leave the premises. But museum employees who were filmed without their consent are reportedly taking legal action for defamation.

A Walk in the Woods (1983), the painting completed on air during the first episode of Bob Ross’s landmark television show The Joy of Painting has come to market, The Art Newspaper reported Thursday.

They say that memories are priceless. However, anyone interested in reliving the first episode of The Joy of Painting via A Walk in the Woods is going to have to shell out a hefty sum: Modern Artifact, the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based gallery selling the canvas, has priced it at $9.85 million. 

The gallery understands that this figure might seem outlandish to some, but that may be the point. The gallery says that while it will entertain offers “they would prefer to share it with a museum or traveling exhibit to allow as many people as possible to view such an exciting work of art.”

Meanwhile, Modern Artifact plans to take the painting on tour itself, according to The Art Newspaper.

In a statement, gallery owner Ryan Nelson wrote about Ross’s singular place in art and cultural history. “Bob Ross has surpassed Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso as the internet’s most searched for artist according to data from Google Analytics,” he said. “It’s an incredibly impressive feat, especially considering that there is virtually no official marketing, and his original paintings are nearly impossible to find.” 

On September 21 at Christie’s, Marchant, the venerable London-based dealer of Asian art, is selling eight pieces of imperial Chinese porcelain they hope will reinvigorate the once-booming Western market for these ceramics. 

The sale sparks interest on multiple fronts. Marchant is a London-based dealer specializing in this exact sort of thing, and has been since 1925, so its collaboration with a house like Christie’s is unusual.

Also, the works headed to sale date to around the time of the ascension of Wanli (1573–1620) as emperor. According to Samuel Marchant, this was an era of very notable porcelain for the late Ming Dynasty, as quality of production fell sharply toward the end of Wanli’s reign.

Marchant knows his stuff. His great-grandfather was Samuel Sidney Marchant founded the firm, and Richard Marchant, Samuel’s grandfather, joined the family business at the age of 17 in 1953.

On the phone with ARTnews, Samuel spoke of the differences between early, middle, and late Ming dynasty porcelain and between Imperial porcelains made “during the reigns of Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who are three of the three most prominent and famous emperors of the Qing Dynasty.”

Fernando Botero, a Colombian artist whose paintings peopled with full-figured members of the elite achieved international fame, opening doors for many Latin Americans after him, has died at 91.

Lina Botero, his daughter, told Caracol, a Colombian radio station, that her father died at his home in Monaco on Friday morning. He had been battling pneumonia.

Botero’s paintings of Colombian governmental officials and clergy are now known the world over. He said that when he first started making them, in the 1950s, there wasn’t much other art like it in his home country, where European modernist painting was not widely seen at the time.

His voluptuous figures, with rounded arms, thick waistlines, and sizable thighs, have become instantly distinguishable as Botero’s own. He went on to translate these figures for the third dimension, turning them into sculptures that were sometimes placed in public settings, where they towered over the people who stood before them.

Critics initially debated whether these figures were meant to be parodies, since the politics of Botero’s work was deliberately oblique.

Rational 360, a high-powered Washington, DC-based strategic communications firm and digital agency, promises to use “innovative” means and a network that extends “deep into the Halls of Congress, the White House, and Fortune 500 boardrooms across the country” to advance the “mission-critical goals” of its clients, a roster of corporations, trade associations, military contractors, policy advocates, and others. The company—one of the many inside-the-Beltway firms that crafts messaging and peddles influence—promotes itself as a purely bipartisan operation, though its top leaders are mostly Democrats with White House experience earned during the Clinton and Obama years. Yet despite these Democratic roots, Rational 360 plays the field, having recently set up a company to help elect Republicans, while also creating an offshoot to assist Democratic campaigns. Moreover, it has advised No Labels, a dark-money and self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run a third-party presidential candidate in 2024 in an effort that could help Donald Trump.

With these activities, Rational 360 looks as if it is trying to profit from all partisan sides—right, left, and middle.

The company was formed in 2009 when Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group, an advertising outfit, created a firm to pitch large corporate clients. The eight partners at the time included Patrick Dorton, who had been a top aide in the Clinton White House and the chief spokesman for  Arthur Andersen LLP during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Dorton is now the CEO of Rational 360, and the other top officers of the company include notable Democratic veterans. Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. The firm, true to its bipartisan pitch, also includes officers and staffers with Republican pedigrees.

“People generally think of Rational 360 as a Democratic-run firm, but here they are trying to help Republicans,” says a person familiar with Rational 360’s operations. “And with this arrangement, could they have a candidate on both sides of the same election?”

According to Federal Election Commission data, Rational 360 has done no work for federal candidates or political action committees, except a modest bit of consulting in 2020 for Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a Republican super PAC, for which it was paid $5,000. But in 2021, it created an offshoot entity to provide digital media services to Democratic candidates—without identifying this group’s link to Rational 360. 

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

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Whether for art classes or for projects that need pizzazz, a set of good-quality colored pencils is a must for every back-to-school season. It can be overwhelming finding the right one, however, as many colored pencils are geared toward pros. For most students, a solid beginner set—while not necessarily lightfast—will suffice. You’ll quickly see that you don’t have to spend a lot to bring a new world of color to a young artist’s fingertips. Read on for our top picks, which all come in sets of at least two dozen colors with a diverse selection of hues and sharpen easily for frustration-free use.

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Our mission is to recommend the most appropriate artists’ tool or supply for your needs. Whether you are looking for top-of-the line equipment or beginners’ basics, we’ll make sure that you get good value for your money by doing the research for you. We scour the Internet for information on how art supplies are used and read customer reviews by real users; we ask experts for their advice; and of course, we rely on our own accumulated expertise as artists, teachers, and craftspeople.

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Prismacolor Scholar Art Pencils, Set of 24
These student-grade pencils from the biggest name in colored pencils sit at the top of our list for many reasons. First, they are economical, at a little more than 50 cents a pencil. Secondly, they deliver rich, blendable color that can lay down lightly or intensely. Their cores are softer than Prismacolor’s premier line of colored pencils, allowing students to practice blending colors, but they nevertheless resist breakage. This set also comes in a durable plastic case that opens to double as an upright holder you can stand on your desk.

Buy: Prismacolor Scholar Colored Pencils, 24 Pack $13.08

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Derwent Academy Colored Pencil Sets
These rather highbrow sets may not be an intuitive buy for little artists, but it cinches the next spot on our list for a few reasons. First off—and this is a big one—these pencils come in a sturdy tin, so you can bid farewell to flimsy, dirty cardboard boxes. The pencils themselves are simply gorgeous: brilliantly hued 3.3-millimeter leads in a glossy black casing, finished with correspondingly colored ends. They’re a worthy purchase for the whole family. Because Derwent’s colored pencils are a step up from our first pick, expect to shell out a little more for these 12- and 24-pencil sets. Are they worth every penny? You bet.