(9/9)

This one just never ends...

To set the mood, refer back to reference 31 in comment 6/9:

• Between 2005 & 2007, Sara Bronfman bought a $6.5 million apartment in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Manhattan that Nancy Salzman would later use.

Now a shoutout to @Mammy for the following thread:

Art Dealer Dead in Trump Tower Fire

Shoutout also to @neptunium1 & @Blacksmith21 for their contributions in the above thread.

However, time to go another direction on it.

[33.]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/nyregion/trump-tower-fire-art-collector.html | https://archive.is/0RTPT

Cut and emphasis my own:

Art Collector and Bon Vivant Dies in Trump Tower Home He Couldn’t Sell

^{By JOHN LELAND and LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍAPRIL 8, 2018}

~~Mr. Brassner was one of two sons born to an art dealer and lighting manufacturer named Jules Brassner, who introduced him to Warhol. Todd Brassner fit right into the Warhol orbit, and often went shopping with the artist, said Stuart Pivar, a collector who was very close to Warhol.

“They were like two 14-year-olds, seeing the world,” Mr. Pivar said. “And he was very knowledgeable about pop art.”

Though Mr. Brassner enjoyed the high life, “he was a very family-oriented guy, and we often talked about our parents,” said Howard Murray, a television director who grew up with Mr. Brassner and reconnected about a decade ago. “He always talked about his mom talking Yiddish.”~~

~~He filed for bankruptcy in 2015, but soon after he inherited money from his father. “He showed up at my house the next day in a brand-new red Lamborghini,” Mr. Pivar said. “That was Todd.”

[34]: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/trump-tower-fire-victim-called-crazy-jew-prez-friend-article-1.3922739 | https://archive.is/6bk5t

Cut & emphasis my own:

Close friend of man killed in Trump Tower fire says President once called victim 'crazy Jew'

^{BY ESHA RAY}

^{NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Sunday, April 8, 2018, 11:06 PM}

~~As a young man, Brassner was close friends with Andy Warhol and sold many of the famed artist’s paintings, including a 1967 self-portrait that went for $601,000 in 2007.~~

[35.]: http://www.josephklevenefineartltd.com/artists/andy-warhol/andy-warhol-small-self-portrait.html | https://archive.is/P2IUy

https://archive.is/P2IUy/1730c1e9be96730e99012350a6de9165bae56a95.jpg

ANDY WARHOL

SELF PORTRAIT, 1967

Provenance

Todd Brassner, New York

Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd., New York

Private Collection, California

SOLD

Brassner | Warhol | Pivar

[36.]: https://www.wired.com/2007/08/pseudoscience-n/ | https://archive.is/sBqQ7

Cut & emphasis my own:

Pseudoscience not Selling? Just Sue a Science Blogger for Libel

^{Brandon Keim | science | 08.20.07 | 10:43 am}

Paul Myers, better known as the science blogger Pharyngula, has been sued for libel by Stuart Pivar, author of Lifecode.

Pivar, a wealthy art collector, alleged Stephen Jay Gould buddy and Renaissance-throwback science hobbyist, published Lifecode in 2004. The press release accompanying its recent re-issue describes the tome as

... an alternative theory of evolution which contends that the embryo is formed by self-organization, as are crystals, rather than by a genetic code subject to natural selection. Accompanying illustrations depict hypothetical construction blueprints for the various body forms. Biological Self-organization has long been a contending alternate theory for the code of life; recent proponents include evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin.

~~On Pharyngula, Myers was pointed in his criticisms:

The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while,

I realized what this book is actually about.

This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.

Maybe if Myers hadn't included a long, technical evaluation to the balloon animal snark, Pivars might – theoretically – have had a very outside shot at a case. But in that post and elsewhere, Myers gets into the scientific flaws of Pivar's theories. What he says falls well short of the American definition of libel, which requires that a claim be false.The meat of Myers' criticisms are quite substantial.

Pivar's case is clearly empty. And given his wealth, he can undoubtedly afford better legal advice. So what's the deal? I'm guessing that it's just a PR stunt. What better way to sell your book than get the blogosphere boiling, in the hope that the lawsuit becomes a full-blown – and wholly undeserved – controversy?

And here I am, covering it. Damn the system.

Update: Scientific American's Christopher Mims just wrote to say, "What if PZ didn't work for Seed? If people start going after individual bloggers without the resources to defend themselves, that would have a chilling effect on the whole field." He's right. And it's a scary thought.

[37.]: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/garden/two-scientists-caught-in-amber.html | https://archive.is/hYR9Z

Cut & emphasis my own:

Two Scientists Caught in Amber

^{By CLAUDIA STEINBERGSEPT. 9, 2004}

"YOU need 300 objects to furnish an apartment, just for the record," said Stuart Pivar, a scientist and art collector, in a grand tone reminiscent of Diana Vreeland. Ms. Vreeland was a close friend and taught him the effectiveness of pontification.

It can be safely guessed that Mr. Pivar has more than 300 objects in the duplex apartment he shares with Helen Matsos in a neo-Gothic building on West 67th Street in Manhattan. His belongings include figurative art and Renaissance furnishings, modern ceramics and an inherited piano.

Mr. Pivar, 72, has long been involved with the New York art scene. The son of an importer of velvet ribbons and an intensely style-conscious mother, he was a founder of the New York Academy of Art, then in the East Village and now on Franklin Street in TriBeCa, with Andy Warhol. (Mr. Pivar was invited to Warhol's Factory by a friend in the early 1970's, and he and Warhol soon became close friends and shopping companions.)

Made wealthy by the industrial companies he founded, Mr. Pivar bought his apartment in 1975 from an elderly woman who had lived there for 60 years. The apartment, including its contents -- chiefly 19th-century salon furniture and what he calls respectable Renaissance reproductions -- cost him $85,000. He then sold all the furniture, except the Steinway piano and theatrical costumes, at Sotheby's for nearly the same amount, in effect getting the apartment free.

"It is a good thing to identify yourself as a collector," Mr. Pivar said. "People will bring you things."

Doormen, recognizing his acquisitive nature, have presented him with art left behind by other residents, including stacks of nude drawings by the American realist painter Leon Kroll (1884-1974, known for his depictions of the female form), who had once lived in the building. Mr. Pivar himself has added, among many other things, a set of twisted Solomonic columns -- the kind Bernini used at St. Peter's in Rome -- and a sculpture of a Greek goddess.

He has also amassed precious musical instruments including the 16th-century harpsichord in his study and a platinum flute, which he bought at auction in 1986 for $187,000, he said, after a bidding war with an investment banker, who wanted to buy it for his 12-year-old-daughter.

Warhol's diary entry that year for Oct. 18 recorded the moment: "Stuart kept his paddle up and I could feel his whole body next to me shaking. When the hammer came down, Stuart was just in shock. Just in shock. He then consumed two double martinis and four hot chocolates."

On the floor underneath the harpsichord is a surprising sight: a large number of familiar-looking bronze Rodins. Mr. Pivar refers to them, with a shrug, as his Rodin forest. As he puts it, "Everyone has a Rodin."~~

Brassner | [31: NXIVM | Bronfman] | Warhol | Pivar

[.38]: http://www.washdiplomat.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6040:10-jews-30-years-later-&catid=205:april-2010&Itemid=239 | https://archive.is/XCjAF

Warhol's Landmark Portraits Make Their Way Back to D.C.

For pop artist Andy Warhol, maybe timing really is everything. When his show “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” premiered in Washington, D.C., in 1980, critics panned it as exploitative, even as audiences lauded it. Thirty years later, in the age of wardrobe malfunctions and racy YouTube videos, 10 colorful portraits of influential Jews hardly raises an eyebrow.

Any time an artist departs from the norm, people get uncomfortable, said Susan W. Morgenstein, guest curator of “Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century in Retrospect,” an exhibit at the Washington District of Columbia Jewish Community Center’s Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery.

The display comprises Warhol’s 10 portraits of renowned Jews: French actress Sarah Bernhardt; Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; philosopher and educator Martin Buber; physicist Albert Einstein; Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis; the comical Marx brothers; former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; composer George Gershwin; novelist Franz Kafka; and writer Gertrude Stein.

Besides the 40-inch-by-32-inch prints, this show includes reproductions of the photographs on which Warhol based the portraits, clips from media coverage of the original exhibition, and letters among the original collaborators who selected which Jews to feature.~~