(Courtesy Bonhams)

It's so rare in one's art life to experience absolute completeness, to see every work—even if only in a single medium—by an artist. But right now, in Cologne, Germany, you can do just that with Gerhard Richter. Through May 17, Bonhams is currently hosting an exhibition of every single one of Mr. Richter's artist books, or Künstlerbücher as they say in German. You can take a peek at them over on the artist's remarkably comprehensive website.

Mr. Richter has lived and worked in Cologne for 30 years, and is pretty much royalty there. In 2007, he installed a set of stained glass windows with randomly generated little colored squares in the Cologne Cathedral, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Pretty beautiful stuff.

Doing a complete Richter painting show would be a little bit trickier; his website lists more than 3,400 works in that medium, and that isn't even counting the ones that he's destroyed.

That $375.1 million figure edged out the total combined value of last week's uneven Impressionist and Modern art evening sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, which together brought in about $368 million.

The sale was bolstered by an impressive 1954 Mark Rothko and one of Francis Bacon's iconic Pope paintings, also from that year. The record-setting Pollock went for $40 million in just three minutes, shooting up from an opening bid of $20 million, a testament to just how rarely the artist comes up at auction and the eagerness of those looking to buy him.

The Rothko, owned by Sotheby's longtime chief auctioneer and chairman John Marion, saw spirited bidding from the room and from the phones. David Nahmad had a shot at this cover lot at $38 million, but as other bidders fell away, Sotheby's Chairman Lisa Dennison and Charlie Moffett, vice chairman at the Impressionist and Modern department, bid it past its high estimate, on telephones at opposite sides of the room.

Mr. Moffett's bidder made a few aggressive offers, jumping from $41 million to $43 million, and later from $56 million to $60 million, but each time Ms. Dennison's bidder parried with another $1 million increment. However, in the end, he outlasted her, and after eight minutes Mr. Meyer hammered down lot 19, for Mr. Moffett, at $67 million—$75.1 million with premium.

The Rothko, No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue), is now second in the artist’s record book only to the 1961 Orange, Red, Yellow, which earned $86.9 million at Christie’s New York in May. That sale made $388.5 million, the most ever for any contemporary auction, an accolade this evening's sale missed by only about $13 million.

"This painting is from one of the most important periods for Rothko," said Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and former curator of the Mark Rothko Foundation, after the sale. A formative trip to Europe by Rothko just before 1954 led to his discovery of the effect of candles flickering on frescos, and after this time one sees the colors usually associated with the more desirable Rothkos. "After this trip, the colors were more strident," Ms. Clearwater said, "They seem to fight with each other, the layers of green, orange and magenta. Before this they were more chalky."

Andy Warhol also had a particularly good evening, with seven of his eight works on offer selling for a total of $54 million, well above a high estimate of $45 million expected for that selection, thanks to a well-stocked grouping of his highly desirable "Death and Disaster" paintings. Peter Brant purchased a Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) (1963) from this group for $15.2 million, and Christopher Eykyn, of the Upper East Side and London gallery Eykyn Maclean, purchased another featuring the actor James Cagney for the high estimate of $6.5 million, underbidding on a similar piece, The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) (1963), which sold moments before for $9.2 million, setting a new record for a Warhol work on paper.

Such stars made up for later lots, which saw modest bidding and sold to an emptier room, one that had been exhausted by an auction that took one hour to reach lot 26. There was a marked drop-off in action after lot 40—in this latter block of 29 lots, nine (out of an auction total of 11) failed to sell and 13 (out of a total of 20) went for below-estimate prices.

Among the more highly estimated lots that passed were Jeff Koons's 1997 Bread With Egg, estimated at $3.5 million to $4 million, which failed to sell at $3 million (though Mr. Koons's record for the medium is only $5.1 million), and a Lucio Fontana sculpture, which reached $1.7 million and would have been a record in the medium for the artist had it sold.

"Well, we tried," Mr. Meyer said, as a painting by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat passed at $2.1 million. And did they ever! The work had sold for only $400,000 when it last came up at auction, at Sotheby's New York, in 2004.

Toward the end of the sale, a large 2007 Wade Guyton painting bearing one of his trademark Epson–printed Xs sold for $782,500 to a bidder at the back of the near-empty room. The piece was good enough to beat out his previous record of $676,924, set exactly one month ago at Sotheby’s London and would fit in perfectly at his critically lauded show now on view at the Whitney Museum.

At the press conference afterward, Mr. Meyer called the sale's success an "ode to quality."

"The contemporary department was the poor cousin to the Impressionist department for years," said dealer Linda Silverman, who headed contemporary art in her time at Sotheby's between 1972 and 1983. She recalled a time when Rothkos were difficult to sell at $180,000 and said tonight's results impressed her. "I think it was an incredible collection of high-quality works of art from spectacular collections that I knew about many years ago when I worked here. I knew these collectors. They collected and waited, and chose the right paintings by the artists, and that was borne out by the prices tonight."

The contemporary auctions continue Wednesday at Christie's. All auction research courtesy of Artnet, all images courtesy Sotheby's.

Gerhard Richter, 'Untitled,' 1986. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

An untitled 1986 work by Gerhard Richter—an oil-on-paper work measuring about two feet by three feet—led the first Sotheby's contemporary art sale of the fall season, bringing in $842,500, more than double its high estimate of $350,000. The sale, which took place on Friday, Sept. 21, in New York, brought in about $12.3 million, which was comfortably within its pre-sale estimate of $9.7 to 13.8 million, with 71.1 percent of lots selling.

Other highlights in the auction included Frank Stella's 1969 work Window Sketch, which sold for $578,500 and Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Blue Butterfly), a 2001 painting in blue, black and purple that went for $554,500. Both works surpassed their high estimates.

“We are thrilled with the results of Friday’s sale with almost 90 percent of lots selling at or above their pre-sale estimate and with an amazing performance by abstract expressionists," said Erica Barrish, vice president of Sotheby’s Fine Arts Department, in a statement. "There was great international participation and very active bidding throughout the day. With this sale of Untitled by Richter, Sotheby’s currently holds the top five sales of his works on paper globally, and this work was the second highest result for Richter on paper to date."

Gerhard Richter, "Prag 1883," 1983. (Courtesy Christie's)

At its post-war and contemporary sale on Nov. 14, Christie's will auction off Gerhard Richter's Prag 1883. The painting, made in 1983, comes from the collection of hedge fund maven Steven A. Cohen and is estimated "in the region of $15 million."

The news first appeared in Carol Vogel's column yesterday. Brett Gorvy, Christie's chairman and international head of post-war and contemporary art, said in a release, "Richter is certainly the greatest abstract painter working today and Prag 1883 contains the genesis of all his ideas on abstraction."

The painting's title is in reference to the place and date of Franz Kafka's birth.

In other Richter news, his show of new paintings is currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery.

To generate the images in the 488-page book, Mr. Richter took one of his 1990 abstract paintings and digitally dissected it. First he cut it into two separate strips, mirrored them and repeated them across the length of the page to produce two hallucinogenic waves of abstraction. Then he cut the painting into four strips and followed the same process, repeating each mirrored strip so that each of the four final resulting images are the same length. Next came divisions of eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048 and 4,096. Works from that last division are simply straight horizontal lines of color, each one generated by minuscule cuts of the painting.

Patterns presents 221 strips from this series, which numbers 8,190 works in all. It is a seductive collection of images, and the latest bewildering move in Mr. Richter's ongoing tête-à-tête with painting. On the one hand, he seems to be marveling along with us at the intricacy of the paintings he makes by brusquely scraping numerous layers of paint with his squeegee until it looks right to him. However, at the same time, he's brutally picking apart that process in the book, revealing just how easily beauty can be generated with even a random system of cuts and mirrors and repetitions. Maybe, Patterns would seem to imply, his eye doesn't count for very much after all.

Regardless, the images are gorgeous. Take a look.

One of the works (Courtesy Faz.net)

Christie's announced this morning that it will have six works by Gerhard Richter at its spring postwar and contemporary sale.

The move follows Sotheby's, which had a eight works by the artist at its contemporary sale this past fall. The eight sold for $74 million together at hammer, which means the Christie's estimate of $40 million for the six seems reasonable.

The entire press release follows.

89644583 Christie s Ny Press Release 6 Gerhard Richter

Claes Oldenburg. 'Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag' (1966).

When someone steals a Bansky mural, who has the right to get angry? Annie Shaw contemplates the problems of authenticating Banksys. [The Art Newspaper]

The first Indian auction of Western art by a company based in Mumbai failed to live up to expectations, with a sell-through rate of less than half and total sales just $1.2 million, far below Saffronart's $3.3 million low estimate. Indian art, in contrast, has been doing well on the block in the country. [Bloomberg]

Is there a backlash against Frank Gehry? He seems to think so. Also, someone sold T-shirts that said "Fuck Frank Gehry" and he purchased a few. [The Guardian]

Roberta Smith reviews Susanne Kippenberger's biography of her brother, the late artist Martin Kippenberger, and finds it "a tender, reasonably clear-eyed, oddly gripping account." Ms. Smith writes, "It may sound hackneyed to say that Kippenberger’s life was an extended ­alcohol-fueled performance piece, but in a sense it was—at once self-indulgent, self-­destructive and, oddly, selfless, almost self-sacrificing." [NYT]

Anthony Amore, security expert for the federal government and co-author of Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists says art theft is "more Jersey Shore than James Bond." [Harvard Magazine]

Do Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough's 59 trips between July 2008 and July 2011, which included first class seating and travels to a Colorado resort, amount to the theft of taxpayer dollars? [Artinfo]

Jesse Helms on a pack of cigarettes? Here's a photo of the artist Hans Haacke, one of the pioneers of institutional critique, at his retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, looking pleasantly amused by his 1990 sculpture, Helmsboro Country, a gigantic pack of cigarettes emblazoned with the face of the late Senator Jesse Helms. [ArtDaily]

Germans embrace Gerhard Richter as a "hometown hero." [NYT]

Known as Cavaliere, former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi was criticized for his control over the Italian media, while in office. What was art like during his reign? Dutch artists Rob Hamelink and Nienke Terpsma also known as "F**king Good Art," give their take in their new book Italian Conversations. [HuffPo]

Claes Oldenburg interview reveals that his retrospective in Vienna is headed for New York, among other things. As it turns out, the food sculptures are autobiographical. "The key to my work is that it's about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna last month. 'If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them.'" [WSJ]

FDR's desk, from when he worked as an insurance executive, is headed to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum in New York's Hudson Valley. [AP]

A screenshot from "Gerhard Richter Painting." (Courtesy Kino Lorber)

The German painter Gerhard Richter turned 80 on Feb. 9, and celebrated it in high style the next day, by attending the opening of a career-spanning retrospective at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. The event was filled with paparazzi, according to The Times. (He's a king over there!) But there's more new Richter developments to get excited about.

1. A New Film Trailer
Corinna Belz's documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting, which follows Mr. Richter in his studio as he works on his iconic abstract paintings, just debuted a new preview, and it is stunning. There's even some vintage footage of the painter at work decades ago, telling the camera (in German), "To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too." The film hits New York's Film Forum in March.

2. A New Artforum Article
Despite that comment from the young man, brave art historians have been determined to figure out his work for decades, and one of his longest-running chroniclers, Benjamin Buchloh, has a 20-part look at his recent work in this month's Artforum. It's a rather vigorous read, but worth it since the Harvard art historian has some interesting things to say about the weird new digital pieces Richter has been making, in which "color as spiritual substance appears now in abusive excess."

Professor Buchloh has seen Ms. Belz's film, and notes that "the artist accedes to a radical diminishment of tactile control and manual dexterity, suggesting that the erasure of painterly detail is as essential to the work's production as the inscription of procedural traces... we might be witnessing a chasm of negation and destruction as much as the emergence of enchanting coloristic and structural vistas." (Also, in case you worried, like T. J. Clark, that the abstractions risk becoming "corporate decor," Professor Buchloh can comfort you. But you have to read the piece.)

3. Market Triumphs in London
Of course, one reason why Richters aren't going to become popular corporate decor is because they have become so enormously expensive that shareholders would likely toss out any executive shelling out the cash for one. A large 1987 abstraction made $20.8 million at Sotheby's back in November, and the artist's work is cruising along rather nicely in London this week. The majority of Richters on offer at Christie's and Sotheby's evening sales sold for above their high estimates, and a large 1994 example made $15.5 million.

4. "The Next Great Market Force"
Citi Art Advisory's Jonathan Binstock thinks that Mr. Richter "has recently emerged powerfully as the next great market force among the tradition of 20th century painters including Pablo Picasso, William de Kooning and Andy Warhol.” (Quite the boys club there!) But Art Market Monitor's Marion Maneker links to a recent article by Barron's Richard C. Morais in which he speculates that an art bubble is on, with "too much money chasing too little investment grade art is inflating the values of previous outliers." Going to savor that phrase, "investment grade art," for a long time.

5. Destroying Paintings
As my colleague Michael H. Miller noted recently, Mr. Richter has been making news of late by discussing that he destroyed some of his early paintings with a box cutter or by lighting them on fire. Except, it turns out that some of them have survived, in a sense, as photographs, and writer Greg Allen has been looking at them closely, wondering about repainting them from those photographs. Mr. Allen also writes about the fact that some figurative works were "destroyed" by the artist by painting over them and turning them into abstractions--they're wild. Mr. Allen also points out that de Kooning appears to be a rather dramatic influence on the painting that Mr. Richter does to make the abstract works.

1.

Don DeLillo’s most recent novel, Point Omega, begins with a description of the Museum of Modern Art that feels more like a funeral precession:

People entered in twos and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly moved past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left … There were other galleries, entire floors, no point lingering in a secluded room in which whatever was happening took forever to happen.

He never states it outright, but “forever” in this instance is Douglas Gordon’s artwork 24-Hour Psycho—Hitchcock’s masterpiece slowed down to two frames per second so that a projection of it lasts a full 24 hours—which appeared at MoMA in 2006. The New York Times said of the piece, “Though relatively few have seen it, and hardly anyone has sat through the whole thing, Douglas Gordon’s ‘24 Hour Psycho’ has become one of those mythic monuments … that embody the dreams, anxieties and aspirations of a generation.”

It takes time, however, to penetrate what is happening in Mr. DeLillo’s scene. Not for nothing does the chapter bear the title “Anonymity.” Anthony Perkins is there, slowly reaching for a car door and turning his head for a number of minutes. Minutes or, in other words, pages: Mr. DeLillo’s writing here replicates Mr. Gordon’s own long-winded form, “like bricks in a wall,” Mr. DeLillo says, “clearly countable … but not like or unlike anything.” One must spend time with it for it to make any sense. It is unclear what Mr. DeLillo is describing until he comes right out and tells us:

Everybody remembers the killer’s name, Norman Bates, but nobody remembers the victim’s name. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates, Janet Leigh is Janet Leigh. The victim is required to share the name of the actress who plays her. It is Janet Leigh who enters the remote motel owned by Norman Bates.

2.

As with many accounts of visual art in his fiction, Mr. DeLillo writes from the point of view of a person both obsessed with and terrified of what he is looking at. The terror is partly because of the obsession, and that fixation is often inexplicable to the person experiencing it. Of 24-Hour Psycho, we learn the narrator has been watching the film for hours and that this is the fifth straight day he has attended; he takes it personally when people leave the gallery. “Leave if you have to,” Mr. DeLillo writes. “But once out, you do not re-enter. Make it a personal test of endurance and forbearance, a kind of punishment. But punishment for what?”

That final bit of doubt is crucial. When a character ponders art in DeLillo, it is a Romantic gesture in a Postmodern world: that character is pushed to the limits of thought, but thought ultimately fails him. The centerpiece of Mr. DeLillo’s new collection of short fiction, The Angel Esmeralda, is “Baader-Meinhof,” one of the author’s best late-career pieces of writing. There is an oddly specific premise, despite his typically elusive prose: two people staring at a series of Gerhard Richter paintings at MoMA. Mr. DeLillo has been exploring the visual arts in his writing for most of his career. He is a skeptical art critic, but he is also more interested in the people looking than in what’s being looked at. That interest in the viewer has made his assessment of art a nearly subliminal component in his work, but one that reveals DeLillo at his most playful and perceptive.

The early novel Running Dog, for instance, recasts New York’s downtown art world as the site of the mere peddling of pornography. It stars Lightborne, a Leo Castelli-esque figure, who owns a gallery in Soho on the fourth floor of an industrial loft (he also lives inside of it), specializing in erotic objects. The book was published in 1978, one year after both Mary Boone Gallery and Dean & Deluca opened up shop in Soho, as the neighborhood was transitioning from an urban artist residency of squatters and junkies into a consumerist destination. Running Dog is both a critique of the art world—it’s all a bunch of pimps and whores, Mr. DeLillo suggests—and an embarrassingly accurate portrayal of the commercial landscape of New York’s galleries as the contemporary art bubble was beginning to expand. The story is told by a journalist, Moll Robbins. When Lightborne introduces her to a collector at a gathering in his loft, “sex” and “art” are interchangeable throughout their exchange:

“What got you interested?”
“What gets anyone interested in sex?”
“We don’t all collect,” [Moll] said.
“Just a pastime. Line, grace, symmetry. Beauty of the human body. So on, so forth.”
“Do you spend a lot of money, collecting?”
“Fair amount.”
“You must know quite a bit about art.”
“I took a course once.”

Art collecting in Running Dog—like a lot of collecting in any inflated market—is as thoughtless as a one-night stand.

3.

From early on in his work, Mr. DeLillo’s narration, at times overtly theoretical, has also served as linguistic critique, a kind of lesson in the poststructuralist principle of arbitrary signifiers. Arbitrariness—that there is no real connection between the word (the signifier) and the concept behind that word (the referent)—is the root of paranoia in Mr. DeLillo. Flip to any page in one of his books and you are likely to find the seeds of doubt about the act of writing: “An eight-hundred-page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture,” he writes in Point Omega; “plots reduce the world,” he writes in “In the Ruins of the Future,” the essay he wrote for Harper’s magazine in the aftermath of September 11; “all plots tend to move deathward,” he writes most ominously in White Noise—“this is the nature of plots.” Arbitrariness is at the heart of one of Mr. DeLillo’s most famous—and funniest—images, the Most Photographed Barn in America from White Noise—a sign so meaningless that signifier and referent are deliberately interchangeable. Why do so many people photograph this barn? Because this barn is the most photographed barn in America. And so forth, forever. For Mr. DeLillo, language is so inseparable from the world it describes that even he cannot help but critique his writing, even as he is writing.

When he writes about art, the paranoia is there, as is that feeling that the author is behind the words asking, What’s the point of all this? But if Mr. DeLillo’s critique of language results only in dread and suspicion, his reading of art leads, at least momentarily, to reverence. It is not the usual cyclical hunt for meaning that leads to fear and obsession, but rather meaning’s overwhelming presence that causes characters to revert to thoughtlessness.

The man watching 24-Hour Psycho in Point Omega considers each movement of a character’s face to be “a revelation.” In Running Dog, Lightborne spends a bulk of the novel hunting down a pornographic film created in Berlin in 1945 and rumored to star Hitler. Underworld’s Nick Shay impulsively takes a car to the desert to see an art installation by his old lover Klara Sax, whom he hasn’t seen in 40 years. Art in Mr. DeLillo’s writing is so significant that it becomes, despite the viewer’s knowledge of the separation between real and representation (recall the collector’s words in Running Dog that art is, in the end, simply a diversion), too real for his characters to even exist with; it is unrepresentable. They revert to primal, often pathological behavior in their useless pursuit of an understanding they never attain.

4.

This is partly why we can tell that things won’t end well for anyone in “Baader-Meinhof,” which opens with another terror-filled description of a gallery: “She knew there was someone else in the room.” In its starkness, Point Omega carried the temperament of the funereal, but Mr. DeLillo states such morbidity outright and immediately in this story.

She’d been alone for a time, seated on a bench in the middle of the gallery with the paintings set around her, a cycle of fifteen canvases, and this is how it felt to her, that she was sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.

Mr. DeLillo then reminds us that the word “viewing” is used for both paintings and corpses.

What he doesn’t say explicitly is that the woman is looking at Gerhard Richter’s “Baader-Meinhof” cycle of 15 paintings in the permanent collection at MoMA. They are based on photographs of the four founders of the Red Army Faction, the violent German terrorist cell active predominantly in the 1970s. Mr. Richter has said that, when he made them, he thought of the paintings as documentary, an attempt at seeing the present “as it is.” Nothing, however, in Mr. DeLillo is ever simply “as it is” (from Underworld: “how human it is to see a thing as something else”). No work of art is just the thing itself; it is the semiotics of that thing, looking to be reinforced. Again, regarding the Most Photographed Barn in America, he writes, “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one … they’re taking pictures of taking pictures.” The notion brings to mind the performance artist from the eponymous 2007 novel Falling Man. He wears a suit and tie and dangles by a bungee cord from buildings in tribute to the famous AP photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center on September 11. Falling Man exists completely for his viewers, particularly those who are unaware of his safety harness. He is “known to appear among crowds or at sites where crowds might quickly form.” With Mr. DeLillo, we are not reading about a work of art itself, but instead about how people are looking at it, and why. He privileges spectatorship.

So, when he discusses Richter’s painting of the corpse of Ulrike Marie Meinhof, who died in her prison cell in 1977, he is merely descriptive:
“She got up and went to stand before the picture of Ulrike, one of three related images, Ulrike dead in each, lying on the floor of her cell, her head in profile. The canvases varied in size.”

Interpretation comes once he moves his gaze away from the canvases and over to the viewers. The story’s protagonist is a woman who is spending her third straight day at MoMA looking at the paintings. A man approaches her and tries talking. We learn little about their lives, but in the ways they look differently at the Richter cycle, we seem to learn everything about them:

“I realize now that the first day I was only barely looking. I thought I was looking but I was only getting a bare inkling of what’s in these paintings. I’m only just starting to look.”
“And what do you feel when you look?” he said.
“I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“Because I don’t feel anything.”
“I think I feel helpless. These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be.”

From there, the actions feel fated (remember, all plots move deathward). As in Falling Man, the pair seem to simply play their respective parts—the indignant pushy man and the submissive young woman—as if their reactions to the paintings predict everything that comes after. The two go to a snack bar and the man says of the paintings, “No color. No meaning.” They have an unpleasant conversation. The man talks of his unemployment, of his interview in a few hours. The woman is mostly quiet and thinks of the paintings. As they talk—and this is typical of dialogue in Mr. DeLillo—the man increasingly focuses on their talking itself: “You’re supposed to say ‘Who are you? That’s your line. ‘Who are you?’ I set you up beautifully and you totally miss your cue.”

They end up at the woman’s apartment. She asks him to leave and he refuses. He forces himself on her and she locks herself in her bathroom. She hears him on her bed, unbuckling his belt and pulling down his zipper, breathing heavily. Or “this is what she thought she heard.” The next day, however, the two are back at the museum, staring at the paintings as if it were the day before. The encounter is ultimately meaningless.

mmiller@observer.com

An abstract Richter that sold at Sotheby's this fall.

Jerry Saltz, the inimitable New York magazine critic who should only be taken so seriously on Facebook, recently put out the word that he wants a Gerhard Richter badly enough that he would gladly pay $1,000 for a convincing forgery.

The jumping off point for this Richter lust was a clip from the new movie Gerhard Richter — Painting on Nowness. Mr. Saltz went on to say:

"I have always wanted to know exactly how Richter makes these beauties. This little 3-min clip gives an idea of how he does it. Offer: I will pay anyone here $1000.00 plus all-materials if you can make me a Richter that looks EXACTLY like an abstract Richter - more or less indistinguishable from the real thing. (You can sign your own name on the back of the damn thing; I just love these and want on...e.) - Below is link to a longer clip of where this film comes from. Offer: $1000.00 plus materials. I'd like a biggish one. I don't like the green he's working on in the whole middle of this film. The last one is nice...
A condition: I don't pay unless two other people agree that your finsihed version is 'more or less indistinguishable from a real abstract Richter.' Deal?"

Again, the real takeaway here is that Richter is good and that Mr. Saltz likes him. He has, in the past, offered $10,000 to anyone who can prove the idea that "painting is dead."