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NPR’s Weekend Edition gets inside Michael Crichton’s art collection and explains how he lived with his works and what he needed to do to be sure he could own a work:

Crichton employed art handlers to change the placement of a painting in his house or to move it to a room with a different light. One of them, Owen Casey Rothstein, who works for Fine Art Shipping, remembers a painting by Claes Oldenburg that he moved at least seven or eight times. In Crichton’s home, he said, “you would take a piece off the wall, and the whole wall is just Swiss cheese. There are so many nail holes in the wall from moving art around, but you start counting, and you realize that easily 30 paintings were hanging at this particular spot.”Continue Reading

ArtInfo.com runs a few pictures from Christie’s

Best Seller’s List (ArtInfo.com)

The Michael Crichton collection is on display at Christie’s in New York right now. It’s a revelation with the mix of Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Hockney, Johns, Tom Friedman, Agnes Martin, Mark Tansey, several Koons works, Gursky and more. The film Christie’s produced–click through the image to see it–is also a revelation showing how Crichton met Hockney, Rauschenberg and Johns through the Los Angeles printmaker Gemini. Watch it.