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CULTURE MONSTER

Hockney painting sells for a record

“Beverly Hills Housewife,” David Hockney’s 1966 painting of Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman, sold at auction for a record $7.9 million Wednesday night in New York.

The 12-foot double canvas shows the pink-sheathed collector on her patio, flanked by a zebra-print Corbusier lounge chair and an abstract sculpture. It was featured in a 2006 exhibition of Hockney portraits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The previous auction record for a Hockney was $5.35 million for “The Splash,” a 1966 swimming pool painting once owned by movie mogul David Geffen. It sold in London in 2006 at Sotheby’s.

Freeman, 87, died in January of pancreatic cancer. “Beverly Hills Housewife” was among 20 artworks from Freeman’s estate up for sale.

Christie’s said 18 of the 20 lots sold for a total of $31.6 million, with two works unsold because bidding failed to reach the reserve price. The sales prices include auction house commissions.

The name of the buyer was not disclosed. No Los Angeles museum owns a classic Hockney painting from the 1960s, the decade the British artist first came to prominence while working in the city.

-- Lisa Fung

From: Culture Monster: All the arts, all the time

For more, go to latimes.com/culturemonster

JACKET COPY

Dan Baum’s smart Twitter move

Dan Baum used to be a staff writer for the New Yorker. That gig ended in 2007, but he’s just now revealing the details of his tenure there -- on Twitter. He began the story May 8, with a cliffhanger of a phone call inviting him to join the New Yorker staff.

Baum got what sounds like a dream job: $90,000 a year to write 30,000 words for the New Yorker. Then he details the strange relationship of writing from a distance (in his case, Colorado) and perhaps not paying enough attention to the magazine’s internal culture. He writes about tensions that arose when his plans seemed to diverge from his editor’s needs. And he links to stories that he pitched but that weren’t picked up by the magazine.

This is all juicy and delicious for journalists, falling somewhere between voyeurism, professional envy and Schadenfreude. Over the course of two hours one day this week, Baum gained 200 new followers, from more than 800 to more than 1,000.

Which brings up the question: Why now? Baum and the New Yorker parted ways -- amicably enough, it seems -- two years ago.

It could be a Twitter experiment. It reads like a short essay that’s been chopped into 140-character bits (in a few places, sentences stretch across two tweets). Or maybe he’s promoting something. Could he have a book out?

In fact, he does. “Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans” was well-reviewed when it was released in February. It’s doing pretty well on Amazon (No. 1 in some subcategories). But it’s hard for a book to stay on top after the first flurry of attention.

With his Twitter posts on his New Yorker tenure, Baum has brought renewed attention to himself and, by extension, to his most recent book.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

From: Jacket Copy: Book news and information

For more, go to latimes.com/jacketcopy

BOOSTER SHOTS

Exercise video library is online

As waistlines grow from stress eating, it’s time to chuck the cupcakes and do some exercises. What’s that you say? You don’t know how to do exercises properly and you have no budget for a trainer?

No worries. IDEA Health & Fitness Assn., a San Diego-based member organization of fitness and health professionals, has released 30 short fitness videos on its website that are free to the public (members can access all online videos).

Exercises include the usual suspects, such as bent-over alternate dumbbell rows and push-ups. But some unusual ones are in the mix, like the standing 3-plane active hip flexor stretch, a dynamic three-part stretch that involves the upper body. The split squat with crossover dumbbell reach is another dynamic move that combines a squat with upper body strength training using dumbbells that targets the lats. Even veteran fitness types will surely discover some new tricks.

Narrating the exercises are Keli Roberts and Anthony Carey; Roberts is a trainer at Equinox in Pasadena as well as an author and host of her own fitness videos. She was also the 2003 IDEA International Fitness Instructor of the Year. Carey is an author and owner of Function First, a pain relief-based exercise facility in San Diego.

In the videos, viewers are walked through each demonstrated exercise, and Roberts and Carey explain how to do the moves with proper form and what muscle groups are being used. Some routines are also modified to make them more difficult or easy. We appreciate the little twists, such as the use of paper plates to make feet slide more comfortably in the hamstring curl alt. Some light equipment, such as dumbbells, stability balls and bands, are incorporated on certain exercises.

IDEA plans to add more free and members-only videos to the site, so stay tuned.

-- Jeannine Stein

From: Booster Shots: Oddities, musings and news from the world of health

For more, go to latimes.com/boostershots