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Bono Inc. Expands to Art

Rock Star Woos Artists For Big Charity Sale; A $7 Million Hirst

By KELLY CROW
February 1, 2008; Page W4

Rock star Bono is turning to the booming art world to help his altruistic brand, (Product) Red, raise much-needed cash and cachet.

On Feb. 14, Sotheby's Red auction in New York will sell as much as $28 million of art donated by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Banksy and five dozen other top artists in a sale of a scale not usually seen in art or charity fund-raisers. Offerings include a 9-foot-tall medicine cabinet by Mr. Hirst estimated at up to $7 million; a red balloon-animal sculpture by Jeff Koons estimated at up to $1.2 million; and a new Jasper Johns gray watercolor estimated at up to $600,000.

The sale marks a shift in strategy for Red. Until now, the two-year-old commercial enterprise has teamed up with companies to license the Red logo on everyday products like $51.99 sneakers and $28 T-shirts, with between 40% and 50% of the profits going to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a Swiss foundation spearheaded six years ago by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Between March 2006 and March 2007, Red partnered with four companies that generated $25 million in contributions. Since then, it has added five new partners and generated $34 million in contributions. (Three of those partners, Hallmark , Microsoft and Dell, are just now rolling out their products.) One early partner, American Express, says it has decided to not issue its Red card outside the United Kingdom.

Red's chief executive, Susan Smith Ellis, says the brand needs "oxygen" and that the auction is one step in an effort to move upmarket. The new Red Editions line includes a series of 39 red Zaha Hadid "Aqua" tables priced at almost $60,000 each at boutiques like London's Established & Sons. She hopes to line up other collaborations with art stars like Mr. Hirst who can attract a well-heeled clientele.

"The difficult thing Red faces is that it tried to make charity trendy for everyone," says Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy. "And in a down economy, you need deep-pocketed supporters because the rest are worried about their mortgages."

So far, Red's contribution to the cause is comparatively small. Over the past six years, the Global Fund has attracted a total $18.4 billion and committed $10.1 billion for disease-treatment and -prevention programs in 137 countries, with nearly all the money donated by governments. Of Red's $59 million in donations, the fund has made $42 million in AIDS-related grants to Africa.

Last year the major auction houses sold $12 billion of art. Yet charity art auctions rarely raise more than $5 million apiece, auction houses say. Sotheby's participated in over 300 charity auctions last year that collectively raised over $150 million.

Q & A

Damien Hirst, a major donor to the Product (Red) auction, talks about art, commerce and guilt-tripping for a cause with Bono.

For the Red auction, Mr. Hirst says Bono invited him more than a year ago to bring his family to the south of France for a vacation. During their visit, the rock singer hired a boat, which the artist initially considered a "generous" gesture. Then one night Mr. Hirst says Bono "got me drunk, and at about 5 o'clock in the morning, he asked me if I'd do this [auction]." Mr. Hirst agreed to donate his own work as well as compose handwritten letters to induce 50 other artists to give.

Bono says he approached Mr. Hirst to steer the sale in part because the artist, who last year covered a human skull with roughly $24 million in diamonds, is "not afraid of the big beast of commerce -- he rides the back of it."

Some diplomacy was required to bring together traditional art-world rivals. Bono and Mr. Hirst asked Sotheby's and the Gagosian Gallery to market the sale together and conduct it on Valentine's Day. To do that, the auction house had to push back a major auction of contemporary art in London so that it wouldn't compete for bidders at the Red sale in New York, even though rival Christie's is proceeding with its London sale next week as planned. Gagosian and Sotheby's funneled their invitations through a third-party mailing house because neither wanted to share its client roster. The pair will split as much as 10% of the auction's sales to cover administrative costs; the remainder goes to the Global Fund.

Sotheby's and Gagosian are using the sale to showcase some of their artists who haven't typically been seen in a New York evening sale, such as Bernar Venet and an art team called Gelitin. Sotheby's is privately brokering some sales of Mr. Venet's steel sculptures, and Gagosian recently showed Gelitin in its London gallery.

Participating artists were allowed to suggest prices for their donated works, but not every artist approached for the sale signed on. Bono says Chris Ofili declined. (A spokesman for Mr. Ofili says the artist had committed to another upcoming benefit.) Last week several pieces by African artists were added as a gift from collector Jean Pignozzi; only one African native, Yinka Shonibare, had been included in the sale's original lineup.

Artist Antony Gormley in London says he is "inundated" by requests to give art to fund-raisers. He accepted this time because he wanted to help Africa and he hoped the auction would be "the art world's answer to Live Aid." For Christmas, Bono sent a red iPod nano to Mr. Gormley and each of the other participating artists. "I was very touched," says Mr. Gormley. His sculpture of a man, "Insider IX/Weeds II," is expected to sell for up to $250,000.

Some see Red's high-end focus as proof that its business model needs tweaking. "Red's success has been up and down, and the next round will only get more complicated," says Russ Meyer, a chief strategy officer who tracks Red for the branding firm Landor Associates.

Bono calls his start-up's performance "incredible" when compared with sales of other products with nonprofit tie-ins. The Lance Armstrong Foundation says it took nearly four years to sell $70 million of yellow "Live Strong" wristbands at $1 a pop, and it has taken 25 years for Newman's Own Foundation to pull in more than $200 million.

Unlike these nonprofits, Red faces market pressure to show growth. Red charges an undisclosed licensing fee to companies to pay for its 16-person staff and London and New York offices. For the most part, Red has relied largely on the marketing budgets of its partner companies, which spent about $50 million in Red's first year, Ms. Smith Ellis says. (Red's own annual marketing budget is under $1 million.)

Artist Marc Quinn in London says he has been following Red's trajectory from afar, and agreed to donate "Red Sphinx," a white-bronze sculpture of Kate Moss in a heart-shaped yoga pose with red lips. It is estimated to sell for as much as $350,000. "Maybe this will convince other companies to give away more than a few cents at a time" to charity, he says. "I mean, we're giving away the whole thing."

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

Sotheby's Valentine's Day Red auction aims to raise up to $28 million to help fund AIDS relief. Damien Hirst and Bono asked more than 60 artists to create, and then donate, art that incorporated the theme of love or the color red. Here's a sneak peek of what will be on the block. –Kelly Crow

Sotheby's

Bono says he began collecting art by Jeff Koons in the 1990s: "I'm in awe of Koons's work—that combination of joy and melancholy, that childlike fun with a dark cloud around it," he says. This Koons piece, "Balloon Rabbit Wall Relief (Red)," is estimated to sell for up to $1.2 million.

Blog Posts About This Topic

• Art for a cause, and PRODUCT(RED) happymonkeyplanet.com

• Preview the (RED) Art Auction joinred.blogspot.com

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Derek Webb Coming to Dallas, March 3

MARCH 8

Live at Mokah
2803 Taylor St.
Dallas, TX 75226
p 214.651.0633

Show Info
8:00pm - Showtime

7:00pm - Doors

$10 Advance

$12 Day of Show

Derek Webb @ MySpace

Bill Clinton: Clawing for a Legacy

Clinton is a narcissist but also smart and analytic enough to distinguish adulation from achievement. Among Democrats, he is popular for twice giving them the White House, something no Democrat has done since FDR. And the bouquets he receives abroad are simply signs of the respect routinely given ex-presidents, though Clinton earns an extra dollop of fawning, with the accompanying fringe benefits, because he is (a) charming and (b) not George W. Bush.

But Clinton knows this is all written on sand. It is the stuff of celebrity. What gnaws at him is the verdict of history.

...Clinton was a historical parenthesis. He can console himself -- with considerable justification -- that he simply drew the short straw in the chronological lottery: His time just happened to be the 1990s which, through no fault of his own, was the most inconsequential decade of the 20th century. His was the interval between the collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, and the return of history with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001.

Clinton's decade, that holiday from history, was certainly a time of peace and prosperity -- but a soporific Golden Age that made no great demands on leadership. What, after all, was his greatest crisis? A farcical sexual dalliance.

...What is the legacy of the Clinton presidency? Consolidator of the Reagan revolution. As Dwight Eisenhower made permanent FDR's New Deal and Tony Blair institutionalized Thatcherism, Clinton consolidated Reaganism. He did so most symbolically with his 1996 State of the Union declaration that "the era of big government is over." And more concretely, with a presidency that only tinkered with such structural Reaganite changes as tax cuts and deregulation, and whose major domestic achievement was the abolition of welfare, Reagan's ultimate social bete noire. These are serious achievements, but of a second order. Obama did little more than echo that truism.

...Clinton knows that popularity is cheap, easily lost, easily regained. (See Lewinsky scandal.) But historical legacies are forever.

He wants one, desperately. But to get it he must return to the White House. And for that he must elect his wife. At any cost.

Why was he out of control in South Carolina? He wasn't. He was clawing for a second chance.

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The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.

Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Clintonia / More on McCain

Education of a Supply Sider?

Education of a Supply Sider

Arizona Senator John McCain has been under assault over the past week from his GOP rivals and the media for a statement he made to me in a Wall Street Journal weekend interview on the economy three years ago. His admission in that interview was the following: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." The controversy over Mr. McCain's statement has been stirred up anew by NBC’s Tim Russert on his Sunday morning show, but one could easily make the case that Mr. McCain's confession is equally true of every Republican in the presidential field, to say nothing of the three Democratic presidential aspirants. Perhaps the Arizona Senator deserves kudos for at least being honest about his need for help with remedial economics.

Mr. McCain has certainly taken positions and votes on issues like taxes and global warming (he favors cap-and-trade) that are troubling. Most problematic of all was his vote against the Bush tax cuts, which he said were "tilted to the rich." That, of course, has proven to be far from the case, since the percentage of taxes paid by "the rich" has increased, not decreased, in the wake of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

But Mr. McCain has arguably the best stable of economic advisers in the race, with only Rudy Giuliani's team rivaling him in economic expertise. His primary confidant on the economy is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration). Jack Kemp has signed up with Mr. McCain, and Mr. McCain talks frequently to his longtime friend, the godfather of supply-side economics, Arthur Laffer.

The big source of agitation for conservative voters over the past several years has been the federal spending explosion. Here, Senator McCain has teamed with Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, another endorser of the Arizona Senator, to cut more than $100 billion out of the federal budget. He has voted with Mr. Coburn on nearly every anti-pork measure introduced in the last several years. "I will cut the budget more than any other Republican," he told me in an interview late this summer when his poll numbers were in the tank. "Maybe that's what makes so many people nervous about me."

Mr. McCain is also an unwavering supporter of two other issues critical to the economic future of the nation: free trade and school choice. Education is always an issue foremost on the mind of the key "soccer mom" suburban vote. "The day that members of Congress will send their kids to the public schools in Washington, D.C., is the day I'll know we've fixed education in America," he has told me. "Why won't people like Hillary Clinton send her child to the public schools in Washington, D.C.?" Great question, and one he should save for a debate with Hillary if the two are the nominees.

Voters will have to make up their own minds about whether John McCain is sufficiently reliable and reformed on issues like taxes to be trusted. He did tell me this summer: "I've learned from what happened after the tax cuts were enacted. They worked."

Who says John McCain can't be educated on economics?

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U2 3D pulls in $15,508/screen ($1,163,000 total on 61 screens), more than double the #1 film this weekend, Meet the Spartans, at $7,188/screen ($18,725,000 total on 2,605 screens).

Next updates: Monday afternoon - Actual grosses for 50+ movies;

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Faith. It comes up often in the story of 26-year-old Joshua Holt Hamilton. It's virtually impossible to tell his story without it. Faith, the Texas Rangers' future center fielder testifies, is what put him back in baseball.

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