Monday's Art Notes

_Women look at "Witness from Baghdad" by Iraqi artist Halim al-Karim, exhibited by Christie's for its seventh auction of international modern and contemporary art in Dubai. (Photo by Karim Sahib /AFP/Getty Images.)_ * Crown Publishers announced Sunday that former President George W. Bush's memoir, "Decision Points," will be out Nov. 9. The cover design was also released. "According to the publisher":http://crownpublishing.com/2010/04/25/press-release-decision-points-by-george-w-bush-to-be-published-by-crown-november-9-2010/, the book "will be centered on the fourteen most critical and historic decisions in the life and public service of the 43rd President of the United States," including the 9/11 attacks and the 2000 presidential election. * "The Associated Press talks to Neil Gaiman":http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126262420, whose latest book, "Instructions," is a poem about how to survive a fairy tale. The book arrives in bookstores Tuesday. ("Jeffrey Brown talked to Gaiman last year":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/01/conversation-author-neil-gaiman.html about his previous work, "The Graveyard Book," which won the Newbery Medal.) Over at Wired, "Geek Dad takes Gaiman's advice":http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/04/the-geekly-reader-the-13-clocks-by-james-thurber/ and reads "13 Clocks" by James Thurber, which Gaiman calls "probably the best book in the world." * The New York Times' Motoko Rich reports that Random House "is ceding the digital rights":http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/books/26random.html to several works by William Styron. The publisher had previously claimed contract clauses like "in book form" give it exclusive rights to publish electronic editions with a long history in print. * Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an important Italian collector of contemporary American painting and sculpture, "died Friday night in Milan":http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/25/local/la-me-guiseppe-panza-20100425. Panza's collection of works by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and others from 1950s and '60s formed the core of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's permanent collection when it was acquired by the museum in 1984. "In an appreciation":http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/giuseppe-panza-di-biumo-an-appreciation.html, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight calls Panza the "first great international collector of postwar American art."