Big Love; Buy art.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

The entire art world turns red, or (RED), on February 14, when Sotheby's New York auctions a dazzling panoply of works donated by more than 60 contemporary-art stars for the benefit of AIDS relief in Africa. The brainchild of Bono, U2's lead singer turned philanthropic entrepreneur, and Damien Hirst, the king of British art, this is shaping up to be the all-time largest-grossing contemporary-art auction for charity. It includes major works by a blue-chip roster of artists, including Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Cecily Brown, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, Anselm Kiefer, Matthew Barney, John Currin, Guillermo Kuitca, Ashley Bickerton, Gregory Crewdson, Rachel Whiteread, and Ed Ruscha, not to mention seven lots by Hirst, who broke the record for a living artist at auction last June when one of his medicine-cabinet sculptures sold at Sotheby's London for $19 million.

"It's probably outrageous to think we could raise $46 million," Bono tells me by cell phone from Dublin. Forty-six million is what his (RED) project, launched in 2006 with Bobby Shriver, has raised since it began. Proceeds from inventive collaborations with such companies as Apple, Gap, and Motorola, which give up to 50 percent of their profits from a special line of (RED)-branded products (think red iPod nanos and red MotoRazr phones), have gone to the Global Fund, every penny of which is redirected to African AIDS programs. This includes the distribution of anti-retroviral drugs to infected women and children, along with education on how to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. "I'd love for the art to raise even more than the commerce," Bono says. The charm of this formula is you get to buy something you really want, and the purchase helps save lives.

Bono pitched the art-auction idea to Hirst two summers ago, when their two families were vacationing together ...