Ye, who has recently made anti-Semitic statements and praised Hitler, bought the 4,000-square-foot home in Malibu, one of the very few in the United States designed by Ando, for $57.3 million in an off-market deal. Considered architecturally significant, the home had previously belonged to the Wall Street financier Richard Sachs.

Within the art world, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect is specifically known for designing museums, including the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, and the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth in Texas.

Demolition work on the smooth, gray, poured concrete minimalist building was carried out by a day laborer, handyman, and contractor named Tony Saxon. 

Saxon eventually enlisted the help of a small crew when he was asked to strip the house of modern conveniences that most would consider essential: kitchens, bathrooms, and built-in storage. According to Parker, Ye even requested that the floor-to-ceiling windows be removed entirely on the side of the house that faces the Pacific Ocean, and that the house be disconnected from the grid, eliminating access to electricity. 

In the New Yorker story, Saxon described living in the house while working on the project, sleeping on a mattress in what was once the kitchen and dining space. In that same room, Sachs had reportedly once hung a painting by George Condo.

One of the recurring characters in Parker’s story is James Turrell, an artist with whom Ye has collaborated. “We all will live in Turrell spaces,” Ye once tweeted, somehow missing the point that there are only 80 or so of the artist’s “Skyspace” installations in the world. The Parker article included one previously unreported anecdote in which Ye attempted, and failed, to construct a “giant sphere” recalling another Turrell work for a concert on short notice.

Following Ye’s anti-Semitic comments in 2022, he lost his sneaker deal with Adidas, his fashion deal with the Gap, and his status as a billionaire. That year, the house, now gutted, was put back on the market. According to the story, the real estate brokerage the Oppenheim Group handled the listing, using the same images Sachs used to sell the place to Ye. The listing pegged the house’s value at $53 million, just a hair less than Ye paid for it. Earlier this year, Parker writes, the price of the house was lowered to a more realistic $39 million.

Following Ye’s search for radical minimalism, the house is now essentially a three-story concrete shell with oceanfront views. Having been exposed to the elements, the building is now scarred and pockmarked, its once smooth gray concrete “chewed up” and “pitted” by rain and salt, per Parker. The concrete floors are stained where metal railings rusted after exposure to salt air, wind, and water. The ocean-facing side of the house stands completely open after the removal of floor-to-ceiling windows and glass balustrades. 

The trailer—released Tuesday on X—portrays a feverish story in which a suburban city is overtaken by cultists and remade into a playground for braying wolf men, murderous clowns, and ravenous crows. West sings throughout the film, and his lyrics double as a dubious defense against allegations of misogyny and antisemitism. The trailer builds to a ghostly militia in battle formation against a backdrop of burning homes. 

As revealed in the later Instagram post by West (who now goes by Ye), the long-delayed album will release in three parts arriving on February 9, March 8, and April 5, respectively.

The Vultures collaboration marks a high-profile test of the spotlight for Rafman, whose career was derailed in 2020 after three women accused the Canadian artist of sexual misconduct on the Instagram @surviving_the_artworld. The account, which was launched at the height of the #MeToo movement, posted allegations of abusive behavior in the art industry.

Rafman later told Artnet News, “I empathize with their voices, but I disagree with how these testimonies have been labeled on Instagram and in the press.” He sued the Montreal Gazette for defamation for its coverage of the allegations. That case was settled earlier this year, with the Gazette issuing a letter as part of the settlement. In the letter, the Gazette’s editor-in-chief affirms that the newspaper “did not give equal time or space” for Rafman to “refute the claims” against him, and notes he had evidence that he presented to the Gazette after filing the claim. The Gazette also took down the three articles covering the allegations from its website, as part of the settlement.

Rafman issued a statement apologizing for his conduct in 2020, and later told Artnet News, “I empathize with their voices, but I disagree with how these testimonies have been labeled on Instagram and in the press.”

Rafman’s surreal video installations and film essays have been widely exhibited—his Dream Journal (2016–2019) was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale—but several solo exhibitions were suspended in the wake of the scandal.

West, himself no stranger to controversy, has been heavily condemned for antisemitic behavior that stretches back over a decade. In 2023, he publicly apologized for his inflammatory remarks. If the Vultures trailer is taken as evidence, however, he has pivoted and is now on the offensive.

The gift was the first stage of an initiative started by Brown and Richardson, who created the AND1 Mixtape film series, begun in the late ’90s, which documents a traveling basketball competition. The pair aims to teach professional basketball players about art, not only as something to be appreciated but also as something that will appreciate in value.  

“The art world has never really been explained to a lot of professional athletes. They may have seen paintings or pictures their whole lives, but it was never taught that they could get involved with art from a financial standpoint,” Richardson told ARTnews. 

Rookie One Court is organized by Think450, the for-profit wing of the NBA players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). Along with giving NBPA members control over their likeness and intellectual property rights, Think450, which is named after the total number of players in the NBA, has long been involved in teaching financial literacy to players and their fans.  

“One of the things we’re trying to teach a lot of these players is the value of owning things that accumulate value,” Que Gaskins, Think450’s president, told ARTnews, “as opposed to a depreciating asset like a car.” 

For Gaskins, teaching players to appreciate art is a step toward establishing financial savvy and literacy among players, many of whom fought hard to make out of impoverished neighborhoods.   

“What we are trying to instill is knowledge, getting them comfortable with different things that we think they will have an interest in and showing them that there are ways to create opportunity, generational wealth,” Gaskins said. 

The initiative makes perfect sense for Brown. As the vice president of the NBPA, Brown has been a fierce advocate for social justice and has become well-known for his support of Boston’s black community. Earlier this year, after he set a record for the most lucrative contract in NBA history, $304 million for five years with his Boston Celtics, Brown said he wanted to combat the wealth disparity in Boston and launch a project that would bring a “Black Wall Street” to the city, in part by promoting education in science and technology in underrepresented minority community high schools. 

Meanwhile, Richardson appears to be an ideal partner for Brown. He has gained a strong reputation for his creative advertising agency The Compound, based in Red Hook, which he has run for over a decade. Richardson also once ran an art gallery out of The Compound’s former home in the Bronx, which will soon reopen in Red Hook. In the past, he has acted as an art advisor to NBA players who want an entrée into the art world, like Kevin Durant and Malcom Brogdon. 

Richardson approaches his advisory role much the same way he does all his creative work, with the belief that combining creative influences from different areas will bring about something new and interesting. Collecting, he said, is part of a basketball player’s DNA as much as the originality of their game. Richardson pointed to sports trading cards and comics as collectibles often pursued by young athletes, which later beget collections of jerseys and trophies. And that’s not including the high prices fetched for sports memorabilia from the self-same NBA stars. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s held an auction dedicated to memorabilia, which featured a signed pair of sneakers once worn by Michael Jordan during his last championship season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997–98. They sold for $2.2 million, becoming the most expensive sneakers ever publicly auctioned. 

“In our culture, we’re looking at sneakers as collectibles, and there’s a direct line from that to collecting art,” Gaskin said. Hip-hop is another strong influence on the rise in art collecting, he added. “I think Jay-Z obviously played a big role in having people understand the power of art, the uniqueness of it as a collectible and as an investment vehicle,” Gaskins said.  

In 2018, Jay-Z and Beyonce featured over a dozen major art pieces in the Louvre for their “Apeshit” music video. That came five years after the rapper co-starred with performance artist Marina Abramovic in the music video for “Picasso Baby.” In 2021, Jay-Z and Beyonce, in an advertisement for Tiffany’s, posed in front of a rarely seen Basquiat work, Equals Pi (1982). The couple are known to have an extensive art collection in their 30,000-square-foot home in Malibu, California. Beyond that, Kanye West, Drake, and other major stars have prominently featured or worked with major contemporary artists in recent years. Earlier this month, Kendrick Lamar featured Henry Taylor paintings in performances at Lollapalooza and elsewhere, blown up to stadium size. 

These influences have spurred a trend that has seen major athletes looking to the art world for inspiration, identity, and, of course, investment. Serena Williams has amassed a top-notch art collection in her Florida home that includes KAWS, Radcliffe Bailey, and Titus Kaphar, and her sister Venus Williams served as a model for a recent painting by art market darling Anna Weyant. Six-time NBA All Star Amar’e Stoudemire is a Basquiat aficionado, and ten-time NBA All Star Carmelo Anthony’s collection includes household names like Banksy and Shephard Fairey. 

Through Richardson, Brown was motivated to explore the art world and has begun building a collection of his own. In fact, the limited edition Rafa Macarrón print gifted to the top rookies during the Rookie One party was acquired from Richardson’s mentor, the art dealer Lio Malca, who recently opened a new gallery at 60 White Street in Tribeca. And it’s through Richardson that Brown learned to think of art as, not only an investment but something personal, an extension of himself. 

“As I grow and mature, so does my taste for art and culture,” Brown told ARTnews. “Passing that knowledge down to rookies gives them a chance to get involved when their influence is at its peak. The younger generation are the next influencers of this world so giving them art hopefully gives them the inspiration to learn more but to also develop their view on life.”

While the selling off of great collections and the arrival of little-known artists can draw worldwide attention, a lawsuit can sometimes lead to a restructuring of how art is even made.

This year saw a slew of legal drama unfold in the courts. Inigo Philbrick, a budding secondary market impresario, was sentenced harshly (and justly) to dissuade future hucksters from toying with the art market while Top 200 collectors Steve Wynn and Ken Griffin fought with varying arms of the US government. And of course let us not forget the trolls: Ryder Ripps took on the Bored Apes (literally) and Kanye “Ye” West took on history, decency, and a small gallery in Miami.

But these cases are not merely entertainment. A lawsuit between the Andy Warhol Foundation and the photographer Lynn Goldsmith has reached all the way to the Supreme Court. It could have wide and long lasting repercussions for the the way a generation of artists approach their practice.

Below, for your reading pleasure, the ten most interesting art-centered legal cases of 2022.

“The School of the Art Institute of Chicago condemns and repudiates Kanye West’s (now know as Ye) anti-Black, antisemitic, racist, and dangerous statements, particularly those directed at Black and Jewish communities,” the institution said in a statement. “Ye’s actions do not align with SAIC’s mission and values, and we’ve rescinded his honorary degree.”

Taking back the degree is the latest consequence that West has faced since making a series of antisemitic statements both on social media and in interviews with Fox News, Infowars, and other outlets. Over the last several months, Balenciaga, Christie’s, and, most notably, Adidas, with whom West had a $1.5 billion deal, have all severed ties with him. After those incidents, Forbes dropped West from their world’s richest list, and his net worth is now estimated at $400 million.

SAIC’s decision comes after a group called Against Hate at SAIC posted a petition on December 1 calling on the school rescind the degree. “Kanye West’s hateful speech incites violence and does not represents [sic] the values of our community. The School can and should rescind his Honorary Degree immediately,” the petition reads.

Since it was first posted, the petition garnered more than 4,000 signatures. Its original goal was 500. When West’s honorary degree was first awarded, SAIC referred to him as “an advocate for education, and a thinker and maker who often uses his work … to deconstruct stereotypes and spur cultural discourse on important social issues.”

Though West has long had a reputation for bizarre and unpopular comments, including once mentioning that African Americans living through 400 years of slavery sounded “like a choice,” last week he upped the rhetorical ante during an appearance on Alex Jones’s InfoWars by saying “there’s a lot of things I love about Hitler.”

In case his intention wasn’t clear, West then made an appearance on right-wing platform Censored.TV with Gavin McInnes, founder of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys, according to Rolling Stone, during which West pleaded with the Jewish people to “forgive Hitler.”

“Regardless of his contributions prior to receipt of this award, it is harmful to allow Ye, as he is presently known, to continue to use the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to help legitimize hatred and violence,” the petition reads. “This harm impacts the artists, designers and scholars affiliated to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their values of justice, compassion, and free expression without hatred.”

If the past couple years were marked by stasis and uncertainty, partly as a result of the pandemic, 2022 was the first time in a while when it felt as though a lot was happening at once. The Venice Biennale and Documenta, the world’s two biggest art festivals, converged, and brought with them sizable crowds, groundbreaking art, and a good deal of debate. Art fairs, too, roared back, as new ones were launched in capitals across the globe.

All the while, geopolitics shaped the art world, transforming how museums, galleries, and auction houses functioned—and periodically sending them into tumult.

Below, a look back at the defining events of 2022.

The list of losses West has undergone for his recent spate of antisemitic statements is not short: Adidas, Balenciaga and Christie’s have all severed ties with the 2024 presidential hopeful. The loss in revenue from his Adidas deal, which was worth about $1.5 million, severely cut into West’s net worth, leading Forbes to wipe his name from their list of billionaires. 

Now, a group called Against Hate at SAIC has posted a petition to put pressure on the school and its president Elissa Tenny to speak out against West’s continuing xenophobic descent. “Kanye West’s hateful speech incites violence and does not represents [sic] the values of our community. The School can and should rescind his Honorary Degree immediately,” the petition reads.

Since it was first posted, the petition has close to 1,250 signatures. Its original goal was 500. West, who now goes simply by “Ye”, was given the honorary doctorate in 2015. At the time, SAIC referred to West as “an advocate for education, and a thinker and maker who often uses his work…to deconstruct stereotypes and spur cultural discourse on important social issues.”

Only the part about spurring discourse remains true. While West has a reputation for bizarre and unpopular comments, including once mentioning that African Americans living through 400 years of slavery sounded “like a choice,” last week he upped the rhetorical ante during an appearance on Alex Jones’s InfoWars by saying “there’s a lot of things I love about Hitler.”

In case his intention wasn’t clear, West then made an appearance on right-wing platform Censored.TV with Gavin McInnes, the founder of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys, according to Rolling Stone, during which West pled with the Jewish people to “forgive Hitler.”

“Regardless of his contributions prior to receipt of this award, it is harmful to allow Ye, as he is presently known, to continue to use the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to help legitimize hatred and violence,” the petition reads. “This harm impacts the artists, designers and scholars affiliated to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their values of justice, compassion, and free expression without hatred.”

Part of the division’s uncertain future no doubt stems from the cancelation of what was supposed to be its first event: a private sale that was to feature the rare Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototype. Titled “Ye Walks,” the sale was shelved in the wake of a string of antisemitic comments made by Kanye West (who now goes simply by Ye). The backlash in the fashion industry has been swift, with brands like Balenciaga, Adidas, and Gap severing ties with him.

Though the art world has been slow to denounce Ye and his remarks, almost any mention of Ye has been scrubbed from Christie’s website, and Department X’s Instagram account is now offline. Christie’s confirmed that the sale was called off and that the house was “not selling any of this material nor do we have any plans to,” according to a statement first published by Artnet News.

One of the two pairs of shoes that was to be sold is a pair that Ye had worn to the 2008 Grammy Awards, which had sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2021 to the investment platform Rares. Christie’s had given the sneakers a pre-sale estimate between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.

A Christie’s spokesperson, however, told ARTnews that the house isn’t out of the sneaker game just yet. Apart from a sale of sneakers and collectibles scheduled for December, the house is “taking the opportunity to reconsider the marketing of the department.”

The first sign of trouble for the fledgling department came not even two weeks into its existence, after Christie’s collaborated with streetwear brand High Snobiety to create pricey swag as part of Department X’s marketing campaign, with the words “Art Handler” printed on $145 sweatshirts and $50 tote bags. A group of art handlers took to the internet to criticize the collaboration, lambasting it for promoting “class tourism” and belittling an often underpaid and unseen sector of the art market. One handler went so far as to post on Instagram a parody shirt that reads “Christie’s exploits Art Handlers.”

Following only a few hours of internet chatter, Christie’s deleted Instagram posts and pages on its site that announced the High Snobiety collaboration. The following day a Christie’s senior executive apologized to the staff art handlers in person, and the house released a statement saying, “We offer our sincerest apologies to our colleagues and to all who were offended by our recent marketing campaign. We take this matter seriously and are taking appropriate action to ensure this does not happen again.”

As Christie’s searches for a marketing partner who can propel Department X into the collectibles and streetwear stratosphere, sneaker resale sites like StockX have seen the price of Yeezy-branded sneakers rise and fall since the controversy began, according to a New York Times story on the post-Yeezy future of the Sneaker verse.

But the StockX model is precisely what Christie’s wants: the brand has moved on from only trading in collectible sneakers to selling streetwear, apparel, collectibles, and even electronics, giving the younger set a way of investing or collecting outside of the traditional auction house walls or Wall Street itself. How Christie’s moves forward in this arena—with or without Department X—then remains to be seen.

In 2019 alone, the rapper shot a film of himself performing in James Turrell’s Roden Crater and staged an opera with performance artist Vanessa Beecroft themed around the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. The year afterward, Arthur Jafa directed the music video for West’s song “Wash Us in the Blood,” pairing it with the same rapidly edited visuals seen in his films shown in galleries.

Now, it is difficult to conjure an art world that includes Kanye West at all.

Controversy has regularly followed West, who has previously stated that slavery was a choice, unsuccessfully campaigned as a candidate for President of the United States on a conservative platform, and denounced the Covid vaccine. But when West tweeted that he was going to go “death con 3” on Jews this past month, he seemed to have crossed the Rubicon.

In the past week, Adidas, Balenciaga, Gap, Foot Locker, and the agency CAA have all cut ties with West. So far, however, artists who’ve worked with him in the past have largely remained silent.

Emailed about the new antisemitism controversy, Beecroft responded almost immediately. “Let me check with Ye,” she wrote. Then she never followed up.

Representatives for Jafa and Turrell didn’t respond to request for comment.

George Condo, whose work featured on the cover of West’s celebrated 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, sent over a short statement that did not mention the rapper by name: “I have zero tolerance for anti-Semitic comments and for any hate speech from anyone that will cause further pain or anguish to the communities that have suffered the most.”

‘I’m Not Saying I’m da Vinci, But…’

Back in 2015, before his failed run for President and before the antisemitic comments, West declared himself similar to one of art history’s greats. “For all haters, I’m not saying I’m da Vinci, but I feel it’s right for any human being to compare themselves to anything,” he said.

Was West truly as good as Leonardo? For many, the artistry was there. In 2021, Pitchfork’s readers ranked My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as the third-best album of the past 25 years. Four songs by West appeared on a Rolling Stone list of the best 100 songs from the 2000s.

But for West, the obsession with Leonardo appears to have gone beyond egomania—it was a way of signaling that he transcended music altogether, that he was a true artist, one whose sounds shared something in common with the Mona Lisa. When he tweeted about his “favs,” the image he posted was not one of musical recordings but of art books—a Taschen mega-tome about Leonardo, the catalogue for James Turrell’s Guggenheim Museum retrospective, a survey of Matthew Barney, and Elizabeth Peyton’s work.

Throughout his career, West has surrounded himself with art. Takashi Murakami did the cover art for his 2007 album Graduation, one of many critically acclaimed LPs that West put out, and Steve McQueen did the 2016 music video for “All Day”/“I Feel Like That.” Vanessa Beecroft did several collaborations with West, including the famed 2016 one where stone-faced models stood around while the rapper debuted unfinished tracks from The Life of Pablo, and KAWS designed the cover art for the deluxe version of West’s 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak.

At times, West himself even invested in art. Last year, he reportedly dropped £1 million on a Damien Hirst sculpture that features a white dove encased in formaldehyde.

West was hardly the first rapper to cultivate the image of himself as an artist by way of comparison. Jay Z, for example, made waves with his song “Picasso Baby,” which he performed live alongside Marina Abramović at one point. But West’s art connections tended to feel different because he foregrounded them so heavily.

Critics also seemed to have bought what West was selling. For one polarizing piece about the music video for “Bound 2,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Jerry Saltz went to bat for West, the artist. “Just as the Rodney King video included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, ‘Bound 2’ should be in the upcoming one, representing a bend of cultural nature,” Saltz wrote.

Saltz went on to compare Kim Kardashian’s “nippleless boob” in the video to a Méret Oppenheim sculpture. Then he concluded, “West is part of some total merging of art with everything around it of art going viral—of more people wanting a bit of it in their lives. Regardless of their reasons.”

Keep Your Friends Close

It also seemed that every artist wanted a bit of West in their lives. By the mid-2010s, West’s coterie came to include artists who most have trouble accessing.

Turrell, the famously reclusive artist behind Roden Crater, once gave West a tour of his sculptures at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. From its official account, MASS MoCA tweeted a grainy picture of West and Turrell standing amid the latter’s room-size sculpture composed of magenta light that feels endless. “You finally got me here, bro,” West told Turrell.

Beecroft, a recurring West collaborator, had virtually disappeared from the art world when she first began working with the rapper in 2013, despite having shown with powerful dealers like Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian. When West married Kardashian in 2016, Beecroft was tasked with designing the set for the wedding.

The recent four-and-a-half-hour documentary jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, by the filmmaker Coodie, features a number of celebrity cameos—including one from Takashi Murakami, who appears in a sequence where West records the 2018 album Kids See Ghosts, a co-production with Kid Cudi. He wound up making the cover art for that record.

One could go on. There are numerous photographs of West hanging out with art types—my favorite, for the record, is one where he’s alongside Theaster Gates and Virgil Abloh—and many more examples of artists who are notoriously hard to reach working with West. What did these artists get from working with West, and why have so few been quick to denounce him?

It’s true that few of these artists seem to have future projects with West lined up. But it’s also true that none of these artists seem particularly eager to denounce West, as many others in different industries have.

Perhaps these artists fear reputational damage. Perhaps no one wants to be the first to go on the record. But maybe it’s also that the relationships between the rapper and these artists are simply too deeply entrenched to disentangle.

In the case of Beecroft, at least, she has been open about the merger of their personas. When she was profiled by the Cut in 2016, she alluded to as much when she said, “There is Vanessa Beecroft as a European white female, and then there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African-American male.” The remark was one of several explicitly racist ones in the profile, and it drew widespread pushback. Beecroft and West continued working together anyway.

Artists are pals with West, and friends protect friends. It all recalls lyrics from West’s 2016 song “Wolves,” his most nakedly honest reckoning with his own bad behavior: “I’ve been too wild, I’ve been too wild / And I need you now.”

Celebrity Jeopardy

It’s on the artists who’ve worked with West to speak out about his antisemitism. They’ve reaped the benefits of being associated with him, and now, they must contend with his more recent comments. But what to do about art that invokes West and his music without being explicitly about him? The answers can quickly grow complicated.

Perhaps the most notable West-related work of all time is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, which ARTnews previously ranked as the best artwork of the decade. A searing meditation on Black life and death in the U.S., it features as its soundtrack the West song “Ultralight Beam.”

Jafa has said he initially did not seek West’s permission before using the song, whose expansiveness dramatically enhances the video’s epic quality. He did, however, send West Love Is the Message, and West loved the video—so much so, apparently, that he invited Jafa to sit in on his recording sessions. Two years later, Jafa directed the music video for West’s “Wash Us in the Blood.”

Here’s a case where something that was never originally West-sanctioned became sucked into his orbit. The video wasn’t critical of West. It didn’t have to be—it was never really about him. But Love Is the Message still led to future collaborations with West anyway. Did something within it flatter West, even though the work wasn’t necessarily about him?

Guesswork is likely to get us only so far—poring over West’s words and actions is largely a lost cause because he has often been evasive and confusing on purpose. What is obvious, however, is that anything West-associated will now be placed under greater scrutiny, and that includes many beloved artists, among them Jafa.

These artists will have to contend with the timeworn debate about people with bad politics who create great art. No one has easy answers in that regard, and this may be the biggest reason why former West collaborators have remained so quiet: the concept of the genius, an unimpeachable master who creates truly awesome work, is hard to disentangle from art history, which is predicated upon it.

These ideas seemed to be in play for Jafa himself, who has spoken about “Ultralight Beam” in the same hyperbolic terms that music critics have. In a 2017 Interview conversation with Antwaun Sargent, he called the song “the first formal evolution of gospel music in about 100 years.”

Then Jafa seemed to allude to the growing awareness of West’s politics, which had led him to meet with Donald Trump about a month before the piece published. “Now, Kanye is a genius,” Jafa said, “but people just don’t like it because he calls himself a genius a little too often.”

Surface Area alleges that Ye and his team agreed to rent out the gallery space on January 5 for the remainder of the month at a rate of $5,000 a day, plus moving expenses of $20,000 and chair rentals. All costs were approved by Steven Victor and Laurence Chandler, Ye’s manager and general manager, according to the complaint.

Once prices were agreed upon, Surface Area cleared the gallery of artwork valued collectively at $50 million to make space for music recording equipment that was then brought in on the 6th, according to the complaint. After the equipment was brought in, rappers 88-Keys, Pardison Fontaine and “others” began recording music.

It appears, based on the court documents, that at the end of the month, Ye and his team moved out of the space, but never paid.

“The Defendant has failed to pay any amounts whatsoever to the Plaintiff,” the complaint reads.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of a series of scandals and controversies for the artist. In various interview appearances on TV and podcasts, and posted on social media, Ye has made numerous antisemitic comments. Various business partners and associated celebrities, including Adidas, Gap, and the Creative Artists Agency, have cut ties with the once-lauded musician and clothing designer.