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. 

View from Kanye West’s Tadao Ando-designed residence overlooking the ocean in Miami, Florida.

Ever since he first visited Naoshima, the Japanese “art island” designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, Kanye West has been obsessed with the place. He’s been quoted describing the art as “life-changing” and once said he’d like to live inside a James Turrell sculpture, the sort of thing found on the island. And while that sort of lifestyle isn’t quite feasible, Kanye has done the second-best thing—he’s paid a whopping $57.3 million, in an off-market deal, for a Malibu residence that’s part house, part sculpture. The place is also one of only a handful of Ando-designed homes in the United States.

It doesn’t appear West has a mortgage on the property, which is certainly pricey but all in a proverbial day’s work for the music and fashion mogul. Forbes says he’s worth $1.8 billion, and with the current success of his “Donda” album and continued reign of the Yeezy apparel brand, it’s not hard to foresee that number continuing to swell.

And by some measures, Kanye got a deal. The nearly 4,000-square-foot house was initially offered at an outrageous $75 million last year, before being removed from the market. But the discounted sale price is also the second-highest number paid for a Malibu home this year, behind only an $87 million transaction that recorded in February.

Sold by retired Wall Street financier Richard Sachs, best known as the ex-boyfriend of Ashley Olson, the Malibu property last transferred for just $1.9 million in 2003. Beginning in the mid-aughts, Sachs spent millions, and seven years of planning and construction, to build a hulking three-story house that more closely resembles a military-grade bunker than it does an ordinary home. The structure reportedly required 1,200 tons of poured concrete, 200 tons of steel reinforcement and 12 pylons driven 60 feet into the ground, supporting the monstrously heavy house from sinking into the sand.

View from the back of Kanye West’s Tadao Ando-designed residence in Miami, Florida.

The lot itself is quite compact and sits cheek-to-jowl between two other homes, spanning under 5,700 square feet and stretching from the road to the beach. Out front, the two-lane street is often trafficked by local surfers and other beachgoers, who enjoy the relatively wide public beach and the good waves in this particular neighborhood pocket. The vaguely Brutalist-inspired house itself has no yard and nary a single plant, so West will save money on landscaping bills.

View from Kanye West’s Tadao Ando-designed residence looking onto the ocean in Miami, Florida.

Each of the home’s three levels has a distinct purpose. The lowest floor holds three ensuite guest bedrooms, while the middling level houses the public areas—the living room, kitchen and powder room. The top floor is exclusively reserved for the owner, with its penthouse-level bedroom suite and rooftop oceanside terrace overlooking the crashing waves far below. Photos of the interiors don’t appear to exist online, but the decor been described as minimalist “yet warm,” by Marmol Radziner, the L.A.-based architecture firm that built the house in collaboration with Ando.

And for easy commuting, the house is only about 30 minutes by car—via twisting mountain roads—to the massive Hidden Hills compound built by West and estranged wife Kim Kardashian, a property that remains occupied by Kardashian and the couple’s children.

Kanye has owned numerous homes across the country, but in addition to the Hidden Hills and Malibu properties, his current portfolio includes a vast ranch in a semi-remote pocket of Wyoming, a Brutalist-inspired condo in Calabasas and two minimalist condos in a brick New York City building. He’s also got more than 300 acres of vacant hillside land on the Calabasas outskirts, where he once attempted to build a mysterious “village” of dome-like homes.

This story first appeared on dirt.com, which features additional photographs and information on the Malibu residence.

The Headlines

ARCHITECTURAL ASSETS: Designer, musician, and erstwhile presidential candidate Kanye West reportedly purchased a Malibu home by Tadao Ando for $57.3 million, Archinect reports. West once described a visit to Japan’s art-filled Naoshima island, which sports many Ando projects, as “life-changing.” West has also tapped Valerio Olgiati to design a Los Angeles apartment, as well as “an artists’ colony” beneath his Wyoming ranch that will be “as vast as the subterranean cities of Turkey’s Cappadocia, with up to 200 dwellings, as well as studio spaces and a performance venue,” Nancy Hass writes in a profile of the Swiss architect in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Also in L.A., art dealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth are acquiring Richard Neutra’s Lovell House, which he built in the late 1920s, and plan “to bring back its original lustre,” Alex Ross writes in the New Yorker, in an appraisal of the Austrian architect’s work in the city.

MUSICAL MATTERS: Paintings that the artist Stanley Donwood made while developing the cover for Radiohead’s vaunted 2000 album Kid A will be offered online by Christie’s next month, Penta reports. The six large canvases are reminiscent of the album’s art, which was made on a computer. They’re estimated at £10,000 (about $13,800) each. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke is collaborating with Donwood on an exhibition at the auction house’s London branch that will also feature drawings, digital art, and more. Meanwhile, footage of two legendary 1976 concerts by the Sex Pistols in Manchester, England, sold for £15,000 (about $20,500) at Omega Auctions in the U.K., BBC News reports. In the audience at those famed gigs were young people who went on to form Joy Division, The Fall, and The Smiths, among other notable bands.

The Digest

The seven members of the powerhouse K-Pop group BTS presented lacquer vessels by artist Chung Haecho—a gift from the South Korean government—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They will be included in the Met’s upcoming show “Shell and Resin: Korean Mother-of-Pearl and Lacquer.” [The Art Newspaper]

Philanthropist and businessman John Booth, a big donor to the Tories, has been appointed chair of the National Gallery in London. His term runs until 2025. [The Guardian]

Columnist Carolina A. Miranda ventures into the soon-to-open Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a Renzo Piano–helmed project that has “added an unmistakable silhouette to the landscape of Los Angeles,” she writes. It is, in her estimation, a museum that “delivers the goods.” [Los Angeles Times]

Almost 5,000 items have gone missing from a special collection that includes rare comic books and other serials at the Strozier Library at Florida State University in Tallahassee. A police investigation has determined that some of the works have popped up on the secondary market. [WCTV]

A tiny museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma—the Outsiders House Museum—has received visits from celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and the band Green Day. Started by Daniel O’Connor, of the hip-hop group House of Pain, it is dedicated to the 1983 film The Outsiders, which prominently showcases its home. [The Associated Press]

One year into her directorship of the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Myriam Ben Salah spoke with Sarah Douglas about her plans for the august kunsthalle, and her first exhibition there, “Smashing Into My Heart,” which takes friendship as its theme. [ARTnews]

The Kicker

A WATERSHED MOMENT. The multi-hyphenate artist John Waters has a new novel coming out, a film in development that he is staying quiet about, and all sorts of other projects in the works. He spoke to Town & Country  (he’s on the cover) about his career and the state of culture. Of bad taste, the Pope of Trash had this to say: “I don’t even think there is such a thing anymore. I think what used to be called bad taste is now American humor. When I started, it was sick jokes: ‘That’s about as funny as an iron lung.’ Now the kind of stuff I had in my early movies is normal. That’s why my movies are now playing on television, which I never thought would happen. Ever.” [T&C via Page Six]

Over the past decade, China has seen a proliferation in private art museums opening around the country, primarily in Beijing and Shanghai. Yet another museum of the sort will open in March 2020: the He Art Museum, which taking its name from the word he, meaning harmony, balance, or fortune, and which is also the name of its founder, collector He Jianfeng. Located in the Shunde district of the city of Foshan in the Guangdong province, which is part of the greater metropolitan area that also includes Guangzhou and Hong Kong, the He Art Museum will focus on the art and culture from the surrounding region, particularly the Lingnan School, a style of painting begun by artists active during the early 20th century in the three coastal provinces of Guangdong (known as Canton), Guangxi, and Hainan.

The 172,000-square-foot museum, which is designed by Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando, will mount exhibitions related to its permanent collection focusing on Lingnan art as well as shows with work by international artists, including Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama. Its inaugural exhibition, “From the Mundane World,” curated by Feng Boyi, will look at ecological change, particularly as it relates to humans and their environments—a key issue in southern China, which has been transformed by rapid urbanization.

To learn more about the He Art Museum, ARTnews interviewed its founding director, Shao Shu, who from 2012 to 2017 led the curatorial team at the Long Art Museum, another private museum founded by ARTnews Top 200 Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian in Shanghai.

ARTnews: How did the He Art Museum get its start?

Shao Shu: The He Art Museum is based in the hometown of its founder, He Jianfeng, who dedicated the museum to promoting Lingnan culture, which is indigenous to Shunde. He created a platform to showcase rare Lingnan School art, which is a fast-disappearing style of painting, and to advocate for the continuation of this style.

AN: What is your vision for the museum?

Shao: HEM is devoted to the collection, research, mounting exhibitions, education, and the dissemination of knowledge about modern Chinese art and global contemporary art. It aims to build an exchange mechanism for international art grounded on local cultures and to provide a platform to further the research of Chinese art history and the development of Chinese and international art practices. We want HEM to be part of the community, a resource that people feel that can take pride in and have their own sense of ownership. It is open for all and open to everyone’s individual interpretation.

Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 2018-8, 2018, is part of the collection of the He Art Museum.

AN: Why the focus on Southern China?

Shao: We want to look out from this geographical point and offer context. It isn’t that the artist community is overlooked. The Lingnan School is well-known and regarded in the region. Western audiences haven’t seen or heard of the artists involved. We are part of the Greater Bay Area, a large area that has a population of around 70 million people and includes Special Administrative Regions such as Hong Kong. The He Art Museum hopes that it can be different from other art museums in China, which are often less concerned with the country’s art and culture. The museum is seeking to change the local art ecology and provide local artists more opportunities and possibilities.

AN: How, exactly, will the He Art Museum stand out as an institution?

Shao: Art museums are beneficial for the cultivation of artistic and aesthetic perception. The development of the art scene in the Greater Bay Area has been extremely uneven. Hong Kong and Macao are relatively prosperous and have their own unique styles. Shenzhen has had a very speedy growth in recent years, but it has not formed a stable cultural context. HEM aims to create a high-quality platform for art exhibitions, research, and education in order to stimulate [the local art scene]. We believe that the arts are one of the core motivations for the development of society. The community where the art museum is located is more industrial in nature. Most of the surrounding people have very limited access to opportunities to participate in art, and they don’t yet have the habit of seeing it. Therefore, it is a new dawn for a museum in the region.

AN: Can you talk about the museum’s opening exhibition, “From the Mundane World”?

Shao: HEM’s inaugural exhibition will consist of two shows, a thematic exhibition and a collection exhibition. The thematic exhibition is divided into three sections: “Experience All Things,” “Doctrine for ‘Sole’ Material Development,” and “Mundane Canteen,” all of which present contemporary artworks focusing on ecological systems between humans and nature, with a local perspective on the cultural sustainability. In HEM’s collection exhibition, a large number of modern and contemporary artworks are presented in two sections: “Milieu in Change” and “On the Rise.” The exhibitions question the fundamental relationships between nature and urban life, mass consumerism, and human progress, all as a reflection of the current pace of life, making viewers question their existence and their everyday life.

Chang Dai-Chien, Evening Colors over the Stream and Bridge, 1970.

AN: Do you have plans to partner with other arts institutions in China?

Shao: In 2020, HEM will cooperate with Museum 2050, a China-centric platform that looks at museum development. We will host the “Museum 2050 X HEM” symposium in Shunde after our opening. The symposium aims to create a platform for research on the key issues facing Chinese cultural organizations in the future from a native perspective. Also, it aims to gather youth around the nation to communicate and share ideas, which provides rich resources for energetic art communities and dialogue.

AN: Have the ongoing protests in Hong Kong had an impact on Shunde?

Shao: No. As a comprehensive strategy for development, we believe the whole Greater Bay area will thrive and flourish under the guidance of the state, and we totally trust the guidance of the government. If we must talk about the impact, the situation in Hong Kong will have a greater impact on overseas art practitioners, collectors, and art lovers. Many of the guests who planned to participate in the Art Basel Hong Kong will cancel their trips because of what happened in Hong Kong. Some of them may even rule out visiting South China altogether.

AN: Broadly speaking, what do you see as the role of the museum in the 21st century?

Shao: These days, one of the most significant roles of an art museum is its educational function. A museum should play a large role in public education. For an art museum, it is important to establish a relationship with the public. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, there are fixed audiences with developed museum-viewing habits. However, in Shunde, that is not the case, so we must change the context to communicate with the public. As a result, HEM cannot just plainly explain art history and art theory. We need to cultivate the region to develop a long-term habit to visit museums frequently and for audiences to establish their own perception of aesthetics. The art museum has always been a Western concept in China. I hope that through the domestic private art museums and official art museums, we can work out a way that is suitable for China, and we can cultivate our own model of museums in this country.

Elyn Zimmerman.

©TIMOTHY GREENFIELD SANDERS

The Noguchi Museum has named architect Tadao Ando and artist Elyn Zimmerman as the winners of the 2016 Isamu Noguchi Award, which is given annually “to individuals who share [museum founder] Noguchi’s spirit of innovation, global consciousness, and East-West exchange,” according to a press release. The awards will be given out during the museum’s annual spring benefit on May 10, 2016.

Ando is known for his minimalist concrete buildings, the result of an education in both Japanese architecture and modern Western architecture. Zimmerman, who began her career as a painter and photographer, designs large-scale plazas and sculpture gardens out of stone.

Tadao Ando.

©KINJI KANNO

Jenny Dixon, director of the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, said in a statement:

“With the Isamu Noguchi Award, the Museum honors the enduring links between the work of Isamu Noguchi and the many artists and designers he continues to inspire. We are thrilled to present this year’s Isamu Noguchi Award to architect Tadao Ando and artist Elyn Zimmerman, whose approach to their profound and beautiful work shares much with Noguchi’s.”

The steel tower, which stands over 500 feet tall, was built in the early 1920s, during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). It was commissioned by Lenin and designed by the ingenious Russian architect and engineer Vladimir Shukhov (1853-1939). The original plan called for a height of over 1,100 feet (the Eiffel Tower is 986 feet tall), but Shukhov had to readjust the design as a consequence of a steel shortage.

The tower once served as Moscow’s principal radio tower and became the main transmission facility for Soviet television. The hyperboloid structure influenced many 20th-century architects, including Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, who paid tribute to Shukhov’s innovative design in the ovoid shape of his 30 St Mary Axe Tower in London, commonly known as “The Gherkin.”

In recent years, the condition of the tower severely degraded due to neglect, and city officials have called for its demolition. The Moscow Times reported that real estate agents had examined the potential development of the site and proposed to dismantle the tower and rebuild it elsewhere.

The question of the tower’s future sparked a lively discussion in Russia and beyond. In March, a group of leading international architects, including Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, Rem Koolhaas and Elizabeth Diller, signed a public petition—addressed to Vladimir Putin—to protect the tower.

This week’s resolution will remove the threat of demolition and launch a plan to renovate and restore the structure, along with registration in the federal list of protected heritage sites. The success of preservation activists also reflects the growing interest in the preservation of Soviet-era architecture. Another recent example is the conservation order granted to the Konstantin Melnikov House in Moscow (completed in 1933), the foundations of which have been threatened by nearby construction.

“When you arrive, you’ll see a bunch of walls,” Conforti continues, referring to a scheme of red granite partitions that obscure the campus from the parking lot. “Ando consciously funnels you through a very narrow door. Then, all the sudden, it’s truly transformative to walk in—to see the plaza and the great water feature in front of you, to see all three of the campus buildings surrounding it and the views to the Berkshires and the Taconic Mountains.” The reflecting pool is not just for esthetics; it is the center of a hydrological system to retain, filter, and store rainwater that is estimated to reduce the museum’s water consumption by 50 percent. The pool also unifies the existing museum building, the research center, and the visitor center, while extending to a network of new walking trails that wind throughout the 140-acre site, designed by the landscape firm Reed Hilderbrand.

A view of the new Tadao Ando–designed visitor center at the Clark Art Institute, which houses underground galleries.

KRIS QUA/COURTESY STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS

Most of the spaces in the 44,000-square-foot expansion are in fact underground, including the special-exhibition galleries, café, loading dock, art-storage facilities, and central kitchen. “We wanted to keep the intimacy of the scale of the Clark,” says Conforti. “We picked Ando because we knew he could do open courtyards with light coming into the lower spaces.” Inaugurating the airy galleries are the shows “Cast for Eternity: Ancient Ritual Bronzes from the Shanghai Museum,” and “Make It New: Abstract Painting from the National Gallery of Art, 1950–1975” (opening August 2), in addition to an exhibition of David Smith sculptures at the Stone Hill Center—also designed by Ando—up the hill from the main campus and completed in 2008.

Ando has bridged new and old, with a long glassed-in concourse and pavilion connecting the expansion to the original 1955 museum building. There, Selldorf did a complete overhaul—restoring the building’s east-west orientation, redoing the lighting and climate-control systems, and reclaiming some gallery space that had been converted to offices. “You still know you’re at the Clark,” says Conforti, “but she’s done this wonderful, slightly Modernist updating that reconceptualizes the space.” The permanent collection, which has strengths in 18th- and 19th-century French and British art, has been reinstalled throughout the building.

Selldorf is also renovating the museum’s research center—one of the largest art-history research libraries in the country and home to Williams College’s graduate program in art history—which is reopening in phases through next spring. The biggest change to that 1973 building is Selldorf’s enclosing of the courtyard to create a public reading room. “We’re a dual-mission institution, a research center as much as an art museum,” says Conforti. “We’ll be able to make that association a little more vibrant by moving people through the Manton Research Center, where they’ll be able to see art history in practice.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 38 under the title “Going Big in the Berkshires .”

Tom Shannon’s 2009 sculpture Drop reflects Château La Coste’s sprawling landscape.

LARRY NEUFELD/©2012 CHÂTEAU LA COSTE AND TOM SHANNON

For decades, the ancient vineyard of Château La Coste, located on a rolling 600-acre plain near Aix-en-Provence, was a sleeping beauty waiting to be brought to life. Once the center of a major wine-producing region cultivated as early as the Roman times, and a rest stop for pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the property had seen far better days when Irish real-estate developer and art collector Paddy McKillen purchased it in 2002. Convinced that wine-making is “a noble task,” McKillen resolved to restructure the vineyards and to introduce the latest biodynamic standards for their cultivation. At the same time, he realized that La Coste would be a wonderful setting for art.

With that in mind, he invited leading architects and artists to come to La Coste and propose projects that could be realized on its historic terrain. Today, five Pritzker Prize winners and a score of sculptors have left their marks there. With Aix (2008), for example, Richard Serra inserted vast sheets of steel into a hillside at varying angles, like skewed steps. Sean Scully’s signature geometries are realized in the myriad cuts and colors of stone that make up his Wall of Light Cubed from 2007. And Franz West accented the vineyard’s promenade with his bright yellow Faux-Pas (2006), a kind of phallic totem that straddles the line between sculpture and furniture.

The first new structure on the property was the two-part, gravity-flow chai (winery), designed by Jean Nouvel and completed in 2008. Although a nearby 17th-century Palladian-style château with a miniature, baroque garden had long set the architectural tone for the landscape, Nouvel’s gleaming, elegant structure of corrugated aluminum seemed to transport the domain into a new millennium. The winery was soon joined by Frank Gehry’s Music Pavilion, while Tadao Ando’s minimalist “information center” slowly took shape.

In one of the center’s three reflecting pools, a monumental spider by Louise Bourgeois perches above the surface; the second pool holds an Alexander Calder stabile, and the third showcases Hiroshi Sugimoto’s conical Infinity (2010), which rises from the water and tapers to a point no more than one millimeter in diameter. Shimmering in the light beneath the intense blue skies of Provence, Ando’s building and Sugimoto’s sculpture seem almost to dematerialize, while the pools surrounding Ando’s structure reflect the verdant surrounding hillsides. The entire complex encourages a zen-like quiet and introspection.

Ando’s chapel, perched on La Coste’s highest ridge, is a renovated structure that was once a stop for those 16th-century pilgrimages. Completely overgrown when McKillen acquired the property, it was believed by locals to be a former shepherd’s hut, or a gardening shed. Ando stripped the structure of vegetation, took it apart stone by stone, and meticulously reconstructed it, finally encasing it in a glass cube. Its new roof sits slightly higher than the top of the walls, so that by day a narrow band of sunlight filters in.

In the chapel, as with British artist Andy Goldsworthy’s nearby Oak Room (2009), silence feels almost tangible. For Goldsworthy’s permanent installation, he literally wove together the trunks of oak trees cleared from a nearby forest to create a kind of cave within a hillside—a monumental, cathedral-like space that is one of the many surprises awaiting visitors to La Coste. A tour of the property presently takes about 90 minutes, but with new works being added constantly, that duration is certain to expand.

One of the latest projects there involves the erection of a pair of prefabricated houses—among the first of their kind—that Jean Prouvé designed for World War II refugees in 1945. Of the 450 structures originally built, these are perhaps the sole survivors. Restored under the supervision of the architect’s son Nicolas, they now house art libraries fitted with original Prouvé furniture. Linking them is a rare, 17th-century Viet-namese teahouse pavilion, where visitors can sip tea and browse through the objects housed in the adjacent libraries. Meanwhile, work has begun on a bell tower by Henri Matisse’s grandson Paul, a light tunnel by James Turrell, a pair of bridges by Norman Foster, and a Renzo Piano–designed building for aging grand cru wines. Most of this structure is to be underground, but an upper level will house a photography center.

The bulk of a five-star hotel, conceived for the site by Marseille’s Tangram Architects and scheduled for completion late next year, is also to be located underground, embedded in the Provençal landscape. Other exhibition spaces, research facilities, and a cooking school are on the drawing board, as is a concert hall designed by the world’s oldest living architect, the 105-year-old Oscar Niemeyer. A series of organic gardens is being developed by French landscape designer Louis Benech.

The power behind this grandiose fusion of art, architecture, viniculture, history, and landscape is a man who does not give interviews, rarely appears in public, has almost never been photographed, and is more often cited by journalists on the financial page—not always approvingly—than in the culture section. Employing classic British understatement, Richard Rogers, codesigner of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, has remarked, “Paddy is our quietest client.”

But the true voice, and perhaps even the soul, of Château La Coste is that of McKillen’s sister Mara, who manages the domain and recounts her experiences there in a lilting Belfast accent. It was Mara who visited Provence in 1990 “to follow a dream,” discovered the legendary “Monday Market” of Forcalquier, and began writing a book on Provence. That enthusiasm is now focused on restoring the vineyards to their former glory. “It’s all about having respect for the creative process,” she says, “whether in winemaking or in architecture.” When she describes walking through the vineyards and collecting shards of Roman pottery that have been washed up by the rain, her intense love of the land is as evident as her brother’s passion for art and architecture.

With minimal publicity, La Coste is now attracting as many as 200 visitors a day, and that number is likely to skyrocket next year, when Marseille will enjoy a year-long stint as the designated European Capital of Culture. The Mediterranean port city intends to spend the year focusing on the performing arts, while the visual arts will be represented by exhibitions in nearby Aix and throughout the surrounding region. Many who make that cultural pilgrimage may consider Château La Coste a worthwhile stop.

David Galloway is the Wuppertal correspondent for ARTnews.

Three summer exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., break from the museum’s customary program to focus on Chinese art and archeology. While the departure from the museum’s strengths in Impressionists, old masters and decorative arts may seem improbable, it’s no more unlikely than putting together a trove of Renoirs and Monets, for which the museum is known, in a remote mountain valley in the first place. The museum’s location owes to the founder’s conviction at midcentury, when the museum opened, that New York (where he also had a residence) was doomed to nuclear annihilation, and that his treasures would be safer in the Berkshires.

The museum’s focus on China stems from an equally odd discovery. Long known as a collector, horse breeder and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, Robert Sterling Clark (1877–1956), recent research by museum staff has revealed, was also briefly an explorer. After a tour of army duty in Asia, Clark sponsored and led an 18-month surveying expedition in a previously unmapped region of northern China in 1808–09.

“Through Shên-kan: Sterling Clark in China” is on view at the Stone Hill Center, the Tadao Ando-designed facility opened in 2008 that houses the Williamstown Art Conservation Center along with two small galleries. In addition to artifacts and photographs from Clark’s military service, as well as equipment used in his expedition, the show features several taxidermied animals bagged on the journey—a Chinese Striped Hamster, a Kangaroo Rat, an Azure-winged Magpie—some of which are the only remaining examples of now-extinct species.

With his co-expeditionist Arthur de Carle Sowerby, Clark published an illustrated book, Through Shên-kan, which the museum has re-issued in facsimile. The volume looks for all the world like a Wes Anderson film prop, and the writing at times recalls the filmmaker’s deadpan: “On September 30th the caravan left Shêng-yi, and continued its route over the mountains, still in a westerly direction, patches of scrub, pine spinneys and small spaces of cultivated ground being met with.”

For those familiar with the Clark’s collection of Alma-Tademas, Homers, Sargents and Bouguereaus (full disclosure: this writer attended the Williams College art history graduate program, which is housed in the Clark), it all seems so implausible as to resemble a delightful, elaborate put-on, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology transplanted to bucolic western Massachusetts.

In a neighboring room, “Then and Now: Photographs of Northern China” juxtaposes pictures from Clark’s expedition with images of the same sites today by photographer Li Ju. While the characteristic stepped terraces used for rice farming remain, some ancient structures have disappeared, giving way to up-to-date edifices, and the cart used by a 1908 postman has been replaced by a motorbike in the modern photo.

But the star summer offering, in the museum proper, is “Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China.” For this exhibition, the Chinese government made an exception to its policy of always being the first party to publish recent discoveries. The objects on view range from the fifth through 11th centuries.

Among the show’s highlights are a group of exceptionally well-preserved earthenware tomb sculptures from the Tang dynasty (618–907), especially two “Tianwang” figures (heavenly kings or lokapala), about half life-size. Their elaborately detailed and finely painted costumes, bugged-out eyes and flaming headdresses intact, they were designed to frighten off tomb robbers and to guard the “cosmic sleep” of the tomb’s inhabitant. That person is unknown; the burial site is referred to as “Tomb M2,” in Fujigao Village, Lingtai County, Gansu Province.

The show’s most dramatic offering is a room-size, multi-ton, fifth-century sandstone sarcophagus in the shape of a Chinese house that took riggers two weeks to install. Made of more than 100 interlocking pieces, it held the remains of Song Shaozu, a high-ranking court officer.

At a lecture during the show’s opening weekend, guest curator Annette Juliano of Rutgers University observed, “people always ask how long it took to create these things. Usually you don’t know. This is one of the rare cases where a written record provides the answer: 60 stonemasons labored for 50 days to create this.”

During the Q&A after the lecture, an audience member asked what the final resting places of those workers might look like.

“Nothing like this, that’s for sure,” Juliano said. “They were probably buried in an earthen grave with a few objects.

“This sort of tomb,” she added, “is definitely the burial place of the one percent.”

Complementing the summer program in New York is a project by Mark Dion, Phantoms of the Clark Expedition, which comprises a series of dioramas and sculptural faux specimens related to the expedition. Commissioned by the Clark, it’s on view through Aug. 3 at the tony neo-Gothic Explorer’s Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which serves as the Clark’s new Manhattan satellite during the museum’s $100-million-dollar expansion and renovation. The new Clark facility, also designed by Ando, is expected to open in July 2014.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel—the latter expected to cost upwards of $1.3 billion—are among the first major museums that will form a new global cultural hub in the tiny countries of the Gulf. The Gehry and Nouvel museums will be joined on the coastline by a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando, and a national museum by Norman Foster, with the first phase of the cultural district to be completed as soon as 2012.

But Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates in the UAE, is not alone in what amounts to a cultural arms race in a region rich with petro-cash, and eager to spend it on symbols of good taste and refinement. Dubai, whose ambitions and pace of development outstrip even those of Abu Dhabi, has announced plans to build several major museums, including one devoted to modern Middle Eastern art, designed by Amsterdam architect Ben van Berkel; another dedicated to the prophet Muhammad; and a universal museum, curated by three German institutions, for which the content has not yet been defined. Dubai cultural officials say the plan is to build at least eight major museums in the coming decade. And Qatar, a smaller but even richer country down the Persian Gulf from Dubai, intends to build 10 to 12 major museums in the next decade. The first major museum in that country of 800,000 opened in November in Doha. Designed by I. M. Pei, it is a soaring space devoted to Islamic art, floating in the waters of the Gulf.

“There is an explosive quality to the growth of cultural life in this region,” said Roger Mandle, executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority and a former president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “It’s like the birth of a civilization—Russia after glasnost, China after it opened up. There is a desire to enjoy the same opportunities as the rest of the world in terms of educational and cultural pursuits.”

This agenda has far-reaching implications for the world of art, creating new jobs for curators and conservators, a burgeoning market for dealers and auction houses, and unexplored territory for artists themselves. Headhunters are already reaching into the far corners of the art world to fill top jobs and midlevel curatorial positions at these embryonic institutions, even pursuing a kind of museum czar to head Saadiyat Island’s cultural initiative. (The initiative extends beyond museums; the Metropolitan Museum’s outgoing director, Philippe de Montebello, is already a special adviser to New York University Abu Dhabi.)

But the implications for the region itself are more profound, and not without risk. The museums, UAE officials say, are part of a concerted strategy to lessen the emirates’ dependence on oil revenue by creating a new income stream in the form of cultural tourism. It is not yet clear what impact, if any, the recent drop in oil prices and the bursting of an inflationary bubble in Dubai may have on government plans for museums.

With its cultural district on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi hopes to nearly double the number of tourists visiting the country by 2012, from 1.7 million to 3 million a year. Dubai is seeking to attract 15 million tourists by 2015, hoping to re-create the success experienced by Bilbao, where Frank Gehry’s landmark design for the Guggenheim branch drew millions.

“The audience will be any person interested in architecture, art, culture, and the experimentation of new art,” said Rita Aoun-Abdo, the art and culture adviser to Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development Investment Company (TDIC), which runs the new cultural district. She was speaking outside an exhibit at the Emirates Palace Hotel devoted to the project. It features maquettes and scale models of the new museums, and a wall charting the statistical success of Bilbao: “9.2 million visitors, 1998–2006. Jobs = 4,355/year. ROI [return on investment] = 12.8%.”

Saadiyat Island is designed for people who will come from afar to see the marquee museums while enjoying golf, shopping, beaches, and five-star hotels.

But there is also a longer-term strategy at work, articulated by on-message officials at all levels in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Qatar: to build institutions in the Gulf that will educate their people and create a new model of cultural exchange in the Middle East.

“We believe that culture is an integral part of educating our people,” Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, told ARTnewsat an exhibition organized by Christie’s. The sheikh is chair of both the TDIC and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. “One of the essential goals for us is to create a cultural bridge. In 20 years Abu Dhabi will be a beacon of peace and culture, an oasis of culture and peace.”

But many art professionals in the West wonder if this undertaking, launched at such a dizzying scale and pace, can be successful.

Is it possible, some academics and art experts ask, to create an “oasis of culture” in a place that has no history of museums, no community of artists to speak of, no collectors, no donors, and where the local passions run to falcons and racehorses rather than to Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons?

“The important thing is to develop an audience in the Middle East,” said John Martin, a London art dealer and the director of Art Dubai, an annual art fair hosting 65 galleries from around the world. “If that fails, then you’ll have a bunch of white elephants. Big boxes.”

Those leading the Abu Dhabi enterprise agree that this is the crux of the challenge. But they say they are working intensively to build interest among the local populace with exhibitions like one last year of works by Picasso, curated by the Musée Picasso in Paris and visited by hundreds of Abu Dhabi schoolchildren. Other TDIC initiatives include establishing local art galleries, holding seminars on art-related topics, and sponsoring educational programs, so that by the time the museums open, Abu Dhabi will have a support system of art collectors, dealers, and artists to nourish them.

“I can build the most wonderful building. But if I don’t give it the right spiritual meaning, you’ll feel bored,” said Bassem Terkawi, spokesman for the TDIC. “If we don’t start work in the local community today, we’ll have fantastic buildings, amazing collections, and zero visitors locally.”

Still other undefined challenges hover vaguely over the horizon. No one yet knows what will happen when Western cultural institutions are transplanted into desert Islamic societies in the throes of tumultuous social and economic change. What kinds of compromises will be necessary to allow Western museums, with their proud democratic traditions, to function in an Arabian context, with its proud desert traditions?

Some wonder whether openly gay curators will feel at ease in a society that bans homosexuality. Or if Jewish scholars or artists might similarly feel out of place in countries where vilifying Israel is a norm, if less so than in other Arab countries.

And what of artistic freedom? To what degree will the ruling families allow artists free rein to push the boundaries of their craft and their ideas? Or for curators to create provocative and innovative shows?

Compromises will be necessary, said Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University who writes frequently about cultural conflict. “If the Guggenheim wants to start with Mapplethorpe, it will have trouble,” he says. Even so, he went on, “it’s going to be interesting. So much of Western art before the Enlightenment is religious, and Christian. Will women be allowed to see paintings of Saint Sebastian with hardly anything on? These are questions that arise, and the list is endless. If they haven’t been thinking about it, they’re going to have to.”

In the UAE, officials say they have been thinking deeply about these very questions, and have laid the groundwork for the ambitious journey ahead.

So far, there has been plenty to think about just to realize such daunting building targets. The Guggenheim, scheduled to be completed around 2013, will be a spectacular landmark built on a sandbar extending 50 feet out into the waters of the Gulf, visible from Abu Dhabi’s urban center to the east as well as from both coasts of Saadiyat Island.

The scale model on display at the Emirates Palace Hotel is a building defined by a series of giant cubes and cones leaning against one another. A shimmering blue tunnel forms the entrance, leading to a central gallery inspired by the traditional Gulf wind tower called a barjil.

With 450,000 square feet of space, the Guggenheim will be the largest of the four initial museums under construction in Abu Dhabi. Much of the content of the collection is still being discussed, but one gallery will be devoted to Middle Eastern contemporary art and will feature artists living in the region. The permanent collection of acquired art and long-term loans will account for 130,000 square feet of the exhibition space, while 40,000 square feet will be devoted to temporary exhibitions.

Aoun-Abdo, a vivacious Lebanese whose job it is to oversee Abu Dhabi’s “cultural identity,” has a background in consulting with Arab governments on developing cultural initiatives, though her primary training is in theater arts. From her perspective, Saadiyat Island is a laboratory for the creation of something never before seen.

“There is no analogy. It’s something new, experimental,” she said. “It won’t be like the Guggenheim Bilbao, or New York. It will look like Abu Dhabi because of the collection, the involvement of Middle East and Arab artists. It’s a lab. People who come from the outside with prejudgment need to forget all that and look again.”

The billion-dollar Louvre Abu Dhabi ($525 million estimated for the building, and another $747 million estimated for curatorial services and artwork) will quickly follow the Guggenheim, a universal museum for the 21st century in 260,000 square feet. The design proposed by Jean Nouvel is an elegant white dome made of Islamic-style latticework, creating a light-dappled experience for visitors below.

But as for the contents and ethos of the museum, those creating the Louvre Abu Dhabi say it will be unlike the original Louvre, or any traditional universal museum. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will not be divided by section, whether Asian, Islamic, European, or modern and contemporary art. The work may be shown chronologically, but won’t follow traditional categories.

“People will judge by the results,” said Bruno Maquart, CEO of the French Museums Agency, a private company created specifically to work on the Emirates Project, which has been controversial among France’s intelligentsia, who have protested that the country is selling its culture for petrodollars. Contents for the Louvre will be chosen from 12 French national museums, among them the Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay—but a director won’t be chosen until a year before its opening, according to Laurence des Cars, chief of the agency.

Said Aoun-Abdo: “It has nothing to do with importing Western art. It’s importing Western expertise and know-how to train people here, and create institutions that will be East to East, East to West, and national in scope.”

Thomas Krens, the former director of the Guggenheim and the senior adviser for international affairs at the Guggenheim Foundation, has been leading the effort to curate and plan the new venue. He will be working with Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the director of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the chief officer for global strategies at the Guggenheim Foundation, who is now responsible for day-to-day management of Abu Dhabi, including hiring a director and curators. One curatorial assistant has been hired thus far, Dana Farouki, who is working in New York, according to a Guggenheim spokesperson, but the director position is not close to being filled. Krens canceled scheduled interviews for this story.

A spokeswoman for the TDIC said the organization is actively seeking a “leader” to head up the entire cultural district initiative, but that Krens is not a candidate.

Fred Henry, a Guggenheim Museum board member who has been to Abu Dhabi some 30 times since 2005 advising the TDIC, said the goal is to create the right community around the museum. “This is about the role Abu Dhabi can play in the next 20 years in education and cultural basis,” he said. “It’s about a certain vision of the role that culture, education, and communication play in the larger world. They have a vision of their role in establishing peace and harmony in the world. As I see it, this is the foundation for doing that.”

But Henry notes that the challenges are significant. “They don’t have schools, curators, writers, studios; they don’t have enough of the stuff that exists in Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires—you name it—that’s in any vibrant art community that is viral and self-organizing,” he observed. “And this is not something that Art Dubai or the TDIC develops. It has to be given nourishment and support, and come from a lot of sources.

“What I’d like to see in five years is a real art community,” he continued. “Big institutions all by themselves are not enough.”

A number of Emiratis are watching these changes in the cultural sphere with something like suspicion. This is a society in the midst of historic social upheaval. Only 10 percent of the current United Arab Emirates population is native, with the rest coming from around the Middle East, Europe, and mainly South Asia, whose labor force feeds the country’s insatiable construction needs.

This demographic shift is fundamentally altering the DNA of a country that only 50 years ago subsisted on pearl and date farming. Today, one rarely hears Arabic in Dubai, a city that is a cacophony of ethnicities where no single culture dominates.

Dr. Rima Sabban, a sociologist who has lived in Dubai since the 1990s, is among those concerned by the explosive growth. “As a sociologist, I’m so overwhelmed,” said Sabban. “The communities don’t interact. It’s like wheels interacting on the surface only. All the wheels work together to create the great energy that moves the city, but we don’t know where these changes are going.”

Hashim Sarhan, a sociologist from the University of Sharjah—in a neighboring emirate, which has its own art fair along with a biennial and a Museum of Islamic Civilization that opened last July—had a harsher perspective. “I don’t know why the government of Abu Dhabi is trying to bring the Louvre here—that’s European culture,” he said. “What is the aim behind it? When other people want to see French and British culture, they’ll go to Paris and London, not to Abu Dhabi.”

Sarhan sees the arrival of Western museums as cultural imperialism, pure and simple. The United Arab Emirates should nourish their local culture, in his view. “Why should we wear other people’s clothes?” he asked. “We have to wear our own clothes. If we wear other people’s clothes, we will not feel comfortable.”

The misgivings expressed by local observers are reflected by concerns among Western groups tallying the human cost
of such breakneck development.

Human Rights Watch, the international watchdog organization, has documented the systematic exploitation of construction workers throughout the UAE, where laborers are packed into barracks and paid virtually save wages—$150 to $200 a month. In many cases the workers are essentially indentured servants, working to pay exorbitant fees to recruiting agencies who bring them there and confiscate their passports. This is against the law in the emirates, but the law is generally ignored, according to observers.

“What we want to see is the Louvre and the Guggenheim and NYU make public their commitments to not rely on exploitive, slavelike labor conditions,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the director for Middle East and North Africa of Human Rights Watch. (New York University is building a sprawling campus in Abu Dhabi, and will be granting degrees.)

“We want them to commit publicly to say that anyone involved in construction of this project will be treated with fairness and dignity,” she said. “And that they will verify that they have not paid recruiting fees or had their passports withheld, that they are given decent housing and a minimum wage.”

Aoun-Abdo and Terkawi of the TDIC said that Saadiyat Island officials have heard the concerns over labor standards, and responded. A village for 40,000 laborers on the island is opening in phases starting this month, Aoun-Abdo said, and contractors there will have to conform to the laws. “They will live in housing that conforms to international standards,” she said. (Laborers more commonly live far from the big cities, in some cases in temporary barracks made out of shipping containers.)

Whitson said the Louvre has been the most forthcoming in offering assurances on this score, and the Guggenheim and NYU have been less eager to engage the question, though Guggenheim officials are in talks with the nonprofit group.

“Since we are still at a very early stage in the project, there is not a lot to say yet,” said Eleanor Goldhar, the Guggenheim’s deputy director of external affairs. “We don’t open until 2013 at the earliest.” Frank Gehry did not return calls about labor issues in building his Abu Dhabi museum.

Said Aoun-Abdo: “All our partners know what we’re doing. I’m honestly not concerned about this.”

Terkawi said the royal family has committed to artistic freedoms at the new museums, even as local cultural and religious norms would need to be respected.

“There is no form of censorship to be imposed on any art displayed here. This is written into the agreements,” he said. “However, we have found good partners who have a mutual understanding of both cultures. We have our culture, our social codes. Our partners will make sure that the displays will be in line with that—and it is normal to expect that.”

But he said the questions about Western norms reflect a “complete misunderstanding” of how the emirates regard such matters. “The UAE is one of the few places in the region where you see respect and tolerance for other cultures,” he said.

As regards homosexuality, gay people live in the emirates, but do so discreetly, he said. Jewish people live freely in the emirates, he insisted; some are “of high position.” However, the Anti-Defamation League reports that an Abu Dhabi think tank (now closed) hosted a 2002 symposium challenging the reality of the Holocaust, where one speaker referred to Jews as “the enemies of all nations.”

Israeli participation is more difficult, said Terkawi, because the UAE has no diplomatic ties with Israel. “In special cases, Israelis have come to attend conferences here. They submit requests, and a decision is made,” he said.

Yoram Morad, the cultural attaché at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, did not address the question directly, but observed: “Any cultural dialogue will be more than welcome on our part.”

In the ruler’s suite, beneath a soaring dome on the very top floor of the $5 billion Emirates Palace Hotel, the smell of frankincense wafted through the air, tended by veiled Nubian servants for the pleasure of the princesses of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Some 80 women, wearing designer outfits beneath their head-to-toe black abayas, sat in a circle in the traditional majlisstyle.

The purpose of this gathering of the sheikhas with the wives of local ambassadors was high culture. They had come to hear a lecture by Paul Hewitt, an expert from Christie’s, on great women collectors in the history of art. Hewitt carefully followed instructions to make no eye contact with the women as he told them about the art collections of Catherine the Great; Farah Diba Pahlavi, the empress of Iran; and Peggy Guggenheim.

An hour or so later Sheikha Salama bint Hamad Al Nahyan and her daughter swept silently and grandly down to the ground-floor ballroom for a private tour of the exclusive Christie’s presale exhibition: a famed Monet, Dans la prairie(1867), estimated at $25 million; Renoirs; some Warhols; contemporary paintings from China; and a multitude of monumental diamonds.

Between the top and bottom floors, other cultural events were taking place. In the same hotel that week, Elton John performed in one auditorium, the Bayreuth symphony played in another, and Jeremy Irons presided over a musical evening featuring groups from around the world.

Abu Dhabi is on a fast track to experience culture of all kinds, funded by the government’s deep pockets. “They’re going through the gradients of a cultural experience that we’ve gone through in decades—in literally minutes,” said Hewitt, marveling at the pace. “But they have the education, the money, and the intelligence to do it.”

Last October Christie’s held its first event in Abu Dhabi, following the lead of other auction houses such as Sotheby’s, which began holding biannual sales in the region in 2006. The Middle East, led by the emirates, has become a huge market for the auction houses (see “An Emerging Market”).

“We’ve moved very, very fast here because of the appetite for the arts,” said Jussi Pylkkínen, the president of Christie’s Europe and Middle East. He noted that his auction house has quadrupled its sales in the Mideast since 2004.

Abu Dhabi and Dubai are both buying art aggressively to fill permanent collections for their museums, but then so is Qatar, which made headlines last year when royal collectors reportedly purchased a Rothko for $72.8 million, a Bacon for $53 million, and a Damien Hirst for $19.2 million.

Later in the evening, after the Christie’s auction, a cocktail reception brought together the elite of Emirati high society. Abayaswere seen, but so were strappy party dresses, and Champagne was served despite the Islamic interdiction against alcohol and the presence of Sheikh Sultan of the royal family. Pylkkínen walked the sheikh and his advisers through the exhibition, pausing for a long time before the Monet.

“We are a young country, and we’ve made an extensive effort to develop our infrastructure over the last 30 to 40 years,” explained Mubarak Al Muhairi, TDIC’s managing director and one of the sheikh’s top advisers on cultural development. “Now the government sees the moment to develop our human resources—education, culture. It’s a reflection of the ambition of Abu Dhabi to develop its society while building culture. Thirty years from now, this will play a role in strengthening tolerance.”

Like many of his generation of the royal family, the 38-year-old Sheikh Sultan was educated in the United States—after getting a B.A. in architecture from the UAE University, he received a master’s in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

What does he say to those who see Saadiyat Island as Abu Dhabi’s attempt to buy its way into high culture? “It’s not true,” he responded in fluent English. “We have a clear vision of complementing culture with education. We believe in the benefits of developing culture, raising our overall standard of living, building world-class institutions for our visitors.

“Of course, we are realistic,” he went on.