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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.
Related Articles
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]