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The Headlines
ON THE MARKET. In November, Christie’s will offer a ca. 1480s Sandro Botticelli painting of the Virgin Mary from the collection of the late Paul Allen with an estimate above $40 million, Angelica Villareports in ARTnews . It is the latest marquee Allen lot to be detailed by the house, which announced this summer that it had won the opportunity to sell $1 billion in art from his collection. If eight figures is out of your price range, a small cotton tablecloth with “food and drink stains, autographs and several ‘acid-inspired doodles’ and portraits by the [The Beatles] and Joan Baez” is being offered by Bonhams with a top estimate of $25,000, the Los Angeles Times reports. The piece was created during a dinner for the band’s final paid concert, in 1966, and might look nice next to one of those dirty tablecloth pieces Reena Spaulings made in the mid-2000s.
Related Articles
UNDERGROUND (AND UNDERWATER) FINDS. Researchers excavating a Shang dynasty site in Zhengzhou, China, have found a 3,400-year-old burial with rare gold pieces that may have been placed atop the faces of the dead, the South China Morning Post reports. Off the coast of Western Australia, divers have located a Finnish ship that went missing in a cyclone in 1911. And in the United Kingdom, a new film, The Lost King, looks at the 2012 discovery of the remains of King Richard III beneath a car park in Leicester, and BBC News reports that officials at the University of Leicester, which conducted the dig, are displeased about how its academics are portrayed.
The Digest
The Judd Foundation has sued Kukje Gallery (of Seoul and Busan, South Korea) and Tina Kim Gallery (of New York), alleging that a Donald Judd sculpture was damaged with fingerprints while consigned to them. So far, no one has commented. [The Daily Beast via Artnet News]
New York dealer Stefania Bortolami is bringing her roving Artist/City venture to Las Vegas, staging a show with artists Jonas Wood, Koichi Sato, and Susumu Kamijo in a onetime Greyhound bus station. [Vanity Fair]
Amateur detectives are working to locate artifacts looted from Asian nations, communicating on Facebook and searching through online databases. It “still feel that we are scratching the surface,” one said. “That’s what keeps us going. We are like the Avengers.” [The Christian Science Monitor]
Artist Abbas Zahedi—the latest Frieze Artist Award winner, who has turned “chip shops and bus stops into art,” and who is about to open a show at London’s Belmacz gallery—got the profile treatment in the Financial Times in advance of Frieze London’s opening next week. [FT]
Elephant, the British art magazine that has been running since 2009, is set to shutter at the end of the month. Its publisher, the art-supply distributor Colart, has withdrawn funding. A company rep said that the firm is “in conversation with several parties about taking over the magazine.” [The Art Newspaper]
The inaugural edition of the four-times-delayed Art SG fair is on tap for Singapore in January with more than 150 exhibitors. Citing the high turnout of the wealthy at the F1 race in the city-state last weekend, August Hatecke of UBS (the fair’s lead sponsor), said, “Singapore’s status in the world has changed.” [The Straits Times]
The Kicker
FAST FASHION. Speaking of F1 racing, driver Lewis Hamilton and artist Takashi Murakami have teamed up on a limited-edition clothing collection that includes shirts and a hoodie, Hypebeast reports. Prices top out at $200. Hamilton recently did a studio visit with Murakami, and the artist wrote on Instagram that Hamilton’s “presence generated this sense of enfolding distance that he must keep within himself; I had never felt anything like it before, and it made a warm feeling well up in me. I couldn’t help asking him whether he’s ever encountered the divine.” Talk about a good studio visit![@takashipom/Instagram]