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The Headlines
DEATH AND DISASTER—AND SUCCESS. A gigantic Andy Warhol painting of a photograph of a brutal car accident, repeated 19 times over, sold last night at Sotheby’s for $85 million, buoying two solid sales of contemporary art, Angelica Villa and Daniel Cassady write in ARTnews. Together, those sales hammered at $276.9 million, which was just slightly above their low estimate. With fees, that number rises to $314.9 million. Among the sale’s most exciting moments was the point when Salman Toor’s painting Four Friends (2019), which had been used to market his 2020 Whitney Museum show, hit the block. It sold for $1.6 million with premium, more than four times its estimate. Records were also set for Barbara Kruger, Betye Saar, Jacqueline Humphries, Carol Bove, and Elizabeth Peyton. The auction action this week will continue tonight at Christie’s, which is hosting two sales of modern and contemporary art
A BIGGER SPLASH. The artist David Hockney is the latest person to join the immersive experience trend, the Guardian reports, with a new one geared around his work planned for a four-story space near Kings Cross in London. The composer Nico Muhly has been tapped to provide the music for the immersive experience, which is titled “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away)” and which aspires to offer detailed views of his art that cannot be obtained when it is encountered in a traditional gallery. Hockney seemed to welcome the show when he said, “The world is very very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much.” The immersive experience will kick off a new enterprise called Lightroom this January.
The Digest
For its 2023 edition, Art Basel Hong Kong has lined up 171 exhibitors, 24 percent more than the 130 who participated in 2022. Still, that number is far smaller than pre-pandemic editions. [ARTnews]
Veteran New York gallery Jack Shainman is expanding to Tribeca, which is home to a growing art district. The gallery will continue to retain its Chelsea space, as well as its schoolhouse location in Upstate New York. [The New York Times]
Critic Jonathan Jones is really mad about the recent spate of climate protests in art museums. “It is arrogant to go into a museum and assume everyone around you is some kind of complacent aesthete who doesn’t care about the environment,” he writes. [The Guardian]
Two artworks have been stolen from a show of work by Yale M.F.A. students at the Connecticut university. According to one student, the event has caused an “uproar” in the vaunted program. [Yale Daily News]
Although two Shanghai art fairs closed well before the end of their run due to Covid last week, some galleries still reported big sales. Hauser & Wirth said it sold a Gunther Förg painting for north of $360,000, and Lisson Gallery said one buyer took an Olga de Amaral piece for $480,000. [Artsy]
Animé Los Angeles, a popular convention dedicated to the art form, has said it will ban AI-generated art at its 2023 edition. [Kotaku]
The Kicker
KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS. It’s a big art week for art-related Kardashian updates. First, there was a Page Sixstory about how Kim Kardashian matched a “Barbiecore” Balenciaga dress to a pink James Turrell painting. Now, word has arrived, via her own Instagram, that Kendall Jenner attended the glitzy opening of the Brooklyn Museum’s Thierry Mugler show. Did she happen to see the Jimmy DeSana retrospective or a protest led by the museum’s union? We’ll never know! All she wrote was: “Wowow what a beautiful night celebrating the opening of the Thierry Mugler Archive Exhibition at the Brooklyn museum. such an honor to wear a piece of fashion history. thank you to the mugler team ?.” [@kyliejenner/Instagram]