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The Headlines
ROCK STAR. Fashion giant Louis Vuitton has tapped the musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams to be the creative director of its menswear division, WWD reports. Williams fills a position left vacant when Virgil Abloh died in late 2020, at the age of 41. Though the Star Trak producer is of course best known for his music, his previous work in fashion has included starting the Billionaire Boys Club streetwear label in collaboration with Nigo, the Japanese designer behind the pioneering brand A Bathing Ape, the New York Times notes. The N.E.R.D. member has also made crossovers into the visual arts, as some market veterans may recall. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2009, he unveiled a sculptural collaboration with Takashi Murakami that has bejeweled consumer products he selected (Pepsi, Heinz ketchup, etc.) sitting inside a characteristically exuberant cartoon head by the Japanese artist. Sharing the news of the “Happy” singer’s Vuitton appointment on Instagram, Murakami wrote, “Bravo!”
Related Articles
A SORRY STATE. Marco Goecke, the German choreographer who spread dog feces on the face of a critic for penning a negative review of his work, apologized for the incident, the Associated Press reports. “In retrospect, I am clearly aware that this was a disgraceful act in the heat of the moment and an overreaction,” he said, apologizing “first and foremost” to the critic, Wiebke Huester . He then went on to attribute his behavior to the “nervous strain” caused by two premieres, and called for the media to “rethink a certain form of destructive and hurtful reporting that damages the whole cultural sector.” (Noted.) The Guardian asked its critics to share the worst cases of artists taking issue with their work, and veteran art critic Adrian Searle mentioned “a turd in a jiffy bag, delivered to my door” and “anonymous phone calls telling me I am crap at my job.”
The Digest
The venture-capital arm of Christie’s, Christie’s Ventures, has taken a stake in the Australian art financier Art Money. Founded in 2015, the firm provides buyers the ability to pay for art purchases in installments, sans interest. [Financial Review]
Board members at the National Gallery of Ireland had reservations about paying €1.5 million (about $1.61 million) for a 1915 street scene by Jack Butler Yeats it acquired, according to meeting minutes. Among the concerns: The museum already owned some three dozen pieces by Yeats, and the sum was more than it had spent on a painting in more than 10 years. [The Irish Times]
The Rhode Island School of Design said that it will no longer participate in the closely watched annual rankings of colleges and universities by U.S. News & World Reports. The Providence school’s president, Crystal Williams, said that the list’s criteria do not make the school’s values. “We eschew participation in systems that strongly rely on exclusion and inequity,” she said in a memo. [The Boston Globe]
Mike Nelson, the British maestro of almost impossibly elaborate immersive installations, will soon open a survey at the Hayward Gallery in London. “I’m thinking of myself as in an incredibly large attic,” he said, “pulling down boxes, and not quite knowing quite how it all goes back together again.” [The Guardian]
A circa 1731 violin made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù that was exhibited on two occasions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will be offered by the Tarisio online auction house with an estimate north of $10 million. [Penta]
Many painters today are “exploring ideas of love, intimacy, and romance,” writer Louis Wise argues, pointing to artists GaHee Park, Karyn Lyons, Xinyi Cheng, and many more. Said Park, “Love and sexuality are sources of very strong and primitive emotions—they have been inspiring artworks for centuries.” [Financial Times]
The Kicker
HAMMER TIME. Collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who owns the Venus Over Manhattan gallery, will offer about 40 works from his collection next month in a dedicated auction at Christie’s, the New York Times reports. Some of the proceeds will go toward a donation—in the “seven figures,” he said—for the Metropolitan Museum of Art ’s wing for sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, which is currently being renovated. Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, and Miyoko Ito are among the artists in the sale, which has an easy-to-remember title: “Adam.” “People are going to make fun of me and people are going to talk about it—that’s fine,” Lindemann told journalist Robin Pogrenin of the somewhat unusual endeavor. “It’s the first time in a decade that I’ve done a big public spectacle. So I’m pretty excited about it.” [NYT]