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The Headlines
TICKET TO RIDE. Twenty-one museums in San Francisco will be free the weekend of December 3 and 4, thanks to an anonymous gift, Datebook reports. Among the institutions participating in the San Francisco Free Museum Weekend, as those days are being billed, are the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (adult ticket: $25) and the Asian Art Museum ($20). Thomas P. Campbell, the CEO and director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco ($15), which is also taking part, said in a statement that “museums provide a critical place of discourse, reflection and inspiration. Increasing access to art spaces and removing barriers to experiencing art is crucial.”
ODD LOTS. Some $1 billion of art once owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen will hit the auction block this week at Christie’s—watch this space—but the late collector’s estate has also been selling off his many other holdings, from real estate to boats. On Thursday, the brokerage Fraser Yachts said that it sold his 300-foot superyacht, Tatoosh, according to Penta . The vessel sports two helipads and accommodations for 19 guests, and had been listed for about $90 million (the same as the reported estimate on his 1899 Paul Gauguin painting). No sale price was released. Meanwhile, a 1992 watch by George Daniels sold for about $4.1 million at Phillips in Geneva, Switzerland, after a three-minute bidding war, Bloomberg reports. That result was an auction record for a British wristwatch, and handily trounced its $1 million estimate.
The Digest
As climate protesters from Just Stop Oil and other groups target prized artworks, museums are heightening security measures and hiring consulting firms to teach guards how to identify demonstrators before they start throwing soup or wielding glue. [The Wall Street Journal and Artnet News]
Artist Andres Serrano said that a London theater canceled a screening of his first film, Insurrection, about the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, because it was deemed too “pro-Trump,” a notion he rejects. The theater has not commented. [Artnet News and The Art Newspaper]
Tracey Emin spoke about a quilt she made, titled The Last of the Gold, that provides advice for someone considering an abortion. “I lived it,” the artist said. “And I know what it was like to make that choice.” [The Guardian]
Honor Titus, a creator of tender, leftfield figurative paintings, has a show coming up at Timothy Taylor in London, and got the profile treatment from Kin Woo. “I see my paintings as an oasis and as a place transcendent of ideas of race and stigma,” Titus said. “I want to depict an all-inclusive romance for life.” [Vogue]
Photofairs New York, a new photography fair connected to Photofairs Shanghai, will take place in September in New York alongside the Armory Show at the Javits Center. Organizers expect to sign on 80 to 100 exhibitors. [The Art Newspaper]
The Los Angeles home of home artist Claire Tabouret and musician and carpenter Nathan Thelen features a massive ceiling painting by the former and furniture by the latter. The two have been collaborating for the first time, and will show their creations with Night Gallery at San Francisco’s FOG Design+Art fair in January. [Architectural Digest]
The Kicker
ART PARTY. A collection of writing by the critic Milton Gendel—an American in Rome who died in 2018, just short of his 100th birthday—has been published, and the Atlantic has some choice excerpts. In one of his diaries (which run to an astonishing 10 million words), he recalls a 1967 dinner for sculptor Alexander Calder and his wife, Louisa , in the Italian capital. The artist was “a great, fumbling, white-haired thing in red shirt and red tie,” Gendel wrote, going on to describe a man who “is swift and piercing in his glances and seems to hear everything from all sides of the table.” There is also this, from that evening: “Horseplay with a datepick in the shape of a woman. Calder making a kind of mobile out of a fork and the pick and a date.” Sounds like a pretty nice time.
[The Atlantic]