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The Headlines
BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS. The Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York is embarking on a $45 million redesign and upgrade of its 500-acre campus that will include “visitor pavilions, a relocated parking lot, infrastructural improvements, and an art conservation and fabrication facility,” the Architect’s Newspaper reports. A team has been tapped for the effort: Heneghan Peng Architects, which is based in Dublin; WXY Architecture + Urban Design, of New York; Reed Hilderbrand , of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut; and Gustafson Porter + Bowman, of London. Promoting biodiversity will also be part of the initiative, according to the Art Newspaper, with more than 600 trees due to be planted. The plan is for the work to be finished in 2024.
THE TOP JOBS. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director since 2018, Max Hollein, will soon be taking on the additional title of chief executive, the New York Times reports. Daniel Weiss, who currently holds that position, recently announced that he will step down next June, at which point Hollein will occupy both roles. (His predecessor, Thomas P. Campbell , also held both jobs when he resigned in 2017.) Hollein told the Times that he views the appointment “as a step of continuation.” The Met is currently fundraising for new modern and contemporary art galleries, a project estimated to cost $500 million. Late last year, Hollein and Weiss announced that Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang had pledged $125 million for it.
The Digest
For alleged tax offenses, Italian officials have seized assets belonging to Lanfranco Cirillo, the architect behind a palatial residence on the Black Sea that critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin have linked to him. (Cirillo has denied wrongdoing, and Putin has denied owning the building.) The assets, said to total more than $143 million, include art and real estate. [Reuters]
Working under the nom de plume Background Bob, a British teen named Noah raised £160,000 (about $194,400) for charity amid the pandemic by auctioning small pieces that he made for street artists to complete. Now artist El Kouch has paid tribute to Noah by painting a sprawling mural with his portrait. [BBC News]
Siobhan Reid profiled HOA, São Paulo’s first Black-owned art gallery, which was started by artist Igi Lola Ayedun during the pandemic, in 2020, when she had just $2,000 in her bank account. [Cultured]
Beyoncé mentioning her Telfar bag—sometimes known as the “Bushwick Birkin”—on her new album, Renaissance, has reportedly led to a spike in demand for the fashion brand, which was founded in 2014 by Telfar Clemens. (In 2020, he appeared on the ARTnews “Deciders” list, in an issue guest-edited by record producer and art collector Swizz Beatz.) [Page Six]
Here is a highly charming chart that composer (and painter!) Arnold Schoenberg made to explain his unique notation system for recording tennis matches. [@NormalComposters/Twitter]
The Kicker
BIG MONEY—AND BIGGER MONEY. While the $195 million sale of an Andy Warhol can make huge art-market headlines, there is at least one field where such a figure is fairly standard, the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pointed out in a recent story : yachting. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” according to one yacht broker. These floating mansions now regularly go for more than even the most elite real estate. “People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house,” a Silicon Valley CEO told Osnos. “Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” [The New Yorker]
