Happy Friday!
Here are the 5 top stories that made us stop scrolling our Instagram feeds for 3 minutes.
Enjoy!
Designer and art enthusiast, Jonathan Anderson chose a painted wood rendering bust of Justin Bieber by American sculptor Paul Pfeiffer to feature in his new Loewe store in Beverly Hills. The rather interesting choice of artwork sits atop a shelf in this shoe section. Anderson first came across the sculpture of the American pop star at London’s Thomas Dane gallery, according to WWD.
Tom Ford the Fashion designer, creative director, author, and filmmaker can now add another accolade to his CV, billionaire. Ford’s sale of his brand to Estee Lauder at a $2.8 billion valuation gives him a net worth of more than $2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He will stay on as the brand’s “creative visionary” through the end of 2023.
In an act that has bewilderingly become familiar across the art world, climate activists from the Letzte Generation Österreich group threw an oil over Gustav Klimt’s 1910-15 painting, ‘Death and Life,’ at the @leopold_museum in Vienna this week. “When social unrest breaks out due to increasing crop failures, no art is safe,” the group tweeted. Last week two people were arrested in Oslo after trying to glue themselves to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” at the National Museum of Norway. What next?
Banksy has debuted a series of murals in the city of Borodianka, Ukraine. Banksy confirmed the news to The Art Newspaper after artworks suspected to be his appeared in the liberated Ukrainian city, which is located about 35 miles northwest of Kyiv. Other works have been spotted in the capital and other cities in the region. The first piece to be identified went viral over the weekend. It shows a female gymnast balancing on a pile of rubble on the side of a bombed building. Another mural depicted a man resembling Russian President Vladimir Putin being flipped during a judo match with a little boy.
Superfans of Joan Didion, the late famed writer, drove the prices of her estate sale organised by Hudson-based Stair Galleries this week to wild values, with most of the items going well over their estimated price ranges. The estate included furniture and art to desk accessories, sunglasses, and a large quantity of kitchenware. Some items went up to ten times their estimated value. Didion’s (undeniably iconic) Céline sunglasses went for $27,000 and two sets of blank notebooks went for $11,000 each. Nearly $2 million in proceeds from the sale are going toward medical research and a scholarship for women in literature.
