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The Headlines
STARMAN. The Wende Museum in Los Angeles is currently showing rarely seen photographs that Geoff MacCormack took while traveling across the Soviet Union in 1973 with David Bowie, riding the Trans-Siberian Express and spending a couple days in Moscow. The Los Angeles Times has published a few of those images—they are delightful—along with commentary by MacCormack, who said that, despite being told not to photograph certain places, “We took photographs and film of lots of stuff. Probably because we were stupid and didn’t know the real consequences of our actions.” Speaking of the late superstar, the Guardian has an interview with the painter Peter Howson, who said that, when his art about the Bosnian War was generating controversy in the U.K. in the 1990s, “I ended up having to go on to the radio and explain it. But then that thing happened with David Bowie buying the main painting.”
HUMAN RESOURCES. Pace Gallery has hired Laura Attanasio away from Berlin’s König Galerie, where she is a partner, to lead a new office in the city, Alex Greenberger reports in ARTnews. Attanasio joined König in 2014, and she has worked with artists like Alicja Kwade and Katharina Grosse. ● Former Artforum editor-in-chief and Kitchen director Tim Griffin was named executive director of the Los Angeles opera producer the Industry, which was started in 2010, Artforum reports. The group’s co-artistic directors are Malik Gaines, Ash Fure, and founder Yuval Sharon. ● The Phoenix Art Museum and the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography tapped Emilia Mickevicius to be assistant curator of photography, a position shared by the institutions. She’s been an SFMOMA curatorial assistant since 2019, per ArtDaily.
The Digest
London’s Simon Lee Gallery and artist Sonia Boyce, who won a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, are no longer working together. Neither gave a reason. The gallery has reportedly been involved in a tax dispute that Lee told The Art Newspaper “has now been resolved.” [TAN]
While the estate of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has been offloading his art and real estate in accordance with his desire to give most of his fortune to charity, his sports teams—the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers—have remained off the market, frustrating would-be suitors. [The Wall Street Journal]
The Bezos Learning Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., will be designed by Perkins&Will, whose projects have included the Shanghai Natural History Museum and the University of Minnesota Bell Museum in St. Paul. Much of the funding is coming from Jeff Bezos’s $200 million gift to the Smithsonian. [Press Release/Smithsonian Institution]
The bar from the television series Cheers (1982–93) went for $675,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on Sunday. It was offered as part of a sale of classic TV material collected by James Comisar that totaled more than $5 million. [The Associated Press]
The venerable Manhattan appetizing shop Zabar’s has said that it is caring for the last remaining Banksy on public view in New York, which is near its Upper West Side storefront. One ardent Banksy fan claims it has not been doing so, and he has been cleaning it himself, sparking a true “only in New York” dispute. [The New Yorker]
The Serpentine Gallery in London has unveiled its annual Serpentine Pavilion, which was designed by the Lebanese-born architect Lina Ghotmeh, who is based in Paris. [Dezeen]
The Kicker
ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE. In 1967, artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, who were then married, got the commission of a lifetime: The cover for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But as Haworth tells it in an interview with the Financial Times, she did not have any special passion for the project. “They were a white boy band,” she said. “I wasn’t that interested in that music.” She added, “It’s just a record cover and I don’t think that’s very important.” Many Beatles fans would, of course, disagree. In any case, her latest commission, a mural with her daughter Liberty Blake, will go on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London later this month. [FT]
