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The Headlines




ARTIST ILYA KABAKOV,  whose imaginative and incisive installations helped rocket him from the Soviet Union’s underground art scene to international acclaim,  died on Saturday  at the age of 89. His “visions were unsparing, sad, and explicitly critical of the state, and were, in that way, quite unlike the government-approved art being made in the Soviet Union,”  Alex Greenberger   writes in  ARTnews . Collaborating with his niece and later wife,  Emilia , beginning in 1989, he exhibited widely, from the  Grand Palais  in Paris, which staged a major display in 2014, to the  Pushkin Museum  in Moscow, which presented a 2008 retrospective.  Writing in  Artforum  in 2018 , art historian  Claire Bishop  in termed Kabakov “ the  paradigmatic installation artist.”




OFF COLOR.  The rippling  Snøhetta -designed facade on  SFMOMA ’s east side, which is normally white, is covered with  “multistory smears of dirt and grime,”  urban design critic  John King  reports in the  San Francisco Chronicle . Its custom-built cleaning device is broken, according to a SFMOMA spox, who said, “We are aiming to identify alternate ways of cleaning the facade.” Over in Venice, part of the  Grand Canal   turned bright green  on Sunday, baffling observers, per the  Guardian . Police reportedly investigated if climate activists were responsible (the  Ultima Generazione  group said it  “wasn’t us,”   NPR  notes), and tests revealed the cause: fluorescein, which is used to test wastewater. Officials did not say from where the substance may have come.




The Digest




Egypt’s  Supreme Council of Antiquities  said that archaeologists have unearthed embalming workshops in Saqqara, about 20 miles south of Cairo. They are believed to date to the fourth century B.C.E.  [Reuters/Yahoo!]




Three years after the explosion in Beirut’s port damaged the  Sursock Museum ‘s building and art holdings, the institution reopened on Friday. More than $2 million has been raised to support its restoration efforts.  [The Associated Press]




At a charity auction at last week’s  amfAR Cannes  gala, which raises money for AIDS research,  Damien Hirst ’s 2016 “Spin Painting” portrait of actor  Leonardo DiCaprio  sold for $1.3 million. The piece was donated by collector  Christian Levett , according to  Simon de Pury , who gaveled the sale.  [Variety  and  @simonedepury/Instagram]




A late-18th-century painting of a dog—perhaps  Marie Antoinette ’s  Pompon !—by the little-known French artist  Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre  sold at  Sotheby’s  on Friday for $279,400, quite a bit above its $5,000 high estimate.  [Hyperallergic]




ARTISTS SPACE.  Sculptor  Thomas J. Price , now showing at  Hauser & Wirth  in L.A., is in the  L.A. Times ; the category-eluding  Darren Bader , who is selling his practice, is in the  New York Times ; and painter  Hurvin Anderson , exhibiting at the  Hepworth Wakefield , is in the  Financial Times , with a guide to Cambridge, England, where he lives.




ON THE MOVE.  Artist  Anicka Yi  has  added Esther Schipper  as one of her dealers, per  Ocula ;  Mirela Back  has been  tapped  to run the  Salzburger Kunstverein , per  Artforum ; and  Dennis Scholl  is  retiring  as president and CEO of  Oolite Arts , per  ArtDaily .




The Kicker




ELITE INSIGHTS.  In this week’s  New Yorker ,  Evan Osnos  has  a rollicking article  about the market for superstar musicians playing private concerts that features a guest appearance from  Anthony Scaramucci . The financier and ill-fated  White House  comms director offered some thoughts about how people spend money. “You’ve got to think about it as a pyramid,” he told Osnos. “The widest part is eating at  McDonald’s . The narrowest part is ‘I paid two hundred million for the  Basquiat .’ Because that’s one of a kind. I’m taking a piece of the immortality that artist created, and I’m owning it.  Freud  said we’re ultimately hysterical because of our own demise.”  [The New Yorker]