What We're Reading: 10/4/22
Inside the Secret, Very Expensive World of Hollywood’s Star Art Collectors
In the 30-odd years Barbara Guggenheim has worked as Tom Cruise’s art adviser, a theme has been established: “He collects works that are very intense, that have a lot of movement and that are very positive, and I think that that’s who he is,” Guggenheim told The Daily Beast.
No kidding—over a career spanning decades, Cruise has solidified his reputation as one of the hardest-working, hardest-driving actors in the blockbuster business; a relentless force of nature who propelled Top Gun: Maverick, the juggernaut sequel to the ’80s classic, to box office Valhalla this year and who also once jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch.
Very little is known about Cruise’s art trove. Guggenheim, invoking her role as a fiduciary, declined to answer specific questions about the size and contents of the actor’s collection. Undeniably, though, for celebrities of Cruise’s caliber, even the reported existence of a robust yet mysterious art collection can communicate creative dexterity in a way few other material things can.
Via The Daily Beast
The Case of the Disputed Lucian Freud
“After I bought the painting, I went home and put it in the rest of my collection and I forgot about it,” Omar told me in French when we met, earlier this year, at an expensive hotel on the lakefront in Geneva. He wore a Harrods baseball cap and was carrying a plastic bag. For years, Freud’s searching, candid portraits went against the overwhelming appetite of the contemporary art market, which was for abstraction. Although he was a famous painter in England, in part because of his surname (Sigmund, his grandfather, went to London as a refugee in 1938), Freud was a respected rather than a fashionable artist in Europe. In 2002, Omar watched a program about his career on Swiss television, which prompted him to learn more about the painting. So he put it on eBay.
Via The New Yorker
Art is transformative. Just ask the Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams. His work has the power to captivate us and shift our perspective, offering the opportunity to dream anew.
A participant of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in 2019 and the recipient of the prestigious Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in 2018, Adams is best known as a painter, printmaker, and multimedia artist. Perhaps less well documented is his robust community-based practice beyond the studio.
Via Artnet
Image: Portrait of Derrick Adams by Christopher Garcia Valle.
A presidential committee on culture that was disbanded five years ago after all its members resigned in protest of then-President Donald Trump’s response to a deadly rally of far-right extremists in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been re-established by President Joseph Biden. In an executive order on 30 September that, among other things, proclaimed October to be National Arts and Humanities Month in the United States, Biden re-established the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
Via The Art Newspaper