Dick Wolf Makes Major Gift to the Met, Kanye West Lists Tadao Ando-Designed Malibu Home: Morning Links for December 21, 2023

The Headlines

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH JUSTICE. OR ART. An absolute television legend, Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, is promising a trove of works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zachary Small reports in the New York Times. The bounty includes more than 200 pieces, from giants like Vincent van Gogh (an early oil landscape), Orazio Gentileschi, and his daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi . Wolf’s gift also includes a financial component in an undisclosed amount that a museum rep said is in the tens of millions of dollars, Small writes. That donation will endow two galleries in the museum’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts that will bear Wolf’s name.

SUMMARY JUDGEMENTS. A French couple who parted with a rare 19th-century Fang mask for €150 (about $164 million), only to learn that it later sold for €4 million ($4.38 million), lost their legal bid to nix the sale and obtain those proceeds, CNNreports. They argued that the dealer who purchased the piece had acted improperly; a French court said they showed “carelessness.” Speaking of price differences: An N.C. Wyeth illustration purchased for $4 at a bargain store and sold at auction for $191,000, only to have the winning bidder refuse to follow through on the transaction has found a buyer, the New York Times reports. The collector is going unnamed, as is the price, beyond “six figures.”

The Digest

The Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea, has named as its next director Namhee Park, a veteran of the nation’s art scene who curated the 2022 Jeju Biennale on that Korean island. A visiting professor at Hongik University, Park succeeds Seong Eun Kim, who took the helm in 2019. [Artforum]

Musician and fashion designer Kanye West, who has been widely condemned for making antisemitic statements, has listed a Malibu home designed by Tadao Ando for about $57 million. The residence is in the midst of a gut renovation, and “several million dollars” will be required to finish it, a listing agent said. [The Wall Street Journal]

Artist Stephen Power’s art shop in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, Espo’s Art World, will close at the end of the year after 11 years in business. Speaking about his team, Power said, “We want to discover something else because we’re artists, so it’s time for a change.” [NY1]

Earlier this year, it was reported that the longtime Italian political leader and media baron Silvio Berlusconihad a collection of some 25,000 paintings, but that each was worth only an average of €800 ($880). Louisa McKenzie looked at the long history of powerful people acquiring art, good and bad. [The Times of London]

The Prado has spent three months restoring Caravaggio’s astonishing David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1610), and just put it back on view. “Now, viewers can more easily distinguish several planes in the painting,” Ana Marcos writes. [El País]

The Kicker

COMING TO RELIGION. The U.S. government has designated the beloved Wayfarers Chapel—an ingenious, elegant construction of glass and wood amid redwood trees in Rancho Palos Verdes, California—as a National Historic Landmark, the Los Angeles Times reports. The place was designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright) in 1951 for the Swedenborgian Church, and it has been known to have a powerful effect on its visitors. The Rev. David Brown told the paper, “Militant atheists who don’t believe in anything feel something in our chapel.” [LAT]