Rachel Corbett

1 month ago | vulture.com | Rachel Corbett

Serge Attukwei Clottey’s Fashion Icons sold for £340,200 in October 2021. In October 2021, the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey watched anxiously as a painting he had made just a few months earlier went up for sale at the Phillips auction house in London. The portrait — of a stylish Black couple whose clothes were rendered in colorful strips of duct tape — was his first ever to go to auction. It was “really, really scary,” Clottey, now 39, tells me.

1 month ago | vulture.com | Rachel Corbett

In late 2021, Sotheby’s held one of the highest-grossing auctions in its history. The star lot of the $922 million sale, featured on the catalogue’s cover, was Alberto Giacometti’s 1949 sculpture Le Nez, a skeletal bronze head with a long, thin nose, hanging from a cord in a large cubic cage. Two Sotheby’s representatives competed for the work on behalf of two anonymous clients, and the winning bid was placed by a Hong Kong specialist. The total price, including fees, was $78.4 million.

1 month ago | vulture.com | Rachel Corbett

Do you know anything?” the performance artist Marina Abramović asked over the phone in late March. For months, it had been the question on everyone’s mind: Who was going to lead MoMA now? Abramović had recently had lunch with the museum’s current director, Glenn Lowry, who would be stepping down this fall. She asked him explicitly. “I could get nothing out of him,” she said.

Feb 25, 2025 | culturedmag.com | Rachel Corbett

Lucien Smith wears a jacket, shirt, pants, and tie by Balenciaga and hat from Alias Costume Rental. Fifty years ago, New York was in decay and on the brink of bankruptcy. The stock market crashed, Robert Moses was carving up the Bronx, property values were plummeting, and large swaths of the city were vacant. Artists flocked to cheap live-work lofts in Soho and a prescient group of art dealers opened galleries in the neighborhood. But there were no restaurants and few places to hang out.

Jan 30, 2025 | vulture.com | Rachel Corbett

RETNA. Today, a Dallas-based auction house sold off what it called the “intimate” contents of the Los Angeles studio of RETNA, a graffiti artist whose hieroglyphic-like calligraphy has, over the course of three decades, appeared on streets, museum walls, the façade of a Louis Vuitton store, and the cover of a Justin Bieber album.