From the Highlights of Frieze Week to Jeff Koons’s Snapchat Collab: The Best and Worst of the Art World This Week

BEST

• David Geffen is donating $150 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, making it the largest cash gift in the history of the museum. That’s a lot of money!
• From pronouncing “Egon Schiele” to wielding an auction paddle, actress Julia Stiles told artnet News all about the challenges of playing a curator on her new Sundance series, Riviera.
• Frieze Week did it’s thing in London, with a spotlight on subversive feminist artworks, plus a push to reintroduce Julian Schnabel’s artwork to the market at Frieze Masters. Here’s the best of Frieze, Frieze Masters, Sunday, and 1:54.
• Sotheby’s auction saw mixed results in London: records were broken for artists Josef Albers and Thierry de Cordier, but big-ticket lots went unsold as well. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, a rare Ru Bowl fetched $37.7 million following a heated bidding war.
• An artist claims to have found a secret in Marcel Duchamp’s final work, so he built a replica of it to make his case. We visited the otherworldly installation, housed in the New York studio where Duchamp worked.

Marina Abramovic. Photo: courtesy Kreemart, ©2017.

WORST

• Thanks to a new augmented-reality collaboration with Snapchat, Jeff Koons’s famous sculptures can be conjured around the world with just a click of the app. It’s the perfect marriage of cutting-edge and obvious.
• After the opening of Frieze London, collector Stefan Simchowitz posted a rant on Facebook directed at “gallery idiots” who he says are lying about why they supposedly can’t sell artwork to him.
• President Trump finally released his proposed tax reform plan, but experts in the field delivered a range of opinions on whether high-net-worth individuals (like collectors) will really be pleased with the results.
• documenta’s CEO finally broke her silence and addressed the show’s financial troubles, citing air conditioning and hotel tabs as two sources contributing to the deficit.
• What does Marina Abromović taste like? The performance artist has partnered with Ladurée to create a macaron based on her life.
• The publishing magnate SI Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast, passed away this week, and we looked back at his storied art collection.