This week’s editorial musings from magpie’s nest
The Art Fair beat Takeaways from last month’s London-Paris art fairs: Frieze London / Frieze Masters and Art Basel Paris are different enough, they both have really good satellites like 1:54 at Somerset House and NADA in Paris, the short turnaround is exhausting (for dealers, shoppers, and journalists), and sales seemed pretty decent.
We’re currently ploughing through The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024 to find out what HNWIs are doing with their money, and that might have implications for the art fair business …
More parochially, Abu Dhabi Art is coming up; it’s the biggest edition yet (102 galleries) and has some interesting extras (like a section for non-art collectables).
Away with wrinkles Hooray! Today is National Retinol Day, established to celebrate the 25th anniversary of RoC Skincare’s breakthrough in stabilising retinol for skincare use. They have lots of advice about how you might mark National Retinol Day: try a (retinol-based) skincare product, host a Skincare Night featuring retinol-based treatments, take some selfies to document your skin’s progress, and/or treat yourself to a luxury retinol product. Enjoy!
ADQ gets into Sotheby’s Sotheby’s has closed the previously-announced deal for the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ to acquire a minority stake in the auction house for $1 billion. Sotheby’s said that $800 million of the cash has been earmarked for reducing long-term debt, the rest is for expansion plans – including “an even stronger presence in the Middle East, as Abu Dhabi continues to strengthen its arts and culture offerings domestically”.
Dance on Cinema Akil’s outpost in 25H Hotel is reopening for a new season with some of the screenings from the Move On Screen programme of dance-related film – two Pina Bausch documentaries, Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats, the Jacques Demy classic Les demoiselles de Rochefort, the sunny feminist comedy romance Fragile, and Stefan Westerwelle’s cool Into The Beat. All screenings are free but require prior reservation, which you can do here.
Where to next Numbeo, which does cost-of-living data, has been analysing search logs to see which countries users are most interested in. The top search overall is USA (5.3%) then UK (4.4%); the UAE comes in seventh at 2.6%. The UAE is however the top destination for people in Pakistan, Oman and Egypt, where it rates around 10% of searches. It’s also popular in Kuwait, Jordan, and Algeria. Here’s the link.
Good luck with that A Russian court has ordered Google to pay a fine of $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for banning 17 propaganda channels from YouTube. That’s more than the GDP of the whole world.
Book ahead Martin Garrix is at Atlantis The Palm with what looks like a characteristically OTT show: but he really is good … Singin’ in the Rain is coming to Dubai Opera for a good long run … Mezzotono are bringing amazing ways with the voicebox to Abu Dhabi …
Overheard “I made a graph of all my past relationships. It has an ex axis and a why axis.”
Something for the weekend Pacman, but you control the action by munching at your webcam or phone camera. Play it here.
Things we didn’t know no.94 You can’t fold a piece of A4 paper more than eight times.
Oh, America
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