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“Let’s keep in touch,” reads an inscription on a pink ceramic vessel by Cape Town–based sculptor Githan Coopoo that has been placed near the entrance to the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Coopoo’s optimistic sentiment was palpable in the Cape Town International Convention Centre during the VIP preview on Thursday for the fair’s 11th edition, which includes more than 100 exhibitors from 24 countries. The energy had actually started a few days earlier as the Mother City’s annual art week kicked off with exhibitions, performances, and talks across the breezy ocean town.

The vernissage saw a crowd of around 5,000 attendees which included largely local collectors taking an early look at 400 works mainly by African artists and artists its diasporas. Key local market heavyweights like Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, SMAC Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, and Southern Guild, which will open a Los Angeles outpost later this month, showed alongside Kenya’s Circle Art, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury from Côte d’Ivoire, A.Gorgi from Tunisia, Botswana-based Ora Loapi, and Borna Soglo Gallery from Benin. Several  Italian exhibitors, such as Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Galleria Anna Marra and Shazar Gallery,  were also on hand, likely due to the fair’s Milanese owner company Fiera Milano.

Laura Vincenti, the fair’s director, described the last decade as “a learning curve” to ARTnews. In that time, she has focused on bringing “galleries with content that communicates with the local scene,” she said. “I have learned that not all galleries are prepared to show in Cape Town.”

In addition to the main gallery section, Investec also includes eight curated sections like Generations, which is new to the fair this year. (Exhibitors can participate in multiple sections.) Organized by Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu, Generations pairs young artists with established names to show parallels between artists’ work across decades. The section’s cash prize of $80,000 South African Rand (around $4,200) was awarded to Johannesburg-based painter Boemo Diale, who exhibited with South African gallery Kalashnikovv Gallery.

“The goal is to create fresh perspective on historical figures through the lens of contemporary artists who are in dialogue with the past,” Becker told ARTnews.

Yuga Labs, the web3 and lifestyle company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, recently announced it had acquired rival non-fungible token creator Proof.

Proof is best known for Moonbirds, a collection of NFT profile pics known as PFPs. The Proof acquisition includes its team, intellectual property, and artistic portfolio, including the Oddities NFTs, Mythics PFPs, and Grails exhibition series.

In addition to Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs is known creating the metaverse game Otherside, blockchain art series TwelveFold, and ownership of NFT brands Meebits, CryptoPunks, and 10KTF. Yuga Labs acquired Meebits and CryptoPunks from Larva Labs in March 2022.

“As a company committed to championing art, culture, and community on the blockchain, we’re excited to have PROOF join the Yuga ecosystem,” Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre said in a press statement. “Moonbirds is a collection with great potential and many unifying brand elements with Otherside. We look forward to PROOF Collective becoming an important part of our ongoing art and community engagement efforts.”

Last year, Proof collaborated with Pace Verso, Pace Gallery’s arm for web3 projects, on the NFT project “Archive of Feelings” by multidisciplinary artist Mika Tajima. The project was based on an existing series of large-scale installations by the artist.

Collectors, fashion designers, and more gathered at these events, which were essential to forming New York's social scene.

In a little over a week, Frieze Los Angeles returns for its fifth edition, and its second at the Santa Monica Airport. With its move further west from its previous outings in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Frieze LA is now much closer to LA’s westside neighborhoods, like Brentwood and Venice, and not that far from the beach. Use this handy guide as a cheat sheet not just for highlights of the art on view, but for where to go before and after a day at the fair, which opens to VIPs on February 29 and runs through March 3. All of the restaurant’s options are less than a ten minute drive from the fair. Happy Friezing!

Pre-Fair Coffee and Nosh

In an alleyway near 26th and Broadway, GoodBoyBob Coffee Shop offers all kinds of specialty coffees, including one with with house-made vanilla syrup, as well as waffles, toast, and breakfast sandwiches like the “Client X Morning Sando” (brioche, egg, avocado, ham, cheese, red pepper aioli). There are fancy pour-overs like the “Sideshow Bob,” a two-course coffee extravaganza (“the same coffee, two different ways”) consisting of an espresso as well as a pour-over of the restaurant’s single origin Guatemala Rosendo Domingo.

Alternatively, you can head over to Layla Bagel, on Ocean Park Boulevard at 16th Street, where you’ll find what Eater recently referred to as “some of LA’s most coveted bagels.” Options include the usual lox with the works (“The Laika”), along with some more exotic combinations like “The Scarlett,” (heirloom tomato, lemon zest, and chili flakes), and a vegan option like “The Marli” (avocado, pickled onion, chili flakes, and sprouts).

A Morning Full of Art

Last year saw the art world reach a new peak in art fair saturation with the introduction of two major fairs in Asia, ART SG in Singapore and Tokyo Gendai in Yokohama. 2024 promises to be just as packed, with Frieze increasingly integrating its new acquisitions—the Armory Show and EXPO Chicago—into its overall strategy.

Below, a look at the most important fairs taking place this year.

As digital art has consistently made headlines over the last few years—from the onslaught of NFTs to revisiting pioneers in the field to showcasing tech artists—it has taken the art world by storm. Given this recent upswing in interest, there’s still much to discover, particularly the artists who have been quietly pushing the bounds and formats of the medium for decades. Auriea Harvey is one such exemplar. If you’ve never heard of her, you’re probably not alone.

Harvey began her foray into digital art as the internet was developing in the early ’90s, right before it boomed. Though she studied sculpture at the Parsons School of Design in New York, she was drawn to all things digital, a self-described “obsession” that drove Harvey to experiment with a number of digital formats that span photography, sculpture, drawing, and video. Yet, her works are hardly static.

In the digital world, Harvey is known for artistic experimentations on the website entropy8.com as well as the independent game studio Tale of Tales, which produced such video games as The Endless Forest. With both endeavors, she was driven by the ability to craft narratives and have personal interaction in the digital realm—a through-line that continues in her practice even today. In fact, Harvey met her collaborator and partner Michaël Samyn online.

With digital art, “there’s nothing to fear here,” Harvey said from her studio in Rome, where she’s been living with Samyn since the start of the pandemic. The lockdown, she said, “had a lot to do with where I am today.”

Her breakthrough in the mainstream art world came only in 2021, with a solo show at bitforms gallery in New York, but lockdown restrictions prevented her from attending. For the exhibition, Harvey created physical sculptures, like Fauna (2018) and Minoriea (2021), busts which bare a resemblance to both the mythical creatures they each represent and the artist herself; she also created these objects as virtual versions that were available online and in augmented reality (AR) so that anyone around the world could experience her work. She additionally gave virtual tours of the show to people in-person and online. “I felt like it was something I had been training for my entire life,” she said.

Christie’s big 20th and 21st century art sales in London this year will be led by two landscapes: a dynamic and passionate Francis Bacon and a wistful Monet, both of which have not been seen at auction in quite some time.

The Bacon, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is estimated at £15 million-£20 million. It was painted as a tribute to Peter Lacy, with whom the artist had a years-long passionate, and often abusive, relationship. 

Bacon made the painting in London, just one year after Lacy died tragically in Tangiers at 46. The painting has remained in the same collection for more than 20 years. When it last sold at auction, at Sotheby’s New York for $517,000 in 1985, it became the most expensive Bacon ever sold. (Today, Bacon’s auction record is for the 1969 picture Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold at Christie’s New York for $142.4 million in 2013.)

The Bacon painting was originally sold by Marlborough Gallery in 1963 and, according to Christie’s, has been on view in 32 exhibitions across 27 cities worldwide, including the 1971–72 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts’s “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” in 2022.

Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) is among the 21 pictures that make up the artist’s “Mornings on the Seine” series. Each work in it focuses of the same section of the famous river at different times of the day. 

The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA), an arts hub in Hong Kong which operates the M+ museum and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, will run out of funding next March and may need to acquire additional loans if a new finance plan is not approved by the city’s government.

That was the warning from WKCDA CEO Betty Fung on February 14 in regard to the status of the hub’s HK$21.6 billion (approximately USD$2.75 billion) funding, endowed by the city’s legislature in 2008.

Fung told local media outlets that the WKCDA had recorded over 4 million visits in the 2022–23 year, with M+ drawing 2.7 million visitors and the Hong Kong Palace Museum attracting 1.25 million people.

She said she was confident that an increase in special exhibitions would boost visitor attendance this year, according to the Hong Kong Free Press. Revenue from ticket sales at the two museums covered nearly half of expenses, “on par or even exceeding internationally renowned museums,” she said. But it left the WKCDA to pay for the remainder of costs for exhibitions, insurance, transportation, electricity, management, and salaries.

“Currently, the district relies on borrowing loans,” Fung said, according to the Standard. “The worst-case scenario for the authority would be to continue relying on borrowed funds.”

The Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine is cutting 13 positions due to the lingering finance impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, local news outlets report. 

The layoffs will include salaried and part-time employees, as museum management is seeking to reduce the nearly 70 percent of its operating budget dedicated to wages. 

“The museum was fortunate to receive ERC credits and PPP loans to maintain staffing and programmatic growth during unprecedented times, but the multi-year positive impact of this support will soon expire,” the PMA said in a statement. “As expenses continue to remain high and unpredictable, the real and persisting negative effects of this historic moment have necessitated changes in the PMA’s operations.”

The announcement follows two years of contentious relations between the museum and its employees over wages and job security. Last month, gallery ambassadors and security workers unionized, marking the second second successful union campaign at the museum, following the 70 or so employees who joined United Auto Workers Local 2110, the Technical, Office and Professional Union in 2021. Unionized employees will be not be affected by the layoffs. 

The museum reported that attendance numbers have dropped by 35 percent since the 2020, raising concerns for the sustainability of its programming. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Thursday its co-chairs for the 2024 Met Gala. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth will join Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour as co-chairs for this year’s Costume Institute Benefit, which will have “The Garden of Time” as its theme.   

The theme is inspired by the upcoming “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” spring exhibition, which will open to the public on May 10. As previously reported by WWD, this year’s exhibition will feature 250 pieces that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their fragility. The pieces are part of the Costume Institute’s collection of 33,000-plus items.

“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will also feature artificial intelligence, video animation, light projection and diverse technologies to create a sensorial experience. 

Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and Bad Bunny have attended the Met Gala multiple times before. Zendaya famously dressed up as Cinderella for the 2019 edition of the event, posing with stylist Law Roach as her fairy godmother on the red carpet.

6 min read

The first mention of an ‘Oxford Sauce’

When it comes to describing what ‘Oxford Sauce’ is, many would likely differ in their answers, if they were aware of its existence at all. Some seasoned foodies might point to Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Oxford Sauce, mentioned in the last book he ever wrote himself, titled Ma Cuisine (1934). Escoffier is widely celebrated for his contributions as a chef, known amongst French media as the ’king of chefs and chef of kings’. He popularised and modernised the French haute cuisine style of cooking and brought it with him to London, where he lived for 32 years. He began his apprenticeship in the kitchen at the young age of 14 and by 27 he was already chef de cuisine in the Parisian restaurant Le Petit Moulin Rouge.

A few years later he began to work with the famous hotelier Cesar Ritz at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. From 1890 to 1898 the pair both worked at the Savoy hotel in London, until dismissed for ‘gross negligence and breaches of duty and mismanagement’.

However, the duo had already established the Ritz Hotel development Company, which went on to open Paris’ Ritz Hotel in 1898 and London’s new Carlton Hotel the following year.

 Ma Cuisine (1934), written post World War II, when high dining and haute cuisine were in decline, focused more on recipes developed in modest kitchens using local ingredients and became a staple for French family cooking. In this book Oxford Sauce is described as a cold table sauce, based on fruit, similar to Cumberland sauce, but eliminating citrus peel. According to him it is: ‘A British sauce of red currant jelly dissolved with port and flavoured with shallots, orange zest and mustard; usually served with game.’

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