Amy Winehouse Retrospective Lands at London’s Design Museum, and Other News

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A retrospective of Amy Winehouse’s career will land at London’s Design Museum.

The Design Museum in London is preparing to open a major career retrospective of Amy Winehouse. Instead of focusing on her short yet troubled life and fraught media presence, curator Priya Khanchandani has said the exhibition will focus on Winehouse’s musicianship, stylistic influences, and fashion sense through personal items such as an electric guitar and handwritten notebooks. “It felt like there was something that had been left unsaid about Amy’s story and about her as a serious musician—the way she’d been reflected in the media had really diminished her legacy,” Khanchandani tells the Guardian. “There’s a lot of noise surrounding her story that has engulfed it and I’ve been trying to pick away at the layers, and make sure we tell the right story.” One major component of the show sees the artist Chiara Stephenson design an installation inspired by the Metropolis studio that Winehouse recorded in; another room will showcase her red Moschino bag and yellow Preen dress. Winehouse fans can also expect new music soon to be released by the singer’s estate. 

A Miami developer is preparing to build the tallest East Coast tower south of New York. 

Set to rise 1,049 feet, the Brickell neighborhood’s One Bayfront Plaza, designed by ODP Architects, will become the tallest skyscraper in the region south of New York. The demolition of the site’s current building is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2022, and the developer FECR says the demand is so high that every unit has already been sold, crediting the migration from states such as New York and California. 

Australian architect Glenn Murcutt is awarded the 2021 Praemium Imperiale prize. 

Dedicated to awarding artistic fields that don’t fall under the Nobel Prizes, the Praemium Imperiale laureate recognizes groundbreaking figures in the realms of sculpture, painting, music, and architecture and is delivered each year by the Japan Art Association. Glenn Murcutt received this year’s award for his contributions to architecture and became the first Australian recipient. As noted by the association, Murcutt is an “architect ahead of his time” and “spent his career creating modest, environmentally responsible buildings rooted in the climate and tradition of his native Australia.”

A symbolic church destroyed on 9/11 is being remodelled by Santiago Calatrava.

Following the collapse of the original St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine in New York during the 9/11 attacks, Spanish engineer and architect Santiago Calatrava is reconstructing the heritage building by channeling the influences of orthodoxy and anthropomorphism in architecture. Although its initial rebuild kicked off in 2015, a lack of funding and subsequent pandemic delays pushed the opening date to 2022. With a new cash flow pipeline from non-profit Friends of St. Nicholas, the revamped blueprint takes inspiration from Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque. As Santiago describes, his vision stems from “the idea of a metamorphosis of the images of the Virgin as the Throne of Wisdom ‘Sedes sapientiae’ and turning it into a temple of the Church.”

The Berlin-based sculptor Nairy Baghramian receives the 2022 Nasher Prize.

Nairy Baghramian, an Iranian-German artist who excels in abstract sculptural work, marries historical art influences with modern sculpture to explore the nuances of the human anatomy. Her rich body of work is featured at blue-chip galleries, such as the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and her meteoric rise in her field watches her land the Nasher Prize, an award designed by architect Renzo Piano and inaugurated by the Nasher Sculpture Center. The delivery ceremony is slated for next Spring at the museum in Dallas. Director Jeremy Strick credits Baghramian’s projects, noting them as “evocative, enigmatic explorations of the body and that probe our proclivity toward binaries of the interior and exterior, the insider and the outsider.” 

Dread Scott auctions his maiden NFT of a “white man for sale” at Christie’s.

In a study of social theory, artist Dread Scott crafted a looped 70 second video of a white man, ready for purchase, standing atop a block that is being sold as an NFT by auction house Christie’s. Scott’s work subverts the traditional hierarchy of slavery as his video journals an ignored white man on a pedestal by Black pedestrians. The main takeaway of the piece, however, lies in its connection to capitalism: Scott draws on American history and slavery to demonstrate the correlation between an augmented labor force and reward capital. His analysis of the ambivalent system leads him to analyze this social phenomenon in a satirical manner: “This is a really rare opportunity to buy a white male for sale,” says the artist. “If you have money to buy one, you should do it—they don’t come up very often.”

Today’s attractive distractions:

Marcel Dzama’s wondrous moons and suns enliven a Williamsburg subway stop.

It turns out the Jackass crew racked up more than $24 million in hospital bills.

This biotech startup has raised millions of dollars to resurrect woolly mammoths.

For $475, you can buy an NFT ticket to experience Beeple’s viral NFT in person.