The Rake’s progress: last week in gossip

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories. 

David Shrigley’s continuing involvement with Scottish premiership football team Partick Thistle has taken a new turn. The artist has designed a foam glove for supporters of the club, that bears aloft an exaggerated thumb based on Really Good, his winning proposal for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. The idea is that Jags fans can raise it in support of the players as they race across the pitch, encouraging positivity. ’The “thumbs up” gesture is universally understood as meaning something is good so, as a Jags fan, I thought what better way to show our support than to give the guys a giant thumbs up’, he explained. And so far, it’s been a case of finger on the pulse: on Tuesday, when the club distributed Shrigley’s glove, Partick defeated Dundee United 1–0.

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There was much to enjoy in Guardian restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin’s interview with Olafur Eliasson on Saturday. As previously reported here, Eliasson has published a recipe book based on the food served up by the kitchen at his Berlin studio. Though his grub sounds almost as impressive as his art, not all of his interdisciplinary ventures work out quite so well. ‘In 2007, I decided to raise grey sheep, to try to save the Icelandic economy,’ he tells O’Loughlin. ‘Instead, it very quickly became an increased burden on the economy.’ Undeterred by this agricultural setback, he has recently been in discussions with the greenhouses at Versailles, attempting to encourage them into using glacial moraine dust found in Greenland in their fertiliser. ‘It’s not really going very well,’ he admits, but should they take up his suggestion, he thinks he ‘could rescue the Greenland economy.’ The Rake is sceptical. In 2012, a project Eliasson was commissioned to undertake for the 2012 London Olympics was dropped at the last moment due to concerns over its £1million cost. Seems ‘economy’ isn’t really his watchword.

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News that Andy Warhol’s first studio is on the market for just under $10 million will come as a thrill to any collectors – not least for the fact that his work has been known to fetch prices 10 times that sum at auction. Warhol rented the run-down premises in 1963, shortly after exhibiting his Campbell’s Soup Cans for the first time, and remained there for just over a year. Now an art storage facility, the building, according to estate agents Cushman & Wakefield, ‘offers a developer a blank canvass [sic] to create boutique condominiums, a mixed-use rental or a luxury townhouse.’ No tinned soup on the menu there, then. 

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