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.

‘If I could own one piece, it would be something by Picasso’, Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder told the i last week. ‘Why? Well, because I’m really abstract myself.’ Ryder, who is probably better known for his anarchic records and bad behaviour, went on to dispense some advice to budding collectors: ‘Just go with what floats your boat,’ he says. […] You might think all my collection’s regrettable, but I like it!’

Tim O’Brien has shed some light on the curious case of the painting Donald Trump keeps referring to as a Renoir. O’Brien revealed that he had noticed the work while accompanying Trump on a ride in his private plane years ago. He asked whether it was an original, to which Trump responded in the affirmative. ‘Donald, it’s not’, he insisted. ‘I grew up in Chicago,’ O’Brien aid, ‘that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it’s hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s not an original.’

O’Brien dropped the topic and forgot about the ‘Renoir’ until he saw it hanging on the walls of Trump Tower office in a TV interview last year. ‘I’m sure he’s still telling people who come into the apartment, ‘It’s an original, it’s an original,’ O’Brien says. ‘[…] He believes his own lies in a way that lasts for decades’.

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Tracey Emin has truly moved on since her hell-raising days. Speaking at the press opening of her show at Turner Contemporary Margate, the artist looked back at her career-making work My Bed (1998) and admitted that she’s now rather more attentive to the laundry. ‘As I get older, all the objects and the bed get further away from me and how I am now’, she said. ‘I don’t make stains on the bed like I used to and if I did I wouldn’t have a bed like that. The sheets would get washed immediately.’

Finally, Britney Spears’s career is taking an exciting new direction…

Britney Spears casually painting flowers on the balcony of her multi million dollar mansion with her tits out while listening to Mozart. A new renaissance is beginning pic.twitter.com/ScYV2BjLD9

— nick (@touchnick) October 13, 2017

Britney Spears painting en plein air, c.2017 // Claude Monet painting his water lilies, from footage filmed by the BBC, c.1912 pic.twitter.com/sie3i3wleH

— TabloidArtHistory (@TabloidArtHist) October 14, 2017