EDITOR’S LETTER

Welcome to The Wick

— Katy Wickremesinghe
Dear Culturally Curious,

Frieze Week has London firmly in its grip. Tarek Atoui turns the Turbine Hall into an instrument, Anne Carson takes the Nobel and Dua Lipa curates the Southbank’s literature festival, while Christie’s makes $289 million and a Brueghel changes hands at Frieze Masters. Here’s what’s making headlines and what’s worth your diary space.

1Frieze fever. Frieze London and Frieze Masters are in full flow and the prizes are already in. Valentine took the Frieze Stand Prize for the late Indonesian artist Oototol, Ella Fleck won the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award and Tate is acquiring works by Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Luis Fernando Zapata. Meanwhile, No. 9 Cork Street, Frieze’s year-round Mayfair space, turns five.

Listen up. Tarek Atoui’s Hold, the 11th Hyundai Commission, turns the Turbine Hall into an instrument you feel with your whole body. It opens the next decade of the Hyundai and Tate partnership. Not since Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials in 2004 has the space been so led by sound.

Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, 76, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “bold and inventive oeuvre.” Start with Autobiography of Red, her 1998 verse novel. Meanwhile, pop star and book club founder Dua Lipa curates this year’s London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, 20 October to 1 November. Highlights include Hernán Diaz on his new thriller Ply and Malorie Blackman marking 25 years of Noughts & Crosses.

The grande dame tells her story. Historian Martin Williams follows Claridge’s from its early 19th-century beginnings as Mivart’s Hotel, through two world wars, to the present day in Claridge’s: Queen of Hotels, Hotel of Kings (Hodder & Stoughton, £35).

Red is the colour. Es Devlin is creative director of the British Museum Ball this evening, themed around red, the earliest pigment humans used in art. It ties together The Bayeux Tapestry, the USA 250 display and the Korea exhibition. Proceeds support the museum’s masterplan and a packed lunch for every school child who visits the Tapestry. Expect many renditions of Lady in Red. Good luck to Nick and his team.

Happy Weekend from
Katy & The Wick KTW Family
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