It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

Set to go on view at Christie’s Beverly Hills space are films featuring model Edie Sedgwick, collector Jane Holzer, filmmaker and actor Dennis Hopper, Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed, and others. The exhibition will run from February 27 to March 14.

The “Screen Tests” are among Warhol’s most famous works. In each, one person steps before Warhol’s camera and remains there for minutes on end, staring back into his lens. Most of the people Warhol shot for them were members of his inner circle.

While there are occasionally moments of drama—poet Ann Buchanan cried during hers, in a work that is not going to be presented here—the “Screen Tests” are largely plain, and that, for many, has been part of their charm.

Patrick Moore, executive director of the Andy Warhol Museum, said in a statement, “Hollywood was a source of endless fascination and inspiration for Warhol so it’s fitting that his films would now serve to inspire new generations of artists and filmmakers.”

Sonya Roth, deputy chairman of Christie’s, said the show marked a “convergence of film, art, and history.”

That alternate world is portrayed in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the new Amazon television series about an espionage-inflected arranged marriage between two employees of a shadowy organization. The titular couple, played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, is sent in the second episode to intercept a wealthy man trying to purchase the Warhol painting during a glitzy New York function.

No Warhol painting of that caliber would ever be sold at a party like that one, of course. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) belongs to “Death and Disaster,” an acclaimed series in which the artist appropriated sleazy images of carnage, and screen-printed them repeatedly, so that the images appeared distressed and only partially inked. The “Death and Disaster” works are among Warhol’s most famous ones, with some residing in major institutions.

That’s why the Sotheby’s auction was so highly anticipated. The real Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) had been held in the same European private collection for 20 years before coming to sale in 2013, and was pegged with an $80 million high estimate. The painting ended up besting that; the record minted by the sale stood until 2022, when a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe sold at auction for $195 million.

It’s not clear who bought Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), but the bidder for the version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a billionaire played by John Turturro, of Big Lebowski fame. We won’t spoil what happens once he is intercepted by John and Jane Smith, but we’ll leave it at this: the actual buyer of Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) probably fared better.

The incident took place at American Fine Art Inc. well before sunrise on January 7 and the targeted works were estimated to be worth $250,000.

“This guy was a seasoned professional,” American Fine Art director Phil Koss told ARTnews. “This wasn’t just a smash-and-grab.”

Around 5:45 a.m., senior international art consultant Jeff Dippold went to the gallery after an alarm went off. He called Koss after hearing someone barricaded inside the offices, prompting Koss to contact 911.

The suspect, identified by police as Harpreet Singh, was arrested in a confrontation on the roof of American Fine Art Inc.

“When the police came down with the backpack, and the crowbar and all the other stuff, the gloves, it was like right out of, Thomas Crown or something,” Koss said.

“It appears the suspect forced entry through a part of the roof and gained access to the gallery,” Scottsdale public information officer Aaron Bolin said an emailed statement to ARTnews. “His vehicle was found parked in an alley nearby below and emergency ladder that provided access to the roof.”

Officers surrounded the building, located the suspect, and ensured he did not escape off the roof. A drone and a police dog were also involved in the early morning arrest.

After Singh was taken into police custody, court documents show officers found several pieces of artwork scattered on the roof of American Fine Art as well as on the rooftops of neighboring businesses, according to a report published by local news station CBS 5. “Police also recovered clothing, including a face mask and gloves as well as a small drill, a flashlight and a glass-break tool.”

While the statement from Scottsdale police sent to ARTnews said one of the works from the incident, Lucky Strike by Keith Haring, was still missing, Koss said everything had been returned. “We’ve got them all back. He never got away anything.”

“I was so happy not to have to make a claim,” he added.

According to court records from Maricopa County Jail, Singh has been charged with with two counts of criminal trespass and burglary and one count of theft. His bond has been set at $50,000. He has already been convicted of burglary in the state of California.

After receiving a call from Dombek on Monday saying that he would like to turn himself in, his lawyer Ernie Preate escorted him to the Lackawanna County Prison, where is still in custody, reported the local news station WNEP.

Dombek was denied bail by a federal judge following a court appearance on Tuesday morning.

Dombek is one of nine people accused by federal authorities of involvement in a multi-state theft ring that stole sports memorabilia, art, and other valuables from 20 museums and stores across the East Coast and parts of the Midwest over the course of two decades. Three suspects already plead guilty for stealing Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock works last year. An additional fourth suspect also pleaded guilty shortly thereafter.

The stolen artworks include Warhol’s 1984 screenprint Le Grande Passion and Pollock’s vibrant blue 1949 painting Springs Winter, taken from the Everhart Museum in 2005; and the painting Upper Hudson by Jasper Cropsey, taken from the Ringwood Manor in Ringwood, New Jersey in 2011. The suspects are also accused of stealing more than $1 million in memorabilia from the Yogi Berra Museum, including nine World Series rings; six championship belts from the International Boxing Hall of Fame; more than 30 golf and horse racing trophies; a Tiffany lamp; $400,000 in gold nuggets; and four firearms worth a combined $1 million.

Until now, Dombek was the last remaining suspect to turn himself in.

The expansion is part of the museum’s “Pop District” initiative, which, according to their website includes a “multi-block public art initiative, a youth-focused, creative economy workforce program, flagship live event & performance venue.”

The Pop District initiative was announced in 2022, as a $60 million project that will transform the area surrounding the museum into a cultural hub that draws on Warhol’s legacy for inspiration. The expansion is planned to roll out over ten years and will absorb six blocks around the museum. 

The multimillion-dollar proposal will convert the museum’s existing 58,000 square foot parking lot into a new building with a concert venue with standing room for 1,000 on the first floor, a mezzanine, office spaces, and a 360-person events space on the fourth floor.

When the initiative was first announced the museum said its goal was “to generate $1 million in annual income for workers with the program” and boost the local economy. In a statement the museum’s director, Patrick Moore, said “We now have the plan and resources to follow suit as an agent of change for Pittsburgh.”

Of the current plans, Rick Armstrong, a spokesperson for the museum, told news outlets that construction could begin as early as the Spring of 2024, however the project is still in the planning and development stages, so timelines are “still flexible.” 

The legacy of the 1MDB scandal on the art world already includes high-profile works by Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Claude Monet, and Andy Warhol purchased by Malaysian financier Jho Low for eye-watering sums at auction. But a new forfeiture complaint filed by the US government Monday alleges that former 1MDB lawyer “Jasmine” Loo Ai Swan purchased the Pablo Picasso pencil drawing Trois femmes nues et buste d’homme (1969) from Christie’s in May 2014 for $1.27 million using misappropriated funds from a bond sale underwritten by Goldman Sachs.

The 1MDB scandal is the shorthand term for the elaborate, criminal mismanagement of the Malaysian government-run wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad. While the fund’s stated goal was strategic investments and helping alleviate poverty, in 2015, it became the center of an extensive corruption, bribery, and money laundering conspiracy involving officials in several countries. The US Department of Justice found that $4.5 billion in assets were diverted to individuals—including then-Prime Minister Najib Razak, his family, Low, and Loo—to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase art and memorabilia, for political lobbying, and even to finance the production company behind the film Wolf of Wall Street.

The 46-page court document, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California on August 28, alleges that Loo purchased the Picasso drawing using proceeds from a series of financial transfers from a $3 billion bond sale arranged and underwritten by Goldman Sachs in 2013. If proven, it would confirm another work of art in the 1MDB scandal was purchased through misapropriated funds.

The court document was submitted by Margaret A. Moeser, acting chief of the US Department of Justice’s Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Section, international unit chief Mary Butler, as well as trial attorneys Jonathan Baum, Barbara Levy, Joshua Sohn, and Sean Fern.

Normally, the identity of winning bidders is kept secret by auction houses unless the buyer chooses to disclose that information, such as Drake posting a photo of Tupac Shakur’s custom crown ring on Instagram last month.

In this case, the US government’s filing revealed that Loo had successfully bid $1.265 million for Trois femmes nues et buste d’homme on May 14, 2014 and paid Christie’s a final sales price, including buyer’s premium, of $1,377,268.75. The amount was well above the estimate of $700,000 to $900,000.

Loo was arrested last month in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after surrendering to police. A warrant for her arrest had been issued on December 4, 2018 after she failed to appear in court.

Some of the other lavish art purchases from those embezzled assets from 1MDB included Low’s winning bids for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads (1982) at Christie’s New York in May 2013 for a record $43.5 million, Picasso’s Tête de Femme from Sotheby’s New York in November 2013 for $39.9 million, and Monet’s Nymphéas (1906) at Sotheby’s London in June 2014 for the equivalent of $53.9 million.

The long list of cases the US government has also filed involving art include van Gough’s La Maison de Arles, the €25.3 million in proceeds from the sale of Nympheas, the Picasso painting Nature Mortes Au Crane de Taureau, Basquiat’s Redman One and Self-Portrait, Warhol’s Round Jackie and Colored Campbell’s Soup Can (Emerald Green), Diane Arbus’s Boy With the Toy Hand Grenade as well as the Monet paintings Saint Georges Majeur and Vétheuil Au Soleil.

The 1MDB case has continued to be irksome for auction houses, who frequently check that potential bidders have the financial liquidity to pay for purchases and the funds have not come from organized crime.

When ARTnews asked Christie’s about the new court filing, a spokesperson said, “We cannot comment on the identity of clients or specific transactions.”

She did so, producing works such as New York/Liberty (1918–19), in which downtown Manhattan’s busy port is shown with a chunky Statue of Liberty welcoming a ship. It’s a bombastic vision of all that New York has to offer, and it’s one of the works that make this list, which collects 100 of the best pieces about the city.

The works ranked below take many forms—painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, even artist-run organizations whose activities barely resemble art. They pay homage to aspects of New York life across all five of its boroughs. Secret histories are made visible, the stuff of everyday life is repurposed as art, and tragic events from New York lore are memorialized. Binding all of these works is one larger question: What really makes a city?

These 100 works come up with many different answers to that query, not the least because a significant number of them are made by people who were born outside New York City.

Below, the 100 greatest works about New York City.

To those with a passing knowledge of rock music, this seems like an uncontroversial choice. But on social media this week, the Billboard list became the subject of discussion after some users asked variations on a question that caused others to cringe: A banana, really?

It may be hard to recall a time when The Velvet Underground and Nico was unpopular, but in fact there was one, and it was 1967, the year it came out. While the record is now considered a towering achievement—its aggressive sounds and subversive lyrics now seen as precursors to so many sonic trends afterward—The Velvet Underground and Nico did not find a mass audience at the time.

Behind the scenes, Warhol was influential in the creation of the album. Serving as the band’s manager, Warhol was the one who linked up The Velvet Underground with Nico. The musicians ended up taking part in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances. Yet even Warhol’s involvement did little to boost the band’s commercial prospects.

Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik has reported that The Velvet Underground and Nico only made #171 on the Billboard 200 charts and that, between 1967 and 1969, its sales produced just $22,000 in royalties. The Pop artist’s management company, Warvel, took a one-fifth cut from that—a meager sum, even considering inflation. (In 1982 producer Brian Eno claimed that the album only sold around 30,000 copies in its first five years.)

The music on the album was considered improper—its lyrics citing doing drugs and S&M, among other activities—so many radio stations declined to play it. That’s one reason the album didn’t fare well at the time. But another may be its album cover, a Pop image whose double entendre is laid on thickly.

JPEGs of the cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico conceal that Warhol designed the album cover so that it had an interactive element. The banana’s vinyl skin could pulled away, offering a view of a pink fruit underneath. “Peel slowly and see” some unsubtle text the cover reads. Gopnik has compared this to peeling back a foreskin, and written that the jacket “aligned the Velvets with the hard-edged queer culture that the Factory was coming to represent.”

Or, to put it another way, here’s what Lou Reed, the band’s frontman, had this to say about the album: “The banana actually made it into an erotic art show.”

In fact, it wasn’t the only erotic art show that Warhol created for a musician. He created another in 1969 for the Rolling Stones, whose 1971 album Sticky Fingers features a close-up of a man’s torso clad in denim, his left bulge plainly visible. That album cover featured a zipper that could be pulled down to reveal underwear beneath. Later reissues of the record nixed the zipper, so that all that was left was Warhol’s picture.

The reception for Sticky Fingers was much different. Warhol, along with designer Craig Braun, received a Grammy nomination for it. Sticky Fingers also appeared on the Billboard 200 list—more than 20 spots behind The Velvet Underground and Nico.

John Lennon bought the Concert Grand Model D piano in 1978 from the Baldwin Factory Store in New York City, according to ACA. The following year he gave the instrument to his friend, art dealer and curator Sam Green, who organized Andy Warhol’s first American museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A plaque that reads “For Sam Love from Yoko and John 1979” was added just above the Baldwin logo on the front of the piano.

Green was close to both Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono. The couple often spent time at Green’s home on Fire Island, and Lennon played the piano and wrote songs there, some of which wound up on his 1980 album with Ono, Double Fantasy.

A few years later, in 1983, Green lent the piano to Warhol, who displayed it prominently at the Interview magazine offices in New York City. 

In 1988, after its display in the Interview offices, Green loaned the piano to the New York Academy of Art, which was cofounded by Warhol, for use during “special events.” For Green, that turned out to be an unfortunate decision. When, in 2000, he discovered the piano was being “misused” and played by students every day, he asked that it be returned.

But the school was no longer in possession of the piano. They had sold it, along with a collection of other “deaccessioned pianos” that were in the school’s basement, to a piano tuner named Harold Katz, for a meager $3,000. 

Green sued the school—which argued that Green had donated the piano, not lent it—for $1.6 million. 

The piano was eventually found at the Mercersburg Academy, a college-prep boarding school in Pennsylvania, bought from Katz by an Alabama man named Buddy Bain, for around $100,000, according to the New York Post. Green’s lawsuit was dismissed. 

While the piano visibly shows the wear and tear of its travels, dings in the enamel, a circle melted in the finish, possibly from an ash tray or oil lamp, the auction house says the instrument is playable and will be tuned before it’s sold. Bidding opens September 30 with an estimated value of $2 million–$3 million.