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.

In an interview with The Times last weekend, Antony Gormley admitted the secrets to his inimitably low-key personal style. ‘I try to be as practical and as straightforward as I can,’ Gormley said. ‘Most of my clothes come from Gap. The T-shirt is Gap; trousers are Gap. Socks are wool because they’re comfortable and they have no elastic. I hate elasticated socks. Shoes are Scarpa. I’ve never worn anything else for the past 10, 15 years.’

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Speaking to the Guardian a few months ago, Jeff Koons expressed his enthusiasm for the music of cult rapper Lil Uzi Vert, revealing that he liked to lift weights to it. Speaking to GQ, Lil Uzi – previously unaware of his celebrity fan – reacted with just as much surprise as the rest of us. ‘For real?’, he exclaimed. ‘You know, I got this weird thing in my head that people think I’m weird. But when I hear that, that’s cool. I want to meet him.’

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Fancy lunch at the Serpentine restaurant? Think again, says Richard Godwin in the Evening Standard. Richard Godwin. Reviewing Chucs, the branch of the Italian eatery that has just opened in the Zaha Hadid-designed Serpentine restaurant building, Godwin served up a litany of culinary disasters. A salad was a bowl of ‘Tesco Metro-grade cos and irregularly chopped avocado’, sea bream ‘outstandingly mediocre’ and ‘Chucs tiramisu […] like normal tiramisu but meh’. In summary? ‘Luxe desultory’.

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In 1993, Rachel Whiteread, then an up-and-coming artist, sparked a national debate with her sculpture House. Since then, she has become one of the most respected cultural figures in Britain – but it seems that even now, her work is capable of irking people. A proposed sculpture for North Yorkshire – a cast of a Second World War Nissen hut, to be placed in Dalby Forest – has residents of nearby Low Dalby up in arms. ‘[It’s] a bit like a bus shelter in an inner city’, one local told the Northern Echo. Another was more forceful: ‘I don’t think that a concrete structure which regularly plays host to dog poo-bags, picnic left-overs and graffiti with an added air of eau de urine is the best way to “interpret and celebrate” Dalby’s history’.

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