Coachella roundup; a bootleg concert archive; an Art World true-crime; and more
Welcome Digest [4.13.26]
Welcome To April 13th
Today’s Important Headlines
Coachella roundup
From Justin Bieber’s stripped-down $10 million set, reportedly the highest-paid in the festival’s history, to The Strokes returning for their first Coachella performance in over a decade, legacy acts dominated the conversation. The xx also made their first live appearance in eight years, while newer energy came from Destroy Lonely previewing an unexpected EDM track during Subtronics’ set and Ninajirachi debuting a new song with Porter Robinson. Elsewhere, Geese covered Bieber’s “Baby,” and Blood Orange delivered a standout performance of “Champagne Coast” on the festival’s circular center stage.
A $300M Frida Kahlo collection has become the center of an Art World true-crime mystery
A cache of works by Frida Kahlo once owned by collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman has become the center of a cross-border legal and cultural controversy stretching from Mexico to Spain. It’s a crazy story involving an American curator and a murdered notary. The upshot is that the collection, which legally was never supposed to leave Mexico, is now headed to Spain, and could one day be owned by a Spanish bank. Understandably, this has sparked protests in Mexico.
Harmony Korine’s first U.S museum show opens this week
A new exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Perfect Nonsense,” the first American museum survey of Harmony Korine, bringing together more than 50 works across film, painting, collage, drawing, and experimental media. The exhibition moves through Korine’s career from his early emergence after writing Kids to recent work like Baby Invasion, highlighting his shifting but consistent focus on outsider figures, fame, and American adolescence as cultural myth. Opening April 15, it arrives nearly a decade after his major mid-career retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2017.
The secret concert recordings of the most prolific bootlegger ever are now online
Since 1989, Aadam Jacobs has quietly taped more than 10,000 shows, starting with an early Nirvana performance years before Nevermind. The archive spans decades of indie and alternative music, with early recordings of artists like Fugazi, The Cure, Pavement, Sonic Youth, and Björk. Now, a global team of volunteers is digitizing and uploading the collection for free, turning decades of bootleg recordings into a public resource. A 2023 documentary on Jacobs offers a deeper look into the project.
Margiela allowed fans to paint their own clothing ‘Margiela White’ at an event
Attendees at the event were invited to bring branded clothing to be covered in Maison Margiela’s signature white paint, a process they refer to as the “bianchetto” technique. Online reactions were split, with many calling it a lazy gimmick, while others defended it as consistent with the house’s long-standing use of hand-finished bianchetto treatments on Replica and Tabi sneakers. Margiela’s recent show invitations also referenced the technique, when guests were sent buckets of white paint and a paintbrush.
The long-awaited Duchamp show is now open at MoMA
A major new exhibition at the MoMA traces the radical career of Marcel Duchamp, whose work repeatedly broke with tradition and redefined art in the modern era. Spanning roughly 300 works and more than six decades of output, the show is the first full-scale U.S. retrospective of his work since 1973 and offers a rare look at his experiments across painting, sculpture, and conceptual work. The show opened yesterday and will run until August 22nd.
Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)
Moodboard 057
Today’s inspiration supplement. Click through to view.
From The Archive
An extra piece of content from the Welcome Archive for Magazine subscribers only.
Desk Job by Louis Quail, the photography series covering the draining lives of office workers.
Shot in 2006 and 2007, the series was inspired by Quail’s own experience in the office at only 19 years old. “It was the most tedious job in the world for me, It required just enough brain power that you couldn’t switch off. It was a slow torture.”
