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People on the Hawaiian coast spotted something enormous over the weekend and could not work out what it was. Some assumed a warship. It belonged to Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese entrepreneur, and it was on its maiden voyage.
The boat is called Nausicaä, after the Studio Ghibli film, and it cost $350 million. Marc Newson designed it and the German yard Lürssen built it. Artnet reported it measures 375 feet, with nine cabins, a sushi bar, a helipad and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
It also has a two-storey art gallery, and there is a reason for that.
Maezawa hung a Basquiat on a previous yacht. Not just any Basquiat: the untitled 1982 skull on a blue background he had paid $110.5 million for at Sotheby's, a record for the artist. His children threw cornflakes at it. The crew then tried to clean the painting and made the damage worse.
"The crew had made the damage worse by wiping them off the painting," said Pandora Mather-Lees, the art historian and conservator called in to assess it.
Ken Griffin, the Citadel founder, later bought the work for $200 million, according to reporting by the Artnet columnist Kenny Schachter.
Nausicaä carries a proper gallery instead. Works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool hang on board, according to the New York Post.
The collection behind it was assembled fast and expensively. Maezawa, who founded the online fashion retailer Zozotown, spent $98 million over two days in 2016 buying seven works at Christie's and Sotheby's, including Koons's Lobster from 2007, Alexander Calder's Sumac 17 from 1955 and Bruce Nauman's Eat War from 1986. He said at the time he wanted them shown at his Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo.
Basquiat has been the constant. He bought an untitled 1982 canvas for $57.2 million during that same 2016 spree and sold it six years later at Phillips for $85 million. The skull painting followed in 2017, and the Brooklyn Museum showed it the year after that.
"Generationally, I relate to Basquiat's culture and the essence of his life story," Maezawa has said.
His spending has run in other directions too. He flew to the International Space Station in December 2021 and has talked about sending artists into orbit. He has spent seven years restoring a 19th-century estate in Kyoto with the architect Hiroshi Nakamura, rebuilding the separate residence, the teahouse and the gardens while keeping the original fabric intact. That house holds mid-century work by Isamu Noguchi, Alexandre Noll and Jean Royère alongside contemporary pieces.
He has a rule about all of it.
"A collection kept in storage is meaningless," he told Architectural Digest. "Whenever possible, I would like every artwork to be seen and appreciated."
The gallery on Nausicaä is presumably where that principle now lives, several hundred feet from the nearest breakfast table.
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