The Art Newspaper reports that the project, costing an estimated $300 million, will be open by 2024. Here’s what we also know: The hotel will be called Motown, and it will have, in addition to 176 luxury rooms, “a 1,075-seat theatre, a new multi-purpose conference centre, gallery, and office space.” Rivaling the Abramović/Turrell spa for best feature, the hotel will be accessible “mainly via the water by ferry.”
This all sounds almost too good to be true—sort of like that Dubai World Island thing where Lindsay Lohan was supposed to design an island. But the idea of Abramović and Turrell collaborating on a spa (a spa!) is a dream personified.
While Turrell’s otherworldly manipulations of light and space make sense for a spa, we have questions about Abramović’s involvement. Her work pushes and transgresses physical boundaries in an intense way, which makes me wonder if this new self-care locale will take its visitors on the least-soothing (but most thrilling!) spa day of their lives, involving live snakes and carrying skeletons. But, if the spa looks anything like Turrell’s blood-red room at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory or Akhob, his secret light installation at Las Vegas’ Louis Vuitton Maison City Center, the experience will be worth whatever hella expensive price it will be.
Motown will reportedly be located next to Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), a subterranean museum that he’s described as a “subversive adult Disneyland.” A freaky-cool Disneyland and a spa dreamt up by Abramović? I want the imagination of a Tasmanian gambling millionaire.