MC QUEEN'S GAMBIT

IS STEVE MCQUEEN A HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR WITH A THRIVING FINE ARTS PRACTICE OR A THRIVING FINE ARTIST WITH AN IMPECCABLE HOLLYWOOD STREAK? HIS WORLD WAR II EPIC, BLITZ, IS ANOTHER VIRTUOSO WORK IN A CAREER FULL OF THEM

- NATE FREEMAN

Throughout: jacket by Bottega Veneta.

IN MAY, the Dia Art Foundation hosted a 600-person lunch at its museum in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Beacon, New York. There are a number of permanent installations at the site, a sprawling former Nabisco packaging factory—Richard Serra’s massive steel whorls, Donald Judd’s plywood boxes, Andy Warhol’s 100-plus canvas masterwork Shadows. The lunch was the vernissage for newly installed exhibitions of artists inducted into the exclusive coterie. The largest new commission, which took over the 160,000-square-foot space’s basement, is by Steve McQueen, the British artist and film director’s first collaboration with the arts organization. Minutes before guests were to arrive, McQueen stood in the middle of his massive installation, titled Bass.

McQueen, 55, is one of the world’s great artists working with the medium of film. His videos can be single-channel, sub-10-minute miracles in black and white like Five Easy Pieces, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work Drumroll consists entirely of the footage caught by cameras jerry-rigged into an oil drum rolling through the streets of midtown Manhattan—it won McQueen the Turner Prize, the highest award for a British artist. In 2023, the Serpentine Galleries put on view McQueen’s