Vibey drop from Nao here, toasting to good riddance. Let us all manifest this vibe as we talk about Amazon.

Amazon is expanding in Africa, and in keeping with their general no-fucks vibe, they’re trying to build a new continental HQ on a sacred indigenous site. “The River Club” is set to be basically the Hudson Yards of Cape Town, a $350 million mixed-use development with “office space, housing, running and cycling tracks and some 20 acres of green-park” in view of Table Mountain. And it’s right on top of the land that the Khoi-San consider the birthplace of their culture. The Goringhaicona Khoi-Khoin Indigenous Traditional Council is trying to get that land designated as a World Heritage Site, but Cape Town is more concerned with the 6,000-odd jobs that the new office would bring, so they’re doing a cute thing where construction forges ahead in fits and starts while opponents draw out the legal battle as long as possible. Of course that inconvenience is falling on Amazon’s new CEO* now that Bezos has moved on to bigger and better things like suing NASA for picking Elon Musk’s space-colonization plan over his. Would we say that history repeats?

*can you even name him

You know who else is suing Amazon? Macy’s, who understandably doesn’t want the giant Macy’s sign outside its 34th street store to say “Amazon” all of a sudden. See, this sign is technically a billboard that Macy’s has been leasing for decades, and during renegotiations this year, sneaky old Amazon seems to have crept past a clause that’s been preventing competitors from taking out ads there since 1963 (not that “history” has proven a deterrent for the Big A so far). To bring us full circle on indigenous theft, Macy’s is trying to move quickly on this since their ultimate nightmare is having to televise a big Amazon billboard during the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s turtles all the way down.

Litigate away, but Jens Haaning would tell us that sometimes a blank slate is the best statement. Haaning, for those of us who don’t follow the Dutch contemporary art scene, makes work like moving car dealerships into galleries and laminating paper money in different-sized frames to demonstrate gaps in average income. The Dutch Museum actually just commissioned him to reproduce that money piece for an exhibit about people’s relationships to work, and loaned him the equivalent of $84,000 as art material. When it came time to submit, he sent in two blank canvases titled, “Take The Money And Run.” The museum folks were predictably stupefied by the fact that he had submitted what was at once no art and also much better art than they’d asked for. “I encourage other people who have just as miserable working conditions as me to do the same,” Haaning said in one of many statements he’s been asked to give to the press. And now the international media is talking about the value of art and the artist, positionality in labor, etc. etc.. Remarkably, no one is suing, in part because the piece still went up (again, good art). But Haaning hasn’t returned the money just yet, so it still seems like there’s still time to… run?