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In the summer of 1987, André Heller created what he referred to as “a carnival of the avant-garde.” An Austrian artist of growing renown, Heller drew on his childhood love of the Wurstelprater, an 18th-century amusement park in Vienna, to create a cross between a fair and an open-air gallery in Hamburg. He called the project Luna Luna, and in the nearly four decades since its debut, the other creatives who contributed to it—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring—have remained among the most famous names in modern art history. However, until 2023, Luna Luna had been all but forgotten.
Heller long dreamed of reviving it, but ambitions for a European Luna Luna tour, or for the city of Vienna to buy the project, were soon abandoned. Then, its sale to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation resulted in a protracted legal battle, leaving Luna Luna to sit boxed up in a rural Texan warehouse for years.
But all that would change when an intern sent entrepreneur Michael Goldberg, now a partner and chief experience officer of Luna Luna, an article about the 1987 fair in 2019. After making contact with Heller’s studio, Goldberg approached rapper Drake and his media company, DreamCrew, who—without knowing the condition of the works—agreed to buy all 44 crates that housed the original installation and ship them to Los Angeles.
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