How Drake’s $100 Million Bet Saved the Long-Lost Art Carnival Luna Luna

In 1987, the Austrian artist André Heller debuted an avant-garde amusement park with works by Basquiat, Dalí and Haring. Its disappearance was a winding tale. Its return is even more bizarre.

 LOS ANGELES — Earlier this year, in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse lined with weathered shipping containers and crates, the Viennese artist André Heller was reunited with one of the great loves of his life and career.

The psychedelic works inside, unseen by Heller or the world for 35 years, had long been lost to history, despite their flashy provenance. Together, they made up Luna Luna — a functional amusement park where the rides and attractions also happened to be contemporary art from the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Salvador Dalí, which Heller had conceptualized and opened, briefly, in Hamburg, Germany, in 1987.

For decades, he had obsessed over its loss. “Forget about it,” he told himself repeatedly. “This is like a love affair where you can’t stop having erotic dreams.”

Eventually, Heller managed to move on. “And then,” he said via video chat from Austria, “when everything was out of my mind, I met some people that started reminding me.”