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The South Florida Coalition for Palestine, members of Jewish Voice for Peace, and an ad hoc group of Miami-based artists and cultural workers protested outside Art Basel Miami Beach on Friday.

Over 100 activists rallied outside the Miami Beach Convention Center, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and calling on Miami-Dade County officials to stop supporting Israel. The protest came two months after tensions escalated in Gaza. Since October 7, when the militant group Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, Israeli forces have killed over 17,000 Palestinians in the region, according to the Gazan health ministry. 

The United States has continued to send weapons and support to Israel. International organizations, including the United Nations, have called for an immediate ceasefire in order to “prevent genocide against the Palestinian people.”

“I believe that artists hold a special power: the ability to reveal truths that can shift people’s awareness of the world around us,” said Agua Dulce, a queer artist, activist, and community organizer based in Miami. “I think there’s a societal avoidance of the internal reflections required to accept that genocide is currently occurring, because that would lead to the admittance of the unsightly truths of history. As an artist and creator, I believe that my role right now is to awaken that spark of humanity in those who’d rather not engage with it. I bare my soul to others, so that they may access its reflection within themselves.”

Miami Artists for Ceasefire (MA4C) has collectively garnered more than 200 signatures on an open letter in support of a ceasefire. Its organizers say they have already sent the letter to local officials via email.

At the Centre Pompidou in Paris on Thursday, striking museum workers, union members, employees from other French institutions gathered inside a theater at the museum.

“We better leave now if we’re going to catch the minister,” Vincent Krier, a member of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), France’s second largest union, told the crowd of about150. The plan was to march to the offices of Rima Abdul Malak, the minister of culture, and pressure her “face to face” to meet their demands for job security amid plans that the center will close for renovations for five years, starting in 2025. It will begin progressively closing after the Summer Olympics in 2024.

Pompidou workers went on strike in mid-October over those concerns, the latest in a series of strikes since plans for the arts complex’s renovations were first announced. Last month, negotiations between France’s five major trade unions and the culture ministry over the strike stalled.

Despite the length of the strike, it has only caused the institution to close for eleven days total so far, thanks to alternating groups of workers opting to picket. When security personnel, for instance, go on strike, the museum is forced to close. On Thursday, however, only the Kandinsky Library was closed, having just joined the movement the day before. But, in yet another sign of the strike’s expansion, the unions announced on the same day they decided to extend the strike to January 15.

Once at the ministry’s offices, located a half mile away near the Louvre, the crowd packed into the lobby, chanting “Pompidou en colère!” [The Pompidou is angry], as whistles blew, people clapped, and some drummed on a reception desk. After some time, Nathalie Ramos, a representative of the CGT-Culture union, and a leading figure of the protest movement, which is arguably the largest since the museum’s opening in 1977, addressed the crowd.

Potential buyers were approached to purchase a minority stake in Sotheby’s after its French Israeli owner, Patrick Drahi, leveraged assets associated with his telecommunications conglomerative Altice, the Financial Times reported earlier this week. Since then, Sotheby’s CEO Charlie Stewart has denied that the house is considering any public offers.

The Financial Times report, which was based on two anonymous sources, said that high net worth investors based in Europe were approached. So was the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a wealth management fund worth established in 2005 that oversees the assets of the state of Qatar.

The QIA reportedly held discussions with the auction house’s owner a year ago about the purchase of a stake in Sotheby’s via a potential capital increase, a maneuver meant to finance a new investment. Drahi did formally not pursue plans to offload stake in Sotheby’s, the report said. Those discussions are no longer active.

Drahi purchased the auction house in 2019 through his family office for $3.7 billion. The private proposals for the sale of a minority stake in Sotheby’s followed the owner’s announcement in August of a plan to leverage the Altice assets to deal with a $60 billion debt accumulated through acquisitions in France, the US, Portugal, and Israel.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Stewart, the Sotheby’s CEO, denied that Drahi was considering a public offering for Sotheby’s. He also said that the business was not in need of capital raising to fund its operations.

During the 2021 crypto boom, Miami became the white-hot center of the scene: Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, christened the Miami Heat’s stadium as FTX Arena, the city played host to a raucous Bitcoin 2021, the world’s largest crypto conference, Wynwood became home to startups like Blockchain.com, Solana, and Ripple, and Mayor Francis Suarez announced that he was converting his salary to Bitcoin. And, of course, Miami Art Week that year and last year were marked by an endless series of NFT activations.

Post-boom, much has changed: SBF was convicted of fraud last month, a year after FTX collapsed, the FTX Arena has since been renamed the Kaseya Center, and Bitcoin 2023 had noticeably worse vibes (and attendance). And yet, though the exuberant abundance of funds may no longer be in play, Miami’s burgeoning digital art scene appears intact and noticeably matured.

At the forefront of those efforts is the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which became more invested in new media arts as Miami’s interest in digital art increased. In 2018, a donation by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation went towards developing a new digital department, which received more funds during the 2021 boom and officially launched at the end of last year. This December, the museum launched PAMMTV, a streaming service for the museum’s new media and time-based works. (Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation opened Art Week on Monday by hosting Catalyst, an invite-only arts and tech forum.)

“Miami has always had people who are experimenting with digital art in really interesting ways, but the literacy wasn’t there from the institutional side for a long time,” Lauren Monzón, PAMM TV’s program manager, told ARTnews. 

“The NFT boom was curious, because you did get a lot of excitement and anticipation around digital art from the art world and institutions. But that really quick rise and fall also led to skepticism in terms of digital art collecting. That’s something that I think we’re still grappling with a little bit.”

In 2019, an inferno tore through Notre-Dame cathedral’s roof, consuming the fragile spire as Paris watched in horror. Firefighters saved the structure, including its two iconic towers, but two-thirds of the roof were destroyed. Within days, an $865 million project was launched, only to progress in spurts due to the Covid-19 lockdown, a slew of archaeological finds below the church’s foundation, and a controversial modernization plan.

But the end is in sight: the church will officially reopen its doors to visitors one year from today, the French government has announced. According to the Associated Press, French President Emmanuel Macron—hard-hat in tow—will tour the site with the stonemasons and carpenters currently working to meet the 12-month deadline, and afterward hand off proceedings to Notre Dame’s clergy for a long-awaited service. 

The cathedral is “not the biggest cathedral nor perhaps the most beautiful,” the Rev. Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, its rector, told AP, but “it is the incarnation of a nation’s soul.”

“The expectations, the preparations for the reopening are a magnificent sign of hope in a difficult world,” he added.

The rebuilding effort at Notre-Dame has been a divisive topic within France and internationally. Shortly after the fire was contained, French collector François Pinault and his son François-Henri pledged €100 million (about $113 million) toward the effort. Hours later, collector Bernard Arnault announced that he would donate €200 million (about $226 million).

Mike Parr, an acclaimed Australian artist, has been dropped by his longtime representative, Melbourne’s Anna Schwartz Gallery. Both the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday that Parr’s representation deal was ended after he staged a performance that referred to the Hamas attack on October 7 and the current conflict in Gaza.

Photographs of the performance shot by artist Zan Wimberley were posted to her social media Thursday. The images appear to show Parr painting words such as “Israel” and “Palestine” on a wall, and then painting them over in maroon and black. Titled Going Home, the performance was staged on December 2 at Anna Schwartz Gallery, where a multi-part Parr show, “Sunset Claws,” is still ongoing.

Because the words are layered on top of one another, it can often be difficult to make out the full phrases that Parr scrawled via Wimberley’s documentation. But, according to the Guardian, Parr also wrote the words “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” as well as the phrase “Hamas raped women and cut off the heads of babies,” a reference to unverified reports from Israeli officials about the October 7 attack in which the militant group killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, more than 110 of which have been released.

“I was sickened by the hate graffiti inscribed on the wall, however I in no way intervened nor censored Sunset Claws, as the full length video of the performance, still playing in the gallery, will attest,” Schwartz said in a statement to the Guardian. “I have always acted in the interest of the artists represented by the gallery and this is the only time an artist has breached my principles of anti-racism.”

Parr told the Guardian, “What Hamas has done in Israel is totally reprehensible and cannot be condoned. But to all intents and purposes 20,000 civilians have now died in Gaza and tens of thousands have been wounded.” He noted that he “abhorred” antisemitism and said that his dealer of 36 years “understands very well the political nature of my performances.”

Amazon has reportedly ended its financial support for the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California, after the institution included an artwork that the company deemed critical of its business strategy in Southern California’s Inland Empire.

The news was first reported earlier this week by the Los Angeles Times. Just days after the article was published, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, who has recently become a high-profile collector, was spotted at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the country’s leading art fairs.

Amazon’s decision to cut ties with the Cheech was revealed in a leaked document laying out several of the company’s business and PR strategies for 2024. It was posted to X (formerly Twitter) by Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and a former California State assemblyperson.

The L.A. Times was able to independently verify the authenticity of the document, and an Amazon spokesperson did not dispute its veracity to the paper.

Amazon spokesperson Jennifer Flagg told ARTnews that the L.A. Times article was a “blatant mischaracterization of Amazon’s work, and in fact, Amazon is proud to be engaged philanthropically in communities across the country.”