December 16, 2023 – February 4, 2024

January 5 – February 3, 2024

Maestro's make-up wins Oscar nom despite earlier controversy

The writer of Amazing Grace was also a slave ship captain

January 5 – February 3, 2024

November 24, 2023 – February 10, 2024

Apple TV+'s new series starring Austin Butler reckons with the moral cost of war

Why did Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie get passed over in the Oscar nominations?

As The Chosen returns, what's behind its recordbreaking success?

December 1, 2023 – February 11, 2024

December 2, 2023 – March 3, 2024

Why the fan lawsuit against Madonna for lateness is so unusual

Savvy home-owners are channelling mid-century retro in their own way

December 17, 2023 – February 4, 2024

October 21, 2023 – February 8, 2024

The Orlando Museum of Art has rescinded legal claims of fraud and conspiracy against the five co-owners of a group of allegedly forged Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings at the center of a scandal that has all but exhausted the museum’s cash supply.

According to a statement by the museum’s board chairman, Mark Elliott, released Friday and shared with ARTnews, the museum is dropping the lawsuit against the consortium of owners to focus solely on former OMA director Aaron De Groft in an “effort to cut legal costs.”

De Groft, Elliott said in the statement, is the most responsible for the doomed Heroes and Monsters exhibition, which featured 25 works painted-on-cardboard originally attributed to Basquiat. De Groft—and the paintings’ co-owners—have fiercely defended the works as authentic. However, following a June 2022 raid on the museum by the FBI, during which the works were taken into the Bureau’s custody, an auctioneer from Los Angeles, Michael Barzman, admitted that he and an accomplice made the works. De Groft was fired shortly after the raid.

De Groft, who has countersued the museum, alleging wrongful termination and defamation, told the Times that for OMA “to pursue an innocent person in their frivolous, meanspirited lawsuit is pathetic.” De Groft maintained that the works are real.

Earlier this month, details of an internal meeting were released to multiple news outlets revealing that the museum was facing a deficit of $1 million for the coming year.

While the tone during Friday’s proceedings in the civil suit brought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev remained collegial—after all, Sotheby’s attorney Marcus Asner was questioning the house’s head of private sales Samuel Valette for the second day—the questioning was decidedly more aggressive.

While Asner’s questions were nominally directed at Valette, it was clear that his real target was Yves Bouvier, the Swiss art dealer who Rybolovlev has accused of overcharging him by $1 billion, with Sotheby’s help, on blue-chip art purchased between 2010 and 2014.

Bouvier, who is not a party to the ongoing trial, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Rybolovlev. Courts in Hong Kong, Monaco, Singapore, and elsewhere have declined to hold a trial against Bouvier or dismissed charges against him. In December, the Geneva Public Prosecutor’s Office closed its case against Bouvier after he and Ryblovlev reached an agreement and the Russian billionaire withdrew the criminal complaint.

Still, evidence shown in court Friday seemed too blatant to call his dealings with Rybolovlev, or his business manager Mikhail Sazonov, above board.

In one example, an email presented to the jury from Bouvier to Sazonov dated Nov. 21, 2011, Bouvier said he had been negotiating with the owner of Rene Magritte’s Le Domaine d’Arnheim, and was fighting hard to get them down from their original asking price, $60 million. In the same email chain Bouvier asks if he is authorized to propose more than $40 million and says that a number as low as $42 million was “mission impossible.”

A museum in Anchorage has paused a controversial policy intended to offer free admission to Alaska natives.

The policy, announced on January 3, allowed Alaska Native visitors to self-identity at the museum’s ticket counter; no proof of tribal enrollment was required to receive complementary admission. 

In a statement shared Tuesday, the museum said the pause “is in the interest of making sure we are in line with our intention to honor Indigenous people and provide access to their cultural belongings while also fulfilling the broader community considerations and applicable museum guidelines and the law.”

Per local reports, the policy was divisive in the Anchorage community. In one Anchorage Daily News opinion piece, Donald Craig Mitchell, an attorney based in the Alaskan city, described the initiative as discrimination against non-Alaska Native visitors, according to his interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

Many praised the museum’s intention—the Native Village of Eklutna, the single federally-recognized tribe in the city, wrote on Facebook, “Great news for Anchorage’s original inhabitants!”—while others still raised concerns over the policy’s lax requirements for proving Native enrollment. 

The remains of a bronze age tomb were discovered along the Atlantic coast in County Kerry, Ireland. It was previously believed that the tomb had been destroyed.

Located on a hill outside of the village Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula, the sun altar, or Altóir na Gréine as the locals call it, was constructed about 4,000 years ago before it suddenly vanished in the mid-19th century.

The monument had been sketched by English aristocrat Georgiana Chatterton in 1838. Fourteen years later, however, antiquarian Richard Hitchcock reported that the altar was broken and subsequently taken from the site.

While recently filming the site as part of an archaeological mapping project, folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn recorded a stone in the undergrowth as he converted the video into a 3D scan. It looks reminiscent of one from Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.

After sending the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, archaeologist Caimin O’Brien confirmed the stone once belonged to a wedge tomb dating to the early Bronze age between 2500–2000 BCE. Wedge tombs were used by bronze age peoples for both ceremonies and the burial of bodies.

ART SG has officially returned to the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center for its second edition, and even if the exhibitor list was noticeably smaller than last year’s fair, the strong energy of 2023 was still present. Just before its 2 p.m. opening, a line had already formed in front of the entrance to its top floor. Inside, dealers seemed enthusiastic.

Several galleries, like Lehmann Maupin and White Cube, did report sales by the early evening. Thaddaeus Ropac, for its part, said it sold an Anselm Kiefer painting for 1.1 million euros, or just under $1.2 million. More than a dozen galleries also reported first-day sales of works under $100,000, with one art dealer noting the lower price point helped sell a higher volume compared to last year’s fair.

Still, several people told ARTnews the pace of buying continued to differ from fairs in other cities.

“People in Singapore take a little bit more time,” Hong Kong–based gallerist Daphne King-Yoo of Alisan Fine Arts told ARTnews. “We did the bulk [of sales last year] after the fair had closed.”

This year’s offerings include thoughtful meditations on the pain of immigration, visual tricks made using embroidery, and paintings produced via labor-intensive processes.