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December 9, 2023 – January 14, 2024

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Deidrea Miller, the senior vice president and head of communications for Christie’s Americas division, has left the auction house.

Miller joined Christie’s just two years ago, in 2021, and helped the house facilitate its historic Paul Allen auction and the sale of a 1964 Andy Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, which in 2022 became the most expensive artwork by a 20th century artist ever auctioned.

While there was no official announcement of her departure, a short profile of Miller published on Thursday by Axios referred to her as being “formerly of Christie’s Americas.” 

She was one of just two Black executives at the auction house, and the only one with a public-facing position. Miller, who was based in New York, worked under Christie’s Americas president Bonnie Brennan.

The other Black executive is Natasha Moore, who is based in London and works as the auction house’s global head of talent and equity, diversity, and inclusion, according to LinkedIn.

Phillips made $840.7 million in auction sales in the last year, the auction house told ARTnews—a figure that marks a 15 percent decrease from the previous year’s total of just over $1 billion.

The Russian-owned company is the smallest of the three major houses, with headquarters in New York, London, and Hong Kong. In 2023, it spent its resources reconfiguring its key locations, announcing that it had added specialists in Asia in December. In July, Phillips consolidated its operations in Los Angeles after eliminating two regional positions on the West Coast.

In 2023, the top five works sold by Phillips, by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Fernand Léger, brought in a cumulative $87.6 million. That’s a 50 percent drop from the $173 million generated from the house’s top five works in 2022, when two pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Yves Klein alone brought in $126 million.

A Phillips representative declined to provide additional comment regarding its 2023 results. The house also did not provide figures for its private sales totals.

In previous years, Phillips has announced figures for its private sales. In 2022, the house’s private sales total surpassed the one for 2022, with an estimated $250 million brought in as the house turned its focus on selling exhibitions of modern art. That was 20 percent more than the $208.2 million the boutique house brought in through private sales in 2021.

A Berlin senator said on Thursday that the city would adopt a clause that requires any recipients of funding to commit themselves against “any form of anti-Semitism,” a move that many artists say could strip financial support from those who have voiced support for Palestine.

The clause, which was announced by Joe Chialo, the city’s culture senator, specifically refers to the concept of antisemitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Among the various points outlined by the IHRA in its definition is one about “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

The IHRA also denounces “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” as well as “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

“Art is free! But not randomly,” Chialo said in a statement. “Cultural institutions and funding agencies are responsible for ensuring that public money is not used to promote racist, anti-Semitic, anti-queer or otherwise exclusionary expressions.”

Not long after the clause was announced, hundreds of artists signed an open letter that protested the measure, which the letter labeled “political interference.”

A Diego Velázquez portrait of Spanish Queen Isabel de Borbón, which was expected to break the artist’s previous records, was quietly withdrawn from auction by Sotheby’s in New York.

The court painting, which has been owned by a private family trust in the US since 1978, was pulled due to “ongoing discussions” on behalf of the sellers. The painting did not appear in the auction house’s digital sales catalogue released on December 21.

There is speculation that a US museum may have put in an offer, however, Sotheby’s declined to comment, the Art Newspaper reported Friday. The 1620s painting was guaranteed by the auction house at $35 million in its upcoming Old Master sale on February 1.

The Isabel de Borbon portrait could be related to a famed Velázquez painting of her husband Philip IV held by the Prado in Madrid. It was taken from the Spanish royal collection in Madrid during Napoleon’s 1808 invasion and later appeared in a French noble collection in 1838. It eventually came into the hands of British banker and book collector Henry Huth. His relatives held it until 1950, when the piece was last at auction.

High-quality works by Velázquez are typically found in royal or museum collections and are rarely sold in public auctions. The price tag and good condition reflect this singularity. If sold, the work would more than double the 17th-century Spanish painter’s current $16.9 million auction record.

Lisa Schiff, an art adviser who has been accused of defrauding collectors in two pending lawsuits from last year, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday.

In documents processed by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, she filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would allow her to potentially eliminate some debts that she still owes. Those documents claim that she owes nearly $7 million to a spread of entities, including storage facilities, blue-chip galleries, and collectors.

Some of those debts had already been made public in prior filings. Among those listed in the filing are the collector Candace Carmel Barasch, a plaintiff in both lawsuits pending against Schiff, as well as galleries such as 47 Canal, Bortolami, Canada, Nina Johnson, and Various Small Fires.

Of the debts listed, some of the greatest ones are to Adam Sheffer and Richard Grossman, and to Brian and Karen Conway. The filing says that Sheffer and Grossman have a claim of $900,000, while the Conways have a claim of $886,501.25, according to the filing. Sheffer is a dealer who was worked for galleries such as Pace, Cheim & Read, and Lisson; Grossman filed one of the lawsuits against Schiff alongside Barasch. The Conways are philanthropists who have a gallery named after them at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where Karen is a trustee.

According to the bankruptcy filing, Schiff also owes more than $1 million to the Internal Revenue Service, plus an additional $408,939.14 to the New York State tax department, as well as $162,191.17 to the New York City Department of Finance.

A cyber attack on a software company called Gallery Systems impacted hundreds of art institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which used the software to manage their online archives and collections.

According to the New York Times, Gallery Systems told its clients on December 28 they’d learned that computers running its software had become encrypted and that those systems could no longer function. “We immediately took steps to isolate those systems and implemented measures to prevent additional systems from being affected, including taking systems offline as a precaution,” the message read. “We also launched an investigation and third-party cybersecurity experts were engaged to assist. In addition, we notified law enforcement.”

eMuseum, the program that allows visitors to search an institution’s archives and collections suffered in the attack, as was a program named TMS, which stores donor names, loan terms, provenance records, the storage locations of artworks, and shipping information.

Museums are far from the only cultural institutions that have had to deal with cyber attacks in recent months. Last year both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra faced online attacks, and in November, a ransomware group stole personal data from the British Library, later posting images of human resource files online. 

“The objects in museums are valuable, but the information about them is truly priceless,” Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told The Times. “Often, generations of curators will have worked to research and document an artifact. If this information is lost, the blow to our knowledge of the world would be immense.”