Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in our special Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter for Art Basel Hong Kong. Sign up here to receive it every day of the fair.

The first auction held by Christie’s at its new Asia headquarters in The Henderson building in Hong Kong last September was a buoyant affair, carried by excitement for the glitzy locale, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. That inaugural evening sale, for 20th- and 21st-century art, brought in $113.4 million (with buyer’s premium), a more subdued haul compared to past boom years, but still a solid result.

On Friday, the house held its second 20th/21st century auction in its new digs, the first aligned with this week’s Art Basel Hong Kong, which opened to VIPs Wednesday. According to a post-sale release, more than 7,000 people visited the headquarters to take in the lots ahead of the evening sale, many of them in town for Art Basel.

While the room was filled to capacity, the pace of Friday’s evening sales was a bit slower, totaling $73.3 million (including buyer’s premium), with few surprises. The sale was said and done in just over an hour. Though it carried a 95 percent sell-through rate on 43 lots, most hammered at the low-end of their pre-sale estimates, with the aggregate hammer price sitting 6 percent above the sale’s low estimate. 

Cristian Albu, Christie’s deputy chairman and head of contemporary art for Asia Pacific, said in a post-sale press conference that those figures indicated the works on offer were “responsibly priced for this market,” despite “some challenges in sourcing.”

I can’t think of a more relevant and necessary exhibition right now than Wafaa Bilal’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It isn’t only that the exhibition is topical—though, sadly, its critiques of Islamophobia and the ways technology sanitizes warfare and distances us from its effects are timely. (Bilal takes on these topics unflinchingly, but we hardly need an art show to remind us of them.) Instead, what stands out is the way his faith in humanity carries on despite it all.

After learning that his brother had been killed by a remotely operated drone in Iraq, and after relocating as a refugee to the United States, Bilal took up residence in Chicago’s Flat File galleries for 30 days. For the resulting performance, Domestic Tension (2007), he connected a paintball gun to a video feed and chatroom, where people identified only by IP addresses could shoot yellow paintballs at a brown man in a keffiyeh. And shoot they did: in a surprise to no one, the relative anonymity of the internet enabled the unleashing of racialized hatred. Bilal was shot more than 65,000 times, and the site received more than 80 million hits.

But more memorable for Bilal were the moments of selfless kindness and basic respect that other strangers offered. When an Ohio-based IP address went at him relentlessly, Bilal politely asked for a break from the shooting: he was trying to eat dinner, and paintballs kept falling into his food. The shooter obliged, replying “Ouch, sorry.” Soon, users discovered that if they repeatedly clicked left and aimed the gun into a corner of a room, Bilal would be spared, and so 39 strangers organized shifts to protect him. He was so moved that he extended the project an extra day, saying moments like these had restored his hope for humankind.

Where politics and technology can abstract, time and again, Bilal brings things back to person-to-person scale, and he does so by putting his own body on the line. Such is the premise of Virtual Jihadi (2007), a remake of a remake of the popular 2003 American video game Quest for Saddam. In the earliest version of this first-person shooter game, players kill off civilian Iraqis standing between the shooter and Saddam Hussein. Tellingly, every Iraqi has the same face—Hussein’s. Three years later, Al Qaeda released their own version, changing it into a hunt for George W. Bush. Bilal’s version intervenes by introducing a third character: an Iraqi suicide bomber who, angered after his brother is killed by the US, is recruited to join a terrorist group. In this third version, both Al Qaeda and the US are the enemies, with the focus on figureheads clearing way for the people they most impact. Here technology onboards and recruits people to violence while alienating them from the impacts of war.

For 3rdi (2010–11), Bilal surgically installed a camera in the back of his head and, for one year, took a picture every minute. The abundant photos show things like pillows and strangers, and in a sense compensate, per the catalog, for the childhood photos Bilal left behind when he fled Iraq. The work is shown synchronically, meaning if you visit the show on March 27, 2025, at 4:32 pm, you will see what Bilal saw—or rather, didn’t see—on March 27, 2011, at 4:32 pm. The images are projected on a screen hung at a dramatic angle, giving the project a commanding presence in much the same way Bilal’s camera intruded into any given space. This was the point: Surveillance cameras are everywhere yet disappear; what if you could see the person on the other end?

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The Headlines

SMITHSONIAN SUPPRESSION. On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution’s museums. He demanded the restoration of public monuments that have been removed since January 1, 2020, many of which represented Confederate leaders, according to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The so-called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order instructs Vice President JD Vance to cancel whatever he deems “improper” from the Smithsonian museums, education, and research centers, as well as at the National Zoo, all in an attempt to eliminate “divisive narratives.” That apparently includes “race-centered” and “anti-American ideology.” Examples include exhibits allegedly depicting American and Western values that the Trump administration believes to be “inherently harmful and oppressive.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture is specifically faulted for suggesting, according to Trump, “that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’” The new order also forbids transgender women from being included in the forthcoming American Women’s History Museum. How the order would be implemented remains to be seen.

MYANMAR’S HERITAGE SITES ARE AT RISK after a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake this morning that also rocked neighboring Thailand, killing at least three in a Bangkok high-rise collapse, reports CNN and the Associated Press.  Many more feared dead and injured in the region. The earthquake damaged part of Myanmar’s historic royal palace in Mandalay, built in the 19th century, according to videos posted on social media. Additional photos show crumbling religious shrines in Myanmar’s capital city of Naypyitaw. Mandalay is home to ancient monasteries and palaces that draw international tourists.

The Digest

Lucy Dacus’s newly released album Forever Is A Feeling has been widely anticipated among music aficionados, with the 29-year-old singer even getting a full-length profile in the New Yorker last week. But it turns out that the art world has a reason to pay attention to the album, too.

Included on the album is a song called “Modigliani,” in which Dacus sings of missing her friend, the singer Phoebe Bridgers, whom Dacus performs alongside in the band Boygenius. (Boygenius’s members also include Julien Baker, newly revealed to also be Dacus’s romantic partner.) Despite its title, the song is, for the most part, not about the Italian-born modernist painter whose nudes once provoked controversy upon being exhibiting in Paris in 1917.

But there is one line that refers directly to Modigliani and the women with almond-shaped eyes that he painted. “Modigliani melancholy got me long in the face,” Dacus croons. “But I feel better when you call.”

The line is a reference to the elongated proportions of the people in Modigliani’s paintings, whose bodies necks, hangs, and chests are intentionally not portrayed in a biologically accurate way. These paintings diverged from the norm of his day: they were portraits, not abstractions, and more specifically figurative portraits that directly referenced people who had actually modeled for Modigliani.

Critics have praised his bizarre aesthetic. (Collectors, too, have responded in kind, with one of his paintings selling at auction for $157.2 million at auction in 2018.)

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order on Thursday directing the Smithsonian, a federal consortium of cultural and research institutions, to eliminate “divisive” and “anti-American” content from its exhibitions and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed from public spaces since 2020.

The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order gives Vice President JD Vance the authority to determine what content is “improper” at the Smithsonian Institution. A fact sheet from the White House describes the order as opposed to “anti-American ideology.”

Since its establishment by Congress in 1846, the Smithsonian has operated as a public-private partnership and maintained editorial autonomy in its telling of the country’s history. It encompasses museums and education and research centers, and within the past decade has evolved substantially with new divisions dedicated to diversity. The National Museum of the American Latino and American Women’s History Museum are among the more recent additions to its portfolio.

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order reads. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

The order describes the Smithsonian’s efforts to expand the nation’s historical record as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” and “harmful and oppressive.” The order also bans transgender women from being featured in the planned women’s history museum, which currently has only online exhibits, as the construction is not expected to commence for a decade.

Since 1968, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo has commanded attention on the city’s bustling Avenida Paulista for its iconic modernist building, a red-pillar, suspended structure designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi. After more than six years of planning and construction, a new 14-floor building with an additional 82,600 square feet of space, will join it, an expansion effort that will increase MASP’s exhibition space by 66 percent.

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At a cost of almost $43.5 million, all obtained through private donations, this much-awaited annex, which opens to the public March 28, represents MASP’s first expansion since its moved to Avenida Paulista, giving the museum 235,300 square feet to work with, more than double its original footprint. The original building, too, has been renamed after Bo Bardi, with the new building carrying the name of Pietro Maria Bardi, the museum’s first artistic director and the architect’s husband.

Located across a side street and soon to be connected via an underground tunnel, the high-rise Pietro building, with its black, perforated and pleated metal sheet shell, is a sharp contrast to the long rectangular Lina structure. The exterior “acts as a protective ‘skin’” for the artistic treasures inside, controlling the incidence of natural light and reducing internal heating as a way to reduces its thermal load and increase its energy efficiency, according to Martin Corullon, of the building’s architectural firm, Metro Arquitetos Associados.

For MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, who reinstated Bo Bardi’s iconic glass-and-concrete easel installation for the museum’s permanent collection shortly after joining in 2014, the expansion project respects the language of the main building and collaborates with—instead of detracting from— its magnificence.

“It’s really not supposed to be as grand as Lina’s brilliant building; it doesn’t wish to compete with it,” Pedrosa, who was also curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, told ARTnews. “I think it was very gracious of the architects not to attempt to compete with the extraordinary landmark that is the Lina Bo Bardi building.” 

After three years of climate activism, the British protest group Just Stop Oil announced on Thursday that it would end demonstrations directly targeting museums and public spaces in the country.

The group has become known for high-profile demonstrations that have involved throwing food at paintings by artists like Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci in museums. But it will officially cease organizing those protests at the end of April.

Earlier this month, the UK adopted a law early this month that bars license for new oil and gas projects that haven’t already been approved, a change the eco-group had been pushing for in legal complaints. The policy change was announced earlier this month and confirmed by the UK’s energy secretary Ed Miliband, who said the decision was made to implement a new “clean energy future” plan.

Previous Just Stop Oil actions have included defacing Stonehenge and targeting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London. The activists have claimed that each demonstration was carefully orchestrated to avoid permanent damage to cultural objects, and in most cases, the artworks were not permanently altered.

The protests have spurred some officials to take legal action against Just Stop Oil members. At the beginning of the month, Just Stop Oil convened outside a UK court to protest the sentencing of 16 activists arrested during demonstrations since 2022. On March 7, a UK judge shortened the sentence of the group’s founder, Roger Hallam, for disrupting a traffic event after an appeal.

Serop Simonian, the alleged leader of an Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring, mysteriously left Paris for Hamburg during his jail sentence in January.

The now 83-year-old dealer is believed to be behind the sale of allegedly smuggled Egyptian antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre Abu Dhabi for a collective €60 million ($64 million).

In 2022, following a criminal investigation, several objects were seized including a gold sarcophagus and five other antiquities from the Met, as well as the indictment of seven dealers, collectors, and curators such as the former president of the Musée du Louvre Jean-Luc Martinez.

French authorities issued a warrant for Simonian’s arrest, which prompted the criminal investigation. He was charged with trafficking and laundering in September 2023 and was subsequently jailed in Paris.

Simonian’s lawyer Chloé Arnoux told the Art Newspaper that he “suffers from health problems and needs the assistance of a walker, was authorised to leave Paris by a magistrate on 31 December, to go back to his hometown. After 15 months of detention, the magistrate considered that he could be released.”

A painting that for short while was referred to as a lost Caravaggio is now at the center of a major fraud investigation in Spain.

The artwork, Ecce Homo with Two Executioners, was sold by Herennia Trillo, a Spanish art dealer, for nearly $300,000 in early 2023. But, according to the Spanish new outlet El Confidencial, experts from Madrid’s Prado Museum studied the work and quickly stripped the picture of its illustrious attribution.  

The case is reported to have involved forged documents, a supposed Uffizi expert, and a gallerist accused of helping launder the proceeds. Spanish authorities are now investigating Trillo. She may have collaborated with Sara Muñoz, who allegedly posed as a Caravaggio expert from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and Madrid dealer David Badía, who is suspected of issuing false invoices to obscure Trillo’s gains.

El Confidencial broke the story on Thursday. On X, the publication posted a picture of the Ecce Homo with Two Executioners, featuring a grim-looking, sallow-faced man who appears to be wearing a thorny crown and holding a thin piece of wood, alongside a headshot of Trillo.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has named Christophe Cherix as its next director, succeeding Glenn Lowry, who has led the institution for three decades. The New York Times first reported the news on Friday afternoon.

Cherix begins in his new position this September. He has served as chief curator of MoMA’s prints and drawings department since 2013.

“MoMA has long been a leader in embracing new forms of expression, amplifying the voices of artists from around the globe, and engaging the broadest audiences onsite and online,” Cherix said in a statement. “As the Museum approaches its centennial, my highest priority is to support its exceptional staff and ensure that their unique ability to navigate the ever-evolving present continues to thrive.”

His curatorial credits include a range of recent retrospectives that have received widespread praise. In 2023, there was his Ed Ruscha retrospective, undertaken with Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan, for which Cherix personally facilitated the revival of the artist’s rarely seen 1970 Chocolate Room installation, which debuted at that year’s Venice Biennale. And in 2018, there was a retrospective for Adrian Piper, co-organized with David Platzker and Connie Butler, that was briefly the largest exhibition ever mounted by the institution.

With Manuel Borja-Villel, he also organized a 2016 Marcel Broodthaers retrospective at MoMA, as well as a survey of Yoko Ono’s art of the 1960s and ’70s that he co-organized with Klaus Biesenbach.