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The Orlando Museum of Art has rescinded legal claims of fraud and conspiracy against the five co-owners of a group of allegedly forged Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings at the center of a scandal that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.

If you attended the 2022 Venice Biennale, chances are you still remember the penis. It looked like a seven-foot-tall anatomical model, with sores on its shaft and cancerous growths on its insides. Mounted on wheels, this tumescent, tumorous member was attached to a procession of sculpted giraffes, whose white bodies appeared to melt away, dripping apart as they trudged onward.

The artist behind this phallus was the young German phenom Raphaela Vogel, and the sculpture, titled Ability and Necessity (2022), troubled some viewers and energized others. New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote that the Vogel piece was one of the show’s “moments of stunning bad taste.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant that as a compliment or an insult.

Or maybe it was both. Vogel’s art tends to provoke and delight simultaneously, and she embraces the bizarre mix of emotions her work might elicit. “It’s not that I want people to be afraid or shocked,” Vogel said on a recent afternoon, speaking in a backroom of the New York gallery Petzel, which began representing her last year.

She pointed out that the penis of Ability and Necessity could not serve a purpose. It was being toted around like a parade float; it had outlived its function as a reproductive organ or, say, a symbol of the patriarchy. With a straight face, Vogel asked, “It’s a bit funny, right?”

Within Germany and the surrounding region, Vogel’s art has accrued a following. Ask five of her fans which aspect of her oeuvre is most successful, however, and you may get five different answers. Some may point to her videos, in which Vogel, often acting as the work’s director, editor, and performer, turns the lens on herself, creating situations in which she seems trapped by her device’s gaze. (One memorable video involved the usage of a drone that loomed high above, capturing Vogel playing the accordion on a rock in the middle of the sea.) Others may praise her paintings, which often resemble freestanding animal hides rather than traditional canvases hung on a wall. Still others may laud her installations, which she approaches like sets, reformulating their elements with a mind for how viewers move about them.

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

It started with a blast of static that faded away to reveal a gentle pulse of animal sounds: a serene reprise from seemingly alien birds and bugs going about their business on a planet other than our own. An enormous 60-foot screen showed aerial views of former forest land, where trees—or what remains of them—blaze in otherworldly colors. Then a jarring jump cut shifts to close-up footage of young Indigenous people in feathers and face-paint excoriating disgraced Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (“You filth!” “Parasite!”) for damage done to the Amazon.

All of that is part of Broken Spectre (2021), a bracing video work by Irish artist Richard Mosse currently on view in a new space for Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The show’s setting is itself a story, as the 1898 Italian Renaissance Revival building by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White will soon play home to a new Shainman space when it opens officially after further renovation later this year.

But the setting of the Amazon is of far more immediate and urgent concern here. Broken Spectre draws from travels that Mosse undertook to the Amazon Basin between 2018 and 2020, when he captured still and moving images of environmental destruction on a scale that boggles the mind. Wall text at the entry to the exhibition—which continues through March 16—states that more than one-fifth of the original rainforest has been destroyed in the last 50 years. The 74-minute video documenting the ongoing decimation shows no signs of that slowing any time soon.

As in work that Mosse has made in other neglected locales including the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo and cast-out refugee encampments in hostile parts of Europe, Broken Spectre is a documentary that doubles as a call-to-action. It’s slow and poetic but also visceral and intense, mostly wordless and bolstered by a score that includes music and field-recordings of wild nature. The soundtrack is the work of Ben Frost, a musician and composer—and previous collaborator with Mosse—who mines fertile realms between contemporary classical music, dark ambience, and noise pushed to voluminous extremes. (The current show is a rare gallery happening for which earplugs wouldn’t be unadvisable.)

After a period of controversy, the Istanbul Biennial, one of the world’s top recurring art exhibitions, will completely redo its forthcoming edition, delaying its opening date by a year and bringing on a new curator to mount it.

On Friday, the Art Newspaper reported that Iwona Blazwick will no longer serve as the curator of the next Istanbul Biennial. That exhibition was initially expected to open this year. It will now open in 2025—a move that the biennial said would allow for time to rethink the show.

Blazwick, the chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia, had been the subject of scrutiny because she was also formerly a member of the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory committee.

The Art Newspaper had previously reported that despite that committee having recommended Defne Ayas to curate this edition of the biennial, Blazwick was selected instead. The foundation that manages the biennial, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), had reportedly not gone with Ayas because of her 2015 Turkish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, devoted to the artist Sarkis. Her catalogue for the show had initially mentioned the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies having happened; the book was subsequently taken out of circulation.

Around the time of the Art Newspaper report, Blazwick and three other members resigned from the committee. Afterward, a period of tumult followed at the biennial: artists said they would no longer participate in the show, the IKSV announced that it was going to overhaul the curatorial selection process, and the foundation’s longtime director, Bige Örer, resigned, only to be replaced earlier this year by Kevser Güler.

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The Headlines

INVESTIGATION NARROWS: A suspect was arrested by Brazilian police in connection to the death of the prominent New York dealer Brent Sikkema this week. Local TV Globo reported police detained a 30-year-old Cuban man named Alegandro Triana Trevez, who was in possession of $3,000 and a gold chain allegedly stolen from Sikkema. Trevez also appears to be seen on security footage entering Sikkema’s apartment on Sunday. Meanwhile, local media quoted unnamed sources who discussed a child-custody conflict between Sikkema and his Cuban husband. Sikkema, 75, was found dead Monday with 18 stab wounds in his Rio de Janeiro apartment. He founded Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in 1991. The gallery announced a memorial service will be held in his honor.

LOYAL TILL THE END: The courtroom saga continues between Accent Delight International, owned by Russian billionaire, Dmitry Ryboloviev, and Sotheby’s. Yesterday, the auction house’s head of private sales, Samuel Valette, was back on stand, questioned by the lawyer representing Sotheby’s, who attempted to undermine Ryboloviev’s accusation that the auction house aided the Swiss art dealer, Yves Bouvier, in overcharging him some $1 billion. ARTnews Senior Reporter Daniel Cassady said the testimony unfolded more like a conversation than an inquisition, aiming to show Valette’s principal, contracted client was Bouvier, not Rybolovlev. Pursuing Rybolovlev further, at that time, “would be like stabbing my client [Bouvier] in the back,” said Valette, though he hoped to business with Rybolovlev in future. Meanwhile, Bouvier, the elephant in the room, who is not a party to the current trial, released a statement insisting on his innocence. “Following the debates made in the New York courtroom, and the media coverage they have caused, is like a surreal charade in which people argue over a fraud that was proven to have never happened,” Bouvier said.

The Digest

Sotheby’s head of private sales Samuel Valette was back on the witness stand Thursday in the civil suit brought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, in which he accuses the auction house of helping bleed him of $1 billion dollars by providing Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier with bloated estimates for blue-chip works. This time, however, it was Sotheby’s attorney Marcus Asner’s turn to question.

Among the more interesting things one notices during the hours spent watching lawyers question witnesses is how two people vibe. On Wednesday, when Valette was questioned by Rybolovlev’s counsel, Daniel Kornstein, the exchange quickly turned antagonistic. Of course, if would be. They are on opposing teams. Valette says he and Sotheby’s are innocent of the accusations brought against them. 

In Asner’s hands, Thursday’s testimony was a conversation, not an inquisition. During his questioning by Kornstein, Valette often seemed frustrated by the judge’s direction to keep his answers short. On Thursday, he was relaxed, as Asner prompted him to explain the details, like a contract between Sotheby’s and Bouvier’s company Blancaflor Investments, as well as multiple emails between Valette and his colleagues and superiors at the auction house.

Asner’s goal was untying, or at least loosening, the knots that Kornstein was trying to bind Valette down with the day before. This strategy involved walking Valette through many of the same questions Kornstein asked, but worded slightly differently or in a different tone. 

“During the time you spent with Mr. Rybolovlev did you ever tell him that you were his Key Client Manager?” Kornstein asked Valette on Wednesday, referring to an internal term Sotheby’s uses to designate specialists who are assigned to cultivate and manage specific collectors, regardless of whether the collector is aware or if Sotheby’s has ever done business with them.

8 min read

The Peter McQuitty Bursary, a research bursary awarded by the Museum of Oxford to fund local heritage projects led by young people in Oxford, has chosen to award local historian Dan Poole with funding for the research and creation of a biography of Charlie Hutchison. Due for completion in early 2024, this biography will contain original research based on newly recorded oral interviews with Charlie’s surviving family, alongside newly uncovered archival documents and photographs.

In this article, Dan Poole answers some questions about the Peter McQuitty Bursary and the direction of his research.

Who was Charlie Hutchison?

Charles William Duncan Hutchison (1918-1993), born on the outskirts of Oxford in the small historic village of Eynsham, grew up to become a life-long anti-fascist and trade unionist. He is most notable for being the only known Black-British person to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Having probably lied about his age when travelling to Spain, he was among the youngest foreign volunteers, one of the longest-serving, and one of the first to arrive from Britain. After narrowly surviving a bloody defeat which wiped out many of his fellow volunteers, he switched from fighter to ambulance driver, saving countless lives during the war. Come the start of the Second World War, Charlie joined the British military and was present at the Dunkirk Evacuation, the Italian Campaign, the North Africa Campaign, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, and the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Having barely survived his ten-year crusade against fascism and having witnessed the very worst of humanity, Charlie laid down his weapons to begin a new life. He raised a large family and lived a long and quiet life in South England, only occasionally returning to politics in support of peace campaigns and trade unions.

Born into poverty and having spent years of his childhood in an orphanage, Charlie’s early experiences of racism and poverty inspired his life-long support for trade unions and anti-fascism. When asked why he had risked everything to fight fascists, Charlie summarised his life into two sentences:

October 20, 2023 – February 18, 2024

October 6, 2023 – March 31, 2024

November 17, 2023 – January 20, 2024

February 12, 2023 – January 21, 2024