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A trove of works by the overlooked painter, deemed “the largest single-artist private collection” of a German artist in the U.S., catches the attention of collectors and historians. 

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There is a familiar quality to the work of Otto Antoine. The German painter’s evocative depictions of early 20th-century Berlin show people in various states of motion amid solemn urban landmarks, portraying a society caught in the current of rapid, uncertain change. These scenes are rendered with bold brushwork that is recognizable and compelling, yet so embedded within a stylistic continuum that it threatens to occlude its authorship. 

A landmark discovery is poised to change that. An enormous collection of more than 200 works by Antoine has come onto the market, holding with it the potential to push the artist’s name from the precipice of obscurity into the pantheon of turn-of-the-century German painters. 

“This collection should be viewed as a unique, one-of-a-kind, historically intact treasure,” said Jacquelyn Delin McDonald, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas and a specialist in lesser-known 19th and 20th-century European art. “It documents modern life, spanning decades of societal change.” 

Comprising 65 works in oil, 40 watercolors, and more than a hundred pencil drawings, it is, according to McDonald “the largest single-artist private collection of a German artist in the United States to my knowledge.”

The Boy Scouts of America is auctioning off the entirety of its 321-piece art collection, which includes works by Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, and J.C. Leyendecker, and is valued at around $59 million, to fund compensation for sex-abuse survivors as part of a bankruptcy settlement, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Heritage Auctions will begin the sale in November with an initial group of 25 pieces, including five Rockwell paintings like Homecoming (1961) and To Keep Myself Physically Strong (1964) and Leyendecker’s Weapons for Liberty (1917). According to the Heritage Auctions website, many of the works have been on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Howland, Ohio under the title “The American Scouting Collection” since 2020.

The auction house, which is based in Dallas, Texas, will hold previews and lectures in art hubs across the United States, including Chicago and New York, leading up to the auction, Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s senior vice president of American art, told the Journal.

The remaining collection will be auctioned over the next two years.

This sale is a small part of the $2.4 billion trust established for survivors of sexual abuse that was approved by a bankruptcy court in 2022. The settlement is funded primarily by insurance proceeds and contributions from local councils and affiliate groups. The trust also holds stakes in over 1,000 oil and gas properties valued at a total of $7.6 million, plus other assets. 

When undergraduate students return to the Ringling College of Art and Design this fall, one of the school’s newest offerings will be an AI certificate.

Ringling is just the latest of several top art schools to offer undergraduate students courses that focus on or integrate artificial intelligence tools and techniques.

ARTnews spoke to experts and faculty at Ringling, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Florida State University about how they construct curriculum; how they teach AI in consideration of its limitations and concerns about ethics and legal issues; as well as why they think it’s important for artists to learn.

“Knowing how these tools work and how they don’t work, and what they can do and what they can’t do is, we think an important step in a successful artist standing out, right?” Ringling’s AI coordinator, Rick Dakan, told ARTnews. “There’s a million different ways you can apply AI that aren’t having it write the story or make the art for you.”

Ringling’s certificate requires the completion of three courses—a required one on the fundamentals of AI as well as two electives: AI Techniques and Processes for Art, Topics in Artificial Intelligence and/or an existing course that has been revised to “have at least 30 percent of its curricular content related to AI.”

OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, has said it received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), signaling the regulator’s intent to bring a lawsuit against the company for allegedly offering unregistered securities.

On Wednesday, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer disclosed the notice in a blog post on the company’s website, asserting that the SEC’s targeting of tokens traded on its platform threatens the “creative expression” of its sellers.

The SEC has been clamping down on the crypto industry, bringing enforcement actions against major players like Kraken, Coinbase, Consensys, and Uniswap. The SEC previously charged Impact Theory LLC and Stoner Cats 2 LLC for similar offenses, with the latter agreeing to a $1 million fine.

In response to the Wells Notice, Finzer criticized the decision of the 2021 Stoner Cats case targeting the sale of NFTs for funding an adult animated television series, expressing concern over the SEC’s aggression toward digital collectibles and the companies overseeing their trading. OpenSea pledged $5 million to support legal defenses for NFT artists and other online developers who are vulnerable to similar actions.

“By targeting NFTs, the SEC would stifle innovation on an even broader scale: hundreds of thousands of online artists and creatives are at risk, and many do not have the resources to defend themselves,” Finzer said in an online statement, dismissing the government’s motives as “regulatory saber-rattling.”

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF) is relocating from its original Dogpatch neighborhood warehouse to a larger five-story modernist building known locally as “the Cube” in the city’s financial district.

The move, scheduled for October 25, comes just two years after the ICA SF opened its doors and will significantly expand the museum’s exhibition space from 11,000 square feet to 26,000 square feet.

Thanks to an agreement with Vornado Realty Trust, which owns the “Cube,” the ICA’s operational costs will be slashed: while the non-profit institution still has to pay for security and day-to-day maintenance, they won’t have to sign a lease or pay rent or utilities for 18 months.

“Every non-profit Arts organization is looking for the most sustainable financial model. This partnership with Vornado will help the ICA’s mission of providing a space for artists to realize something that is not necessarily what they would do for a gallery show or what they would do a larger institution,” Alison Gass, the museum’s founding director, told ARTnews. 

Gass described the building as “almost like a Venice Biennale-style exhibition experience in the middle of the heart of San Francisco.”

A 17th-century double portrait of Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck was returned after being stolen 40 years ago.

The work, an oil on wood painting by another Flemish artist, Erasmus Quellinus II, was reportedly stolen in 1979 while on loan at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, in southeast England.

The work had been in the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire since 1838.

Peter Day, a retired librarian at Chatsworth, said in a video that he organized an exhibition in 1978 at a gallery in Sheffield that included the painting. The show was staged again at Towner in 1979, where it was stolen on May 26, 1979 in what Andrew Cavendish, the late 11th Duke of Devonshire, described to Day at the time as a “smash and grab.”

In 2020, Belgian art historian Bert Schepers saw the work in Toulon, France, at an art auction, BBC reported Wednesday, and told Chatsworth about the suddenly located painting.

An Icelandic art student is being sued by Iceland’s largest fishing company, Samherji, after making an artwork apologizing for its alleged role in the so-called Fishrot scandal.

The scandal takes its name from a cache of over 30,000 documents leaked by a former Samherij employee in Namibia and published by Wikileaks in November 2019. The so-called “Fishrot Files” detail email correspondence between Samherji’s employees suggesting that the company paid millions of dollars in bribes to high-ranking politicians and officials in Namibia to acquire the southern African nation’s fishing quota.

Samherji had strongly denied allegations of bribery and the ten accused Namibian officials have protested their innocence amid detention for over four years. The case hit Namibia’s high court at the end of last year and is ongoing.

In 2023, artist Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson, known as ODEE, made the artwork We’re Sorry. The work was a fake UK-registered website replicating Samherji’s official website, but with the artwork’s title plastered in large font across the homepage.

“I was angry and saddened by the actions of Samherji in Namibia, which were exposed through the ‘Fishrot Files,’ and that after three years no one had been brought to justice or held accountable,” ODEE told ARTnews. “I felt that no one from Iceland had reached out to Namibia to apologize for what happened. So, my artwork is an apology on behalf of Icelanders to the Namibian nation.”  

ODEE, who is studying for a masters in fine art at the University of Bergen, Norway, also sent a press release titled “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities” to 100 foreign media outlets in 20 different countries.

There’s something dystopian about a tech company cofounder standing on stage and criticizing humans for being slow, expensive, and outdated in authenticating art. Why send a painting to some crusty old art expert’s laboratory for subjective analysis when “objective” artificial intelligence can do the job faster and more cheaply using just photos?

That was the question posed by Carina Popovici, CEO and cofounder of Art Recognition, a Swiss firm that uses AI to authenticate art, during a TEDxNuremberg talk in early 2022. The moment recalled the 1987 sci-fi blockbuster Robocop, specifically, the scene where an executive of evil mega-corporation OmniCorp unveils its latest police robot to a wide-eyed boardroom. Triumphantly, he tells the room that they need a cop “who doesn’t eat or sleep.” The robot stomps in before malfunctioning and pumping a suited board member full of hot lead. Art Recognition may be not OmniCorp—and Popovici nothing like her fictional corporate counterpart—but the company and art authentication outfits like it are similarly banking on technology to “clean up” the art market of fakes and forgeries. They’re also planning to do it with unprecedented efficiency and automation.

If you used a human “you would have to pack your painting, ship it off to a different country for appraisal … then you would have to wait for some months, or sometimes even years, for an answer,” Popovici said, with apparent disdain, as she live-demonstrated Art Recognition’s tech. “Our program needs about three days to learn the characteristics from around 700 training images, and less than five minutes to calculate the probability of the authenticity of an artwork.”

Art Recognition is far from the only company leveraging AI for art authentication, which has become one of the most popular use cases for the technology in the art world.

Hephaestus Analytical is a London-based tech company that integrates AI analysis and machine learning trained from sampled data sets, alongside scientific tests, provenance research, and “connoisseurly expertise to analyze works. It is focused on arguably the “dirtiest” corner of the market, the Russian avant-garde, which also includes modernism that flourished in other Soviet nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Denis Moiseev, the founder and CEO of Hephaestus, told ARTnews that more than 95 percent of the Russian avant-garde paintings brought to him are fake. (One London-based dealer specializing in Ukrainian modernist artists, James Butterwick, told ARTnews something similar, claiming that as much as 95 percent—“in fact, probably more”—of the paintings offered him are not authentic.) Hephaestus claims its system produces “the most conclusive authenticity results.”

This past April, just weeks before the opening of Dak’Art, Africa’s largest and longest-running biennial, the Senegalese Minister of Culture abruptly postponed the event citing unrest stemming from the recent political turmoil surrounding the former president’s proposal to postpone national elections.

Senegal’s democratic exceptionalism within a continent rife with military coups was at stake. Protesters set tires ablaze. Tear gas was fired. Amid such chaos, preparations for the biennial pushed on as hundreds of artworks arrived from overseas for their Dakar debut.

Such a precipitous pronouncement was awkward indeed. Collectors, artists, and curators from around the globe had made travel arrangements that could not be conveniently canceled. Indeed, the startlingly late postponement oddly echoed the former president’s bid to reschedule national elections.

But just as the citizens of Senegal had taken to the streets in defense of democracy, the creative community banded together in solidarity for the arts, announcing more than 200 events across the city in the weeks that followed. The consistently frenetic, often delightful, occasionally rigorous compilation of exhibitions, panels, and parties that followed marked a watershed moment in the autonomous momentum of African contemporary art.

Activities were swiftly organized through a newly created Instagram handle #theoffison, which was subsequently changed to #thenonoffison, indicative of the feisty spontaneity fueling the event. Pop-up public spaces of all kinds offered a study in contrast to the austerity of the former Palais de Justice, which had served as the official biennial’s center of gravity in past years. Venues ranged from large, state-affiliated cultural centers to unique nooks of the metropolis—an elite all-women’s social club with prime waterfront real estate, for example, that was nearly impossible to locate amid new construction and abandoned vehicles.

6 min read

1934: An important year in Oxford’s history?

This blog post was written and researched by Peter Cann.

Peter Cann is the author of Little Edens, a play performed at MOX in 2023.

Want to write your own Oxford-inspired post? Sign up as a volunteer blogger.

Last year the Museum of Oxford hosted a production of a play, Little Edens. It was about a rent strike that took place in Florence Park, East Oxford, in 1934. It was a bitter dispute involving more than 500 tenants complaining about the conditions of the new estate and rents.  It drew support from all quarters of the city, including Oxford University. The builder of the estate, a Tory councillor, evicted tenants who refused to pay their rent.

I am the author of the play and live on the estate. In researching and writing it I realised that change was in the air at that time. Britain was suffering from the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Millions were out of work in the industrial areas of the country, especially South Wales, Tyneside and Scotland. But there was work here in Oxford, at the new Morris car factory and the Pressed Steel factory next door that made the body parts for the cars. Thousands of unemployed workers made their way south, or east in the case of South Wales. Some walked and died in the attempt.

June 8 – August 25, 2024