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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.”

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The Headlines

DOUBLE LEAK. In The Art Newspaper, Theo Belci reports that lists containing the names of more than 16,000 artists allegedly used to perfect the Midjourney generative artificial intelligence (AI) program have gone viral. The Google spreadsheet named “Midjourney Style List”, including references to Frida Kahlo, Walt Disney, Banksy, and Yayoi Kusama, was supposedly retrieved from Midjourney developers while the program’s ability to mimic specific works and styles was being refined. If access to the web document was restricted, it remains partially visible on the Internet Archive). Many of the names in it feature on another 25-page list used for a 2023 class-action lawsuit. “Even though the practice of using human artists’ work without their permission to train generative AI programs remains in uncertain legal territory, controversies surrounding documents like the ‘Midjourney Style List’ shed light on the actual processes of converting copyrighted artwork into AI reference material”, Belci wrote. 

BE PREPARED. What better way to enter the year (and the weekend) than to prepare for the events it holds? Galerie Perrotin, which has reached an agreement with the real estate investment company Colony Investment Management, is opening a new space during Frieze LA. In March, New York’s Grey Art Gallery, once relocated in a purpose-designed space at 18 Cooper Square, will officially become the Grey Art Museum. In Paris, the reopening of the Grand Palais multi-purpose venue for the summer Olympics is as expected as that of Notre-Dame de Paris. The entire Normandy region is celebrating, through some 150 exhibitions, the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, which was 99% ready in October 2022, should finally be accessible by May. Lastly, 2024 is also the year of the 60th Venice Biennale.

The Digest

Nicholas Galanin’s wide-ranging new exhibition, “Interference Patterns,” at SITE Santa Fe opens with something that the multidisciplinary Lingít and Unangax artist posits is uniquely American: a scream.

His new site-specific installation, Neon American Anthem (red), consists of a neon sign inviting visitors to “Take A Knee and Scream Until You Can’t Breathe” in front of a grid of doormats. The last several years have provided plenty of reasons to heed Galanin’s invitation and unleash a catharsis of emotion in this crimson-lit room. The piece threads together many different protest movements: Galanin created the work in response to climate change and other contemporary crises, but the piece in its final form ended up alluding to Black liberation and the kneeling gestures seen at football games.

Neon American Anthem, which is also currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum, is a perfect encapsulation of Galanin’s practice, which is sharply critical of systems of power and often acts as a mordant commentary on art world institutions, taking them to task for their continued role in colonialism. As Galanin explained in a recent interview with ARTnews, when the Seattle Art Museum first approached him about the piece, he was queried about how institutions could decolonize, a question he said he is often asked as an Indigenous artist. When his first proposals—to return tribal objects to their communities—were rejected, he arrived at the current work which, in its own way, bluntly unsettles the institutions in which its versions are housed.

“It’s interesting for me to see these engagements in different institutional spaces,” Galanin said. “It’s been getting strong feedback … but it’s also been difficult. [SAM] has had a hard time with it. They’re supporting the work, but it is engaging and challenging the entire institutional structure.”

When visitors engage the work by screaming, it is disruptive across the museum. At SITE, a contemporary arts space sprawled across a single floor, you hear the screams throughout the central lobby and many of the adjacent galleries.

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.

“Which orifice am I looking at?” is a question you’ll likely find yourself asking as you explore Tishan Hsu’s latest show at Vienna Secession. It’s a curious query to mull as you’re unable to look away from labial-looking mouths and anus-appearing belly buttons, all recurring throughout the exhibition’s dozen sculptures and wall works.

A most intriguing orifice can be seen in a photograph that Hsu affixed to the end of an abstract, lumpy, supine sculpture, right between two leglike mounds that appear to be spread apart. There, a black hole punctures through a distended mound of flesh. The print, with its black edges and rounded corners, might be mistaken for an iPad—even a moving image. For a moment, you may expect full-on body horror in the form of a video of a prolapsed anus. (Nearby, Hsu shows an actual video work in which bodily bits lurk behind a meshy surface, moving so slowly that you’re primed to question whether the things on-screen are moving or still.) Step closer to this mysterious orifice and you’ll see an innocent picture of an ear that—shot from an unusual angle, its attendant head blurred out—Hsu has rendered utterly uncanny.

Hsu wants viewers to attend to the changing ways that technology encourages us to relate—or not—to our own bodies. He shows us how we can now see ourselves from more angles than ever before, and yet this often breeds alienation instead of intimacy.

This exhibition in Austria debuts new works by a septuagenarian artist who’s been exploring ever-weirder relationships between bodies and technology since the 1980s. He worked largely under the radar until a 2020 traveling survey at SculptureCenter in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His next stop was the 2022 Venice Biennale; amid all this, he retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Now, he’s debuting new works that are his best yet.

Martha Diamond, a painter who gracefully pictured New York from all its many vantage points, died on Saturday at 79. A representative for David Kordansky, her gallery, said she died of a long illness.

Skyscrapers, scaffolding, reflections of tall buildings in glassy windows, and distinctive features of the Manhattan skyline were among the many subjects that Diamond regularly depicted. Rather than painting them naturalistically, however, she rendered them expressionistically, allowing their forms to smear and blur as she depicted the city through her own lens.

“Diamond is a New York visionary,” wrote the poet Bill Berkson in a 1990 profile of her for Artforum. “Her pictorial embodiments of the stuns and implosions of urbanity are best understood in the company of those painters of Manhattan across whose surfaces the arguments between representation and abstract form are deflected by the urge to nail down the forces that contend at just about any intersection.”

Because her paintings’ subject matter was so straightforward, many critics noticed a tendency among viewers to disregard them as flat or easy to take in. That, of course, was hardly the case.

“Ms. Diamond’s whole approach to painting is deceptively simple, full of hidden skills and decisions that only gradually reveal themselves, along with a good deal of humor and very little pretension,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in a laudatory review of one of her shows.

July 7, 2023 – January 7, 2024

September 14, 2023 – January 7, 2024

November 4 – December 29, 2023

December 2 – 30, 2023

November 16, 2023 – January 6, 2024

March 31, 2023 – January 7, 2024