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The South Florida Coalition for Palestine, members of Jewish Voice for Peace, and an ad hoc group of Miami-based artists and cultural workers protested outside Art Basel Miami Beach on Friday.

Over 100 activists rallied outside the Miami Beach Convention Center, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and calling on Miami-Dade County officials to stop supporting Israel. The protest came two months after tensions escalated in Gaza. Since October 7, when the militant group Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, Israeli forces have killed over 17,000 Palestinians in the region, according to the Gazan health ministry. 

The United States has continued to send weapons and support to Israel. International organizations, including the United Nations, have called for an immediate ceasefire in order to “prevent genocide against the Palestinian people.”

“I believe that artists hold a special power: the ability to reveal truths that can shift people’s awareness of the world around us,” said Agua Dulce, a queer artist, activist, and community organizer based in Miami. “I think there’s a societal avoidance of the internal reflections required to accept that genocide is currently occurring, because that would lead to the admittance of the unsightly truths of history. As an artist and creator, I believe that my role right now is to awaken that spark of humanity in those who’d rather not engage with it. I bare my soul to others, so that they may access its reflection within themselves.”

Miami Artists for Ceasefire (MA4C) has collectively garnered more than 200 signatures on an open letter in support of a ceasefire. Its organizers say they have already sent the letter to local officials via email.

At the Centre Pompidou in Paris on Thursday, striking museum workers, union members, employees from other French institutions gathered inside a theater at the museum.

“We better leave now if we’re going to catch the minister,” Vincent Krier, a member of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), France’s second largest union, told the crowd of about150. The plan was to march to the offices of Rima Abdul Malak, the minister of culture, and pressure her “face to face” to meet their demands for job security amid plans that the center will close for renovations for five years, starting in 2025. It will begin progressively closing after the Summer Olympics in 2024.

Pompidou workers went on strike in mid-October over those concerns, the latest in a series of strikes since plans for the arts complex’s renovations were first announced. Last month, negotiations between France’s five major trade unions and the culture ministry over the strike stalled.

Despite the length of the strike, it has only caused the institution to close for eleven days total so far, thanks to alternating groups of workers opting to picket. When security personnel, for instance, go on strike, the museum is forced to close. On Thursday, however, only the Kandinsky Library was closed, having just joined the movement the day before. But, in yet another sign of the strike’s expansion, the unions announced on the same day they decided to extend the strike to January 15.

Once at the ministry’s offices, located a half mile away near the Louvre, the crowd packed into the lobby, chanting “Pompidou en colère!” [The Pompidou is angry], as whistles blew, people clapped, and some drummed on a reception desk. After some time, Nathalie Ramos, a representative of the CGT-Culture union, and a leading figure of the protest movement, which is arguably the largest since the museum’s opening in 1977, addressed the crowd.

Potential buyers were approached to purchase a minority stake in Sotheby’s after its French Israeli owner, Patrick Drahi, leveraged assets associated with his telecommunications conglomerative Altice, the Financial Times reported earlier this week. Since then, Sotheby’s CEO Charlie Stewart has denied that the house is considering any public offers.

The Financial Times report, which was based on two anonymous sources, said that high net worth investors based in Europe were approached. So was the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a wealth management fund worth established in 2005 that oversees the assets of the state of Qatar.

The QIA reportedly held discussions with the auction house’s owner a year ago about the purchase of a stake in Sotheby’s via a potential capital increase, a maneuver meant to finance a new investment. Drahi did formally not pursue plans to offload stake in Sotheby’s, the report said. Those discussions are no longer active.

Drahi purchased the auction house in 2019 through his family office for $3.7 billion. The private proposals for the sale of a minority stake in Sotheby’s followed the owner’s announcement in August of a plan to leverage the Altice assets to deal with a $60 billion debt accumulated through acquisitions in France, the US, Portugal, and Israel.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Stewart, the Sotheby’s CEO, denied that Drahi was considering a public offering for Sotheby’s. He also said that the business was not in need of capital raising to fund its operations.

During the 2021 crypto boom, Miami became the white-hot center of the scene: Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, christened the Miami Heat’s stadium as FTX Arena, the city played host to a raucous Bitcoin 2021, the world’s largest crypto conference, Wynwood became home to startups like Blockchain.com, Solana, and Ripple, and Mayor Francis Suarez announced that he was converting his salary to Bitcoin. And, of course, Miami Art Week that year and last year were marked by an endless series of NFT activations.

Post-boom, much has changed: SBF was convicted of fraud last month, a year after FTX collapsed, the FTX Arena has since been renamed the Kaseya Center, and Bitcoin 2023 had noticeably worse vibes (and attendance). And yet, though the exuberant abundance of funds may no longer be in play, Miami’s burgeoning digital art scene appears intact and noticeably matured.

At the forefront of those efforts is the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which became more invested in new media arts as Miami’s interest in digital art increased. In 2018, a donation by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation went towards developing a new digital department, which received more funds during the 2021 boom and officially launched at the end of last year. This December, the museum launched PAMMTV, a streaming service for the museum’s new media and time-based works. (Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation opened Art Week on Monday by hosting Catalyst, an invite-only arts and tech forum.)

“Miami has always had people who are experimenting with digital art in really interesting ways, but the literacy wasn’t there from the institutional side for a long time,” Lauren Monzón, PAMM TV’s program manager, told ARTnews. 

“The NFT boom was curious, because you did get a lot of excitement and anticipation around digital art from the art world and institutions. But that really quick rise and fall also led to skepticism in terms of digital art collecting. That’s something that I think we’re still grappling with a little bit.”

In 2019, an inferno tore through Notre-Dame cathedral’s roof, consuming the fragile spire as Paris watched in horror. Firefighters saved the structure, including its two iconic towers, but two-thirds of the roof were destroyed. Within days, an $865 million project was launched, only to progress in spurts due to the Covid-19 lockdown, a slew of archaeological finds below the church’s foundation, and a controversial modernization plan.

But the end is in sight: the church will officially reopen its doors to visitors one year from today, the French government has announced. According to the Associated Press, French President Emmanuel Macron—hard-hat in tow—will tour the site with the stonemasons and carpenters currently working to meet the 12-month deadline, and afterward hand off proceedings to Notre Dame’s clergy for a long-awaited service. 

The cathedral is “not the biggest cathedral nor perhaps the most beautiful,” the Rev. Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, its rector, told AP, but “it is the incarnation of a nation’s soul.”

“The expectations, the preparations for the reopening are a magnificent sign of hope in a difficult world,” he added.

The rebuilding effort at Notre-Dame has been a divisive topic within France and internationally. Shortly after the fire was contained, French collector François Pinault and his son François-Henri pledged €100 million (about $113 million) toward the effort. Hours later, collector Bernard Arnault announced that he would donate €200 million (about $226 million).

Mike Parr, an acclaimed Australian artist, has been dropped by his longtime representative, Melbourne’s Anna Schwartz Gallery. Both the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday that Parr’s representation deal was ended after he staged a performance that referred to the Hamas attack on October 7 and the current conflict in Gaza.

Photographs of the performance shot by artist Zan Wimberley were posted to her social media Thursday. The images appear to show Parr painting words such as “Israel” and “Palestine” on a wall, and then painting them over in maroon and black. Titled Going Home, the performance was staged on December 2 at Anna Schwartz Gallery, where a multi-part Parr show, “Sunset Claws,” is still ongoing.

Because the words are layered on top of one another, it can often be difficult to make out the full phrases that Parr scrawled via Wimberley’s documentation. But, according to the Guardian, Parr also wrote the words “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” as well as the phrase “Hamas raped women and cut off the heads of babies,” a reference to unverified reports from Israeli officials about the October 7 attack in which the militant group killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, more than 110 of which have been released.

“I was sickened by the hate graffiti inscribed on the wall, however I in no way intervened nor censored Sunset Claws, as the full length video of the performance, still playing in the gallery, will attest,” Schwartz said in a statement to the Guardian. “I have always acted in the interest of the artists represented by the gallery and this is the only time an artist has breached my principles of anti-racism.”

Parr told the Guardian, “What Hamas has done in Israel is totally reprehensible and cannot be condoned. But to all intents and purposes 20,000 civilians have now died in Gaza and tens of thousands have been wounded.” He noted that he “abhorred” antisemitism and said that his dealer of 36 years “understands very well the political nature of my performances.”

Amazon has reportedly ended its financial support for the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California, after the institution included an artwork that the company deemed critical of its business strategy in Southern California’s Inland Empire.

The news was first reported earlier this week by the Los Angeles Times. Just days after the article was published, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, who has recently become a high-profile collector, was spotted at Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the country’s leading art fairs.

Amazon’s decision to cut ties with the Cheech was revealed in a leaked document laying out several of the company’s business and PR strategies for 2024. It was posted to X (formerly Twitter) by Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and a former California State assemblyperson.

The L.A. Times was able to independently verify the authenticity of the document, and an Amazon spokesperson did not dispute its veracity to the paper.

Amazon spokesperson Jennifer Flagg told ARTnews that the L.A. Times article was a “blatant mischaracterization of Amazon’s work, and in fact, Amazon is proud to be engaged philanthropically in communities across the country.”

Bad artist documentaries—there are many of them—breed the myth of the lone great artist, the genius who works in isolation, without the help of studio assistants, to conjure up masterpieces. Anselm, Wim Wenders’s flimsy new film, now transposes that myth onto Anselm Kiefer, the German painter and sculptor whose persona hardly needs to be built up any more than it already has.

This documentary, which was shot partly using 3D cameras, is set mainly in two palatial French towns where Kiefer has set up shop: Barjac, the southern commune where he has erected a 98-acre compound that functions as an art installation in its own right, and Croissy-Beaubourg, the Parisian suburb where he currently runs a massive studio for his oversize art. Wenders, like many others who have visited those places, is clearly in awe of what Kiefer has done at both.

At many points in Anselm, Wenders’s camera sweeps around Kiefer’s many creations at Barjac. At dawn, it romantically encircles Kiefer’s steel sculptures of dresses, sans wearers; sometimes they are outfitted with objects like open books or metal globes for heads. In the fog, it traces Kiefer as he walks amid a suite of his towers that rise high into the air. On a sunny day, it floats godlike above it all, revealing the vast compound in all its glory.

Rarely, if ever, does Wenders show anyone other than Kiefer traipsing through Barjac, which dates back to the Renaissance. Perhaps that makes sense, given that the compound, known as La Ribaute, only opened to the public last year. (It’s also a two-hour drive from Marseille, not exactly a tourist destination itself.) But Wenders’s choice to depict a solitary Kiefer affirms this cloying film’s belief in the artist as a powerful soloist without really interrogating that line of thinking.

Witness the scenes set in Croissy-Beauborg, where Kiefer is shown creating paintings so big, they must be wheeled around. Most times, Kiefer is shown alone, slopping chunky paint onto his vast landscapes.

Art Basel Miami Beach took place a week and a day later than usual this time around, and that was a good thing. It meant that early arrivals could spend a couple of days of with the exhibitions already on view ahead of the hectic fair-hopping.

You could travel all the way to West Palm Beach to visit ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody’s collection or take in closer ones like those of the Rubell Family and Jorge Pérez. At the museums, the offerings range from a disappointing solo for Miami-based Hernan Bas to a standout survey for Charles Gaines at the Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Below, a look at some of the good and the bad on view in South Florida ahead of the fair.

Collectors with an Eye

DeWoody and her curatorial team, Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, are on a roll this year. Those who made the trek to West Palm Beach to visit her private exhibition space, the Bunker Artspace, could find a group of spectacular exhibitions that acted as a testament to the depth of DeWoody’s collection. Thankfully, those shows also don’t take themselves too seriously.

The art industry has once again descended on Miami for a week of “parties, paintings, and pills” at Art Basel Miami Beach, with several galleries already reporting sales of works over $1 million.

This year’s edition of ABMB takes place after a “fair and sober” evening auction season, but any concerns about international conflict or an economic recession were quickly mitigated during preview days.

“Sales at the booth have been strong since the opening hours of the fair, signaling an optimistic shift in this year’s sleepier market and economy,” Lehmann Maupin partner Fionna Flaherty said in a press statement. (Sales are self-reported by galleries, making the data difficult to confirm.)

Dealers reported robust attendance from collectors, curators, and museum groups hailing from Aspen to Paris to Hong Kong, as well as sales of works valued as highly as $20 million.

Below, a look at seven works that galleries said sold during Art Basel Miami Beach’s opening days, as well as a major work that could break an artist’s sales record.

7 min read

Pre-newspaper times

Even though the printing press was introduced to England in 1476, it was only in the 16th century that printed news took off, and even then, at a very slow pace, due to the necessity of town criers to provide them, stemming from the illiteracy of the general population. Early forms of printed news varied from printed news books to news pamphlets and usually related information pertaining to a singular event (e.g., battles, disasters or public celebrations). The earliest record of such a pamphlet details an eyewitness account of the Battle of Flodden (1513) between the English and the Scots, where the former were victorious. However, the Tudors kept strict control over the dissemination of news, preferring its delivery from church pulpits. Furthermore, by the 1500s, all printing matters were reserved to royal jurisdiction. King Henry VIII (r.1509-1547) issued a list of proscribed books in 1529. Nine years later he proclaimed that books needed to be examined and licensed by the Privy Council, or its deputies, to be published and did not allow for any unlicensed books to be published. Mary I (r.1553-1558) provided the Stationers’ Company, a guild of stationers tasked with handling the trade of books and related activities, with a charter in 1557. As a result of this charter, the Company now held the right to find and seize unlawful or pirated works. The Stationers’ Company was given further measures of control and licensing during the reign of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) due, in part, to concerns over the circulations of material which attacked or undermined the queen’s religious settlement of 1559.

The Star Chamber, a court consisting of judges and privy councillors, supplementary to common-law courts, thus put forth a decree in 1586, in which print trade became heavily regulated and the publication of news was wholly forbidden. This decree restricted printing to only London, with the exception of two other printing presses, one at the University of Cambridge and one at the University of Oxford. A petition for the recognition of a press was put forth to Elizabeth I, two years earlier, by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The decree granted the University one printer and printing press.

The need for news

Considering the strict control over printed content in England, the first newspapers to be printed in English were called corantos, published in Amsterdam around 1620 and smuggled into England. A group of London publishers and printers began circulating printed sheets with news in this style shortly after, and one of them, Thomas Archer, was even jailed for printing corantos without permission. In 1621, a translated version of a Dutch coranto called Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France was published. The content of this work contained no information on national news, but rather happenings around Europe, with a focus on the Thirty Years War. The Thirty Years War became a widespread media phenomenon and it ultimately led to the suspension of news publications between 1632 and 1638, by order of the Star Chamber, due to complaints of unfair coverage from Spanish and Austrian diplomats.

England at this time was ruled by Charles I (r. 1625-49), who believed in the divine right of kings, meaning that no one but God could overrule him. For 11 years he led England under Personal Rule, having dissolved Parliament and ruled by decree. In February 1640 he had no choice but to summon Parliament (also known as Short Parliament), as he needed funds to finance the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland. However, he dissolved it after only three weeks, as Parliament was more concerned about addressing numerous grievances they had with him. After losing the poorly funded Bishops’ War, Charles I had no choice but to recall Parliament for a second time (Long Parliament). In 1641, the Star Chamber was abolished by the Parliament, with the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1640. Without copyright laws being enforced, media was freer than ever without restrictions, and there was a high demand for news to keep up with the events of the Civil War. Both pro-Royalist and pro-Parliamentarian publications were printed to drum up support from the public on each side.

November 12 – December 2, 2023

June 22 – December 3, 2023

October 27 – December 2, 2023

October 19 – December 2, 2023

November 8 – December 22, 2023

September 14, 2023

November 10, 2023 – January 3, 2024