At times, it can feel like auction house specialists are part of a cult whose mantra is, ““High-quality, well-priced, fresh-to-market artworks will always sell.”

On Wednesday, in London, Christie’s Tessa Lord was the latest to adopt the cliché after the auction house’s 20th/21st Century evening sale generated a respectable £82.1 million, on a high estimate of £93 million. Immediately following, Christie’s held its annual “The Art of the Surreal” sale, which smashed the high estimate of £38.98 million, generating over £48 million. That brought the night’s total to £130.1 million

“One of the defining characteristics of [mid-season auctions] is that collectors will always respond well to fresh-to-the-market material that is well priced and high quality,” Lord, the house’s head of post-war and contemporary art in London, told ARTnews.

In this case, Lord’s assessment was appropriate. 61 percent of the sale’s 51 lots had never been sold at auction before. (At Sotheby’s equivalent sale Tuesday, over half of the lots also had never hit the block before.) 94 percent of works sold by lot, and 96 percent by value. Four lots were withdrawn ahead of the sale, and three were bought in.

(All prices mentioned include buyer’s premium and other fees unless otherwise mentioned.)

Ricardo Scofidio, an architect who helped reshape the museum landscape in the US, died on Thursday at 89. His death was announced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm he founded with his wife Elizabeth Diller in 1997.

Working alongside Diller and firm partner Charles Renfro, Scofidio worked on many US museum projects, from the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 expansion to a building for the Broad, the Los Angeles private museum of collectors Eli and Edythe Broad.

The firm’s various projects included any number of projects that were not museums: Lincoln Center, redesigned with new outdoor spaces at a cost of $1 billion; the High Line, the railroad viaduct–turned–park that runs through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood; the Blur, a pavilion situated in a Swiss lake; the Brasserie, a restaurant in the Seagram Building. But it is Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museums that have had some of the greatest impact. (Though Scofidio was not the principal designer of all of them, he continued to play an active role in nearly all of them.)

The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the first US museum designed by Scofidio’s firm, offered a view of what the group would offer in future projects. Opened in 2006, the museum was, at the time, the first to be built in Boston in a century. It towers over the harbor nearby, with a hulking cantilevered form that juts out toward the water.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston is not without its quirks. Much of the art is confined to the building’s expansive fourth floor, leaving many portions of this sizable museum inaccessible to the public, and the lobby was labeled “an awkward leftover space” upon the building’s debut. But, even despite it all, the ICA Boston nailed down an aesthetic that Scofidio and his partners would popularize in the years to come: sleek but not too sleek, with heavy, minimalist forms that do not feel austere.

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The Headlines

ACLU SUES NEA OVER GENDER CLAUSE. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), claiming that its new policy requiring that its funding applicants do not “promote gender ideology” will limit what kinds of works can be shown, reports Alex Greenberger for ARTnews. On Thursday, the ACLU’s Rhode Island offshoot filed a lawsuit on behalf of several theaters, which said that the policy adopted after President Donald Trump’s January executive order was an “unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power that has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” While the lawsuit mostly refers to theatrical productions, as we learned in yesterday’s Breakfast Newsletter, any person or institution seeking funding for arts via the NEA is affected.

SF MUSEUMS FACE PAINFUL BUDGET CUTS. Museums in San Francisco are getting hit hard by the city’s budget cuts and may have to reduce opening hours and cut jobs, reports The San Francisco Chronicle. Faced with a financial crisis and the city’s 15 percent reduction in general fund allocations, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which oversees the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, proposed a host of cost-cutting measures in a plan submitted nearly two weeks ago to the mayor’s office for consideration. It outlines the cost-cutting benefits of slashing nearly a quarter of its city-funded workers, 23 positions out of 99, which mostly affects security jobs, while also impacting other human resources and museum operating jobs. Notably, it calculates the savings from closing the de Young and Legion of Honor museums on Tuesdays, in addition to the current Monday closure. However, shuttering on Tuesdays could also mean a drop in annual visitors, tourism, and economic growth, warns the FAMSF. “It is our understanding that the mayor’s office does not want to see a reduction of operating hours at the de Young and Legion of Honor, and we are working closely with the mayor’s budget office to analyze the proposal and look for other cost reduction opportunities,” said Helena Nordstrom, director of communications for FAMSF. Other San Francisco museums will be directly impacted by the budget cuts, including the Asian Art Museum, which is bracing to lose 13 security positions, despite warning, “it would be unsafe to operate the museum with this level of security coverage.”

The Digest

Researchers at English Heritage believe they have identified the only portrait of Lady Jane Grey made while she was alive, before her infamous 1554 execution. Known as the “nine-day queen,” she ruled over England for just that amount of time in 1553. Now, “compelling evidence,” including tree-ring dating and markings on the painted panel, which was apparently altered over the years, means, “it is possible that we are looking at the shadows of a once more royal portrait of Lady Jane Gray, toned down into subdued, Protestant martyrdom after her death,” said Rachel Turnbull, English Heritage’s senior collections conservator. [The Guardian]

Architect Ricardo Scofidio, who designed New York City’s High Line and The Shed, among many high-profile cultural structures in New York and abroad, has died at the age of 89. He led studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro with his partner Elizabeth Diller, and architect Charles Renfro. [Dezeen]

In a cramped basement space in New York’s SculptureCenter in early February, ventriloquist Sophia Becker adjusted the metal legs of a doll with long black hair, a single guarache made from metal, and an underwear-like piece made from medical materials that looks oddly fashionable.  “Oh god that feels good,” the doll chirped in a girlish voice, before complaining that she’s stiff from a lack of play. “The lookers come but they don’t touch. I wish they would touch!”

Becker was on hand for a one-night-only performance activating the exhibition, “Ideal Space for Music,” by Mexico-based artist-duo Hanya Beliá and Matias Armendaris, better known as ASMA. Becker puppetted the doll as she delivered a monologue about her life as an art piece, sitting in a museum. The room was packed, with an overflow audience watching a livestream on the floor above. Becker guided the audience into another room where another doll waited for her chance to come alive, this time to sing a song. The ventriloquy was followed by a musical performance by the interdisciplinary artist and DJ Esra Canoğullari, also known as 8ULENTINA, which included elements from foley sound production to accentuate the theatrical aspects of the exhibition.

The past year has been decisive for the duo, which is represented by Mexico City’s PEANA and House of Gaga, which has locations in Los Angeles and Guadalajara. Last October, they opened the SculptureCenter exhibition—their first institutional show—and then, just weeks later, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit opened its own show of their work, “Wander & Pursuit,” which closed in late February. They also have upcoming presentations at Art Basel in June with House of Gaga and at the Singapore Biennale in October.

For “Ideal Space for Music,” which runs until March 24, ASMA used SculptureCenter’s basement to reflect on the subconscious, a consistent theme over the course of their nine-year collaboration (which is perhaps unsurprising considering Armendaris’s mother’s career as an art therapist). The exhibition includes a series of metal spheres, a video work, soundscapes, ink paintings, and light fixtures made from found objects, transforming the cold concrete space into a bunker of the mind, a post-traumatic landscape of the collective psychology in which the dolls reside.

“It felt different making this work, we don’t usually use the body, the figure, to communicate our ideas about the unconscious,” Beliá told ARTnews after the performance ended. “We could feel it in the studio, when they came alive. All the parts were missing but the tension was there, and she could stand on her own. It was like magic.”