Christie’s New York staged a marathon two-and-a-half-hour sale of 20th-century art on Thursday night that netted $640.8 million and notched new auction highs for Fernando Botero, Richard Diebenkorn, Arshile Gorky, Barbara Hepworth, Joan Mitchell, and Joan Snyder. All but two of the 63 works found buyers and two lots were withdrawn. 

The night was notable for the depth of bidding both in the room and on the phones; American bidders were an especially strong presence throughout the evening, the house saidat a post-sale press conference. Applause broke out no fewer than six times in the course of the evening, including a round of applause for auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen, who helmed the first half of the sale and gave his final performance before retiring after 38 years with the house. 

“It was a solid performance,” advisor Todd Levin told ARTnews on his way out of the sale room. “They did a good job with the estimates, and it was livelier than the last two nights.”

Advisor David Norman described the sale as “quite remarkable, especially when world events are so perilous.”

“It was an excellent sale, with lots of good, fresh material, which is exactly what the market wants,”  Norman told ARTnews after the auction. “Works that were making a repeat performance, like the Magritte, did extremely well,” he added, referring to L’empire des lumières (1949), which sold for a $30 million hammer price, or $34.9 million with fees, just shy of its high estimate.

In 2010, Barack Obama signed the Plain Writing Act into law, requiring that federal government documents use clear, straightforward language. Despite its passage more than a decade ago, though, getting plain-language information about government policy—ranging from the federal to local level—isn’t always easy. 

Plain-language documents serve a dual purpose: they can make information more accessible to people with disabilities that affect cognition and memory, but also address the fact that legislation is already complicated for most people to read—a case in point of how accessibility practices benefit even those without a particular disability.

New Disabled South, a disability justice nonprofit founded in 2022, is trying to make more information available to disabled people on legislation that affects them, launching its Plain Language Policy Dashboard in November to cover 14 Southern states. As of now, the bills it explains fall into six categories: accessibility, civil rights, criminalization, poverty and care, democracy, and education. 

Dom Kelly, New Disabled South’s CEO, told me that he hopes the dashboard—which uses AI to translate texts into plain language, which is then checked for accuracy and additional analysis is added—can also help “combat myths and disinformation” that spread on social media, like whether a mental health–related bill could actually lead to more institutionalization. 

I spoke to Kelly and e.k. hoffman, associate director of the nonprofit’s advocacy arm, about the policy dashboard and the importance of accessibility in politics.

Anticipation surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition has come to a close with the reveal of its latest annual theme. A preview held Wednesday morning at the museum featured Andrew Bolton, the curator overseeing the Costume Institute’s extensive fashion collection, as he announced the title for the much-awaited annual showcase: “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”

The theme, set to serve as the visual centerpiece for the Costume Institute’s annual Met Gala in May, the museum’s largest fundraising event, hinges on the concept of the senses and the natural world, Bolton told guests during the preview. Bolton elaborated that the exhibition would draw from the museum’s vast 33,000-item fashion archive and that curators selected 250 pieces that, in varying ways, relate to the “range of human senses.”

The primary aim, he added, is to “reanimate” historical and contemporary garments— once worn on living bodies, but now exist as artifacts for study within the museum’s archives.

Bolton emphasized that the theme is focused on garments alluding to the natural world, referencing a number of pieces the museum has selected: a 1958 hat produced by American designer Sally Victor, which doubles as a floral arrangement, a dress by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli bearing reproductions of floral postcards, and a 2011 Alexander McQueen piece embellished with artificial butterflies wings made from feathers.

The “impermanence” of fashion will also be a focus, the Met said. Adding to the exhibition’s focus on the senses, the Norwegian Berlin-based artist and chemist Sissel Tolaas will be a collaborator. Tolaas, who has collaborated with Balenciaga, will be tasked with reengineering scents associated with vintage clothes using geochemistry.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia will not run for reelection next year. 

The conservative Democrat called the choice—which he shared the news of in a video he posted to X—”one of the toughest decisions of my life.” Instead of running for Senate, Manchin said he would be “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.” 

If you think that sounds insufficiently vague…I agree. Which is why I reached out to Manchin’s press team in a bid to get some clarity. And specifically, to ask: Is he running for president?

No word yet. (Though, I’m not quite holding my breath: after my colleague David Corn reported a Manchin scoop back in 2021—that he was considering leaving the Democratic party and formulating an exit plan if the Build Back Better plan wasn’t dramatically cut down to his liking—the senator denigrated the Mother Jones story as “bullshit.” We stand by the story.)

In the meantime, NBC News reports that a person “with direct knowledge” of the politician’s future plans said “nothing is off the table” and “no specific decisions have been made other than a commitment to find a way to change the country’s political dialogue.”

GOP presidential candidates are threatening to deport international students who they accuse of sympathizing with anti-Israel terrorists. “If you are here on a student visa as a foreign national, and you’re making common cause with Hamas, I’m canceling your visa and I’m sending you home, no questions asked,” vowed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during Wednesday night’s debate.

“To every student who has come to our country on a visa to a college campus, your visa is a privilege, not a right,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said during the same event. “To all the students on visas who are encouraging Jewish genocide, I would deport you.”

Those comments were just the latest salvo in the escalating Republican campaign against immigrants who the right accuses of siding with Hamas, the group that perpetrated the October 7 mass murder in Israel. It’s a trend that is setting off alarm bells for civil liberties advocates, who warn that these proposals risk conflating support for Palestinian rights or criticism of the Israeli government with an endorsement of terrorism. Moreover, they argue, threats of deportation could have a severely chilling effect on free speech and the right to protest.

“It’s a really dangerous rhetoric,” says Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director of Project South, an organization that focuses on racial justice and immigrants’ rights. “This seems to be just another measure that is targeting a particular group of people, in this case immigrants, and using vulnerability in terms of immigration status to try to force people to stay quiet.”

The Republican demands have already gone far beyond typical campaign-trail bluster. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) urged the Biden administration to “immediately deport any foreign national—including and especially any alien on a student visa—that has expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel.” A week after the October 7 attack, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) introduced a resolution calling on President Biden to “revoke visas and initiate deportation proceedings for any foreign national who has endorsed or espoused the terrorist activities of Hamas” or other anti-Israel terrorist organizations. 

The photographer Nan Goldin said on Thursday that she had called off a project for the New York Times Magazine, accusing the newspaper of a pro-Israel bias in its reporting on Gaza.

“Yesterday, I canceled a big job with the New York Times Sunday magazine — a cover shoot of a musician I admire — because of the NYT’s reporting on the war on Gaza, which shows complicity with Israel,” she wrote on Instagram. “For what they report and don’t report, and how they question the veracity of anything Palestinians say.”

She tagged Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), a group of journalists, critics, and more that have “committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” according to a description on its website, which accuses the New York Times’s editorial board and others of having created a “perversion of meaning” since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and involved the taking of around 200 hostages.

Following that attack, Israel has launched airstrikes on Gaza, killing more than 10,000 people there, according to the local health ministry. The writers’ group linked out to a regularly updated page by the Committee to Protect Journalists that collects the names of journalists who have been killed during the conflict since October 7; the page now lists around 40 names.

On her Instagram story, Goldin alluded to these killings, writing, “I respect the NYT journalists who are on the ground reporting the reality. I mourn the dozens of Palestinian journalists who have been targeted and killed in the last weeks. As long as the people of Gaza are screaming, we need to yell louder so they can hear us, no matter who attempts to silence us.”

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

When financier Arthur Samberg died in July 2020 at 79, he was best known as the founder of Pequot Capital Management, one of the largest US hedge funds in the early 2000s. But court documents reviewed by ARTnews reveal that, behind the scenes, Samberg and his family were quiet major art collectors, owners of blue-chip works by Jackson Pollock, Constantine Brancusi, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Edward Hopper, among others.

Beginning in February 2021, Samberg’s estate began selling off holdings to select galleries, according to public records filed in New York at the time. Among the works consigned were Jenny Holzer’s Go where people sleep and see if they are safe, a red granite bench first produced in 1983, and an untitled LED sign from 2003, both of which were privately consigned to Hauser & Wirth. Around the same time, the estate also consigned Joyce Pensato’s 2016 painting Flashy Donald to Friedrich Petzel in New York.

Samberg founded Pequot in 1998. By 2001, the firm was reported to be the largest hedge fund in the world, with $15 billion in assets. Only eight years later, Pequot closed following an SEC insider trading probe, Samberg and Pequot agreeing to a settlement that included a $28 million fine and barred him from association with an investment adviser.

Samberg and his wife, Rebecca, were noted philanthropists, particularly for major Jewish organizations and higher education. Though they were noted supporters of organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jacob Burns Film Center, and Rebecca served as a trustee at the Katonah Museum of Art in Upstate New York, they never cultivated reputations as cultural patrons in the art world, either as collectors or supporters of major arts institutions. For example, the Sambergs never featured on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. (A representative from the Katonah Museum of Art did not respond to an ARTnews inquiry.)

Bonhams’s auctions of objects from the collection of Barbara Walters brought in $5 million. Ninety-nine percent of the 135 objects offered at an in-person sale sold, while all of the 238 lots made available online found buyers.

The estate toured Boston, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Hong Kong before the sale, before landing in New York alongside an exhibition commemorating her career. Art, jewelry, design, and personal objects were among the items made available for auction.

Presented at Bonhams, her collection was spread across two sales: a live one held on November 6 and an online one where bidding began on October 29 and ran through November 7.

Walters had amassed a collection of American art, much of it in the form of paintings depicting women set against idyllic backdrops. Among the works from it that headed to auction, Childe Hassam’s The Peony Girl (ca. 1888–89) fetched $622,800 and William Merritt Chase’s The Tenth Street Studio (ca. 1884–1915) sold for $508,500. The former was Walters’s favorite piece, while the latter hung in her living room.

From her Mario Buatta–decorated apartment, where Walters often hosted dinner parties, a set of chintz upholstered armchairs by the designer yielded $4,480; a pair of gilt metal ostrich-form candlesticks sold for $6,400; against an estimate of $800–$1,200, Baccarat glass stemware service fetched $5,760; and a Royal Crown Derby Imari porcelain dinner service exceeded its estimate of $800–$1,200, selling for $5,760.

Translated by Imogen Taylor

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me—she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its—midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film’s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another—decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip over, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle’s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.

A lawsuit filed yesterday in New York State’s Supreme Court reveals blistering criticisms against the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s board member by one of their own. 

Fredrick Iseman, Frankenthaler’s nephew who for 20 years was sat on the Foundation’s board with Clifford Ross, also the artist’s nephew, her stepdaughter, Lise Motherwell, and board’s director Michael Hecht, claims his family members are taking advantage of the artist’s legacy in what was colorfully described as “grabstract expressionism” that could effectively destroy Frankenthaler’s legacy. 

Iseman, who claims to have been hand-picked by Frankenthaler to preserve her legacy by helping organize exhibitions of her work at major institutions alongside” other artists of major importance,” says his family members exploit the Foundation “to advance their own personal interests and careers” which he sees as a “betrayal of their commitment to safeguard, protect, and promote Frankenthaler’s legacy.”

The slights against Frankenthaler’s name listed in the suit range from the tactless to the potentially devastating. Ross, who is an artist himself, is accused of engaging in shady “pay-to-play” deals, “trading the Foundation’s grant-giving capacity in exchange for exhibitions of his own otherwise unremarkable artwork and to generate publicity for his own career.” Motherwell, the suit says, used her position on the board to curate Frankenthaler exhibitions in small town museums that lack the prestige befitting an artist of Frankenthaler’s caliber “despite her complete lack of appropriate credentials.”

Hecht, too, is guilty of tarnishing Frankenthaler’s legacy, according to the suit, which says the director enriches himself by regularly employing his own accounting firms for Foundation business and facilitating donations from the Foundation to “unrelated institutions where he sits on the board.”