To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

TOURISTS ALLEGEDLY BEHAVING BADLY. An Irish man in Brussels was captured on video climbing on a stone sculpture of a lion and nude figure outside the city’s stock exchange on Sunday and then apparently knocking off a torch that the figure was holding by accident, the Irish Times reports. Police later cuffed the suspect at a fast-food restaurant. The cost of restoring the piece was put at €17,600 (about $18,800) in early reports. It was a weird weekend in Europe. Footage has surfaced of a woman (said to be an American) cuddling up to and touching Copenhagen’s famed Little Mermaid (1913) sculpture by Edvard Eriksen on Saturday, Metro reports. Signs near the landmark counsel visitors not to touch the piece. One onlooker told the outlet, “There was a crowd of about 100 people and everyone was watching on really confused.”

ARTIST UPDATES. Sculptor Martin Puryear is unveiling a permanent piece at the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York later this month, and got the profile treatment from the New York Times. ● Artist Derrick Adams, who opened a residency in his hometown, Baltimore, this year (The Last Resort Artist Retreat, it’s called), has a show up at Gagosian in Beverly Hills and was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. ● And competing for the John Moores Painting Prize for the tenth time (against more than 3,000 people), Graham Crowley finally won, BBC News reports. Presented by Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, the biennial honor comes with £25,000 (about $31,100).

The Digest

For the first time in US history, UAW members at the Big Three automakers are on strike at the same time. The walkout began when the union’s contract expired early Friday morning.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the initial strike targets during a Thursday night speech. The short notice is part of a new strategy under which the union is striking at targeted sites, rather than across a company. The goal is to maximize leverage by keeping automakers guessing about when and where workers will withhold their labor.

The initial targets are the General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, the Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) assembly complex in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. Roughly 13,000 UAW members are striking at those facilities. All three make trucks and SUVs, which have been key to US automakers’ profitability.

The UAW has more than 145,000 members across the Big Three. Fain said on Thursday that the union is prepared for everyone to go on strike if needed—stressing that all options remain on the table.

The UAW and the Big Three remain far apart in their negotiations. The union is pushing for a more than 30 percent increase in pay over the course of the four-year contract. Members also have been fighting for guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments, an end to tiered-pay systems that put new hires at a disadvantage, a return to defined-benefit pension plans, a four-day work week without a reduction in pay, and a right to strike over plant closures. The auto companies have offered to increase pay by between 17.5 and 20 percent, but remained opposed to the UAW’s top demands, Fain said earlier this week.

The Premier League is back! 

So naturally, Marcus, Luke, Jim and Andy are here to discuss the possibility of Pep Guardiola covering Phil Foden in chocolate and Roy Hodgson feeding worms to Crystal Palace’s next manager.

We also discuss Jadon Sancho’s 'banishment' from Manchester United and what it means for him and Erik Ten Hag. Join us!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.

A new bill has reached the desk of California Gov. Gavin Newsom that would bar the state’s public and charter schools from suspending or expelling students in sixth through twelfth grades for “willful defiance,” a largely undefined violation frequently meted out to students of color. The statewide ban, in force until 2029 once signed by Newsom, builds on the state’s efforts to slowly phase out this form of suspension and expulsion. If it’s enacted, California will be the first state to go from using the practice to banning it outright.

Already, in 2014, California became the first state to pass a partial ban on “willful defiance” suspensions—which are permitted in 25 other states, according to research by Temple University’s Policy Surveillance Program. The 2014 ban, which only applied to students in third grade or younger, was followed by a 2019 bill  that covered fourth and fifth graders permanently and middle schoolers through 2025. Newsom signed that bill, and appears poised to sign the new, broader ban, but his office hasn’t confirmed if or when that’ll happen.

ACLU California Action, which supports the ban, has said that the definition of willful defiance is too “subjective and overly broad,” with some students being suspended for “dancing, dress code violations, or not paying attention in class.” School officials’ judgment of whether a student is “talking back,” another common ground for willful defiance suspensions, can also be shaped by biases. The bill, introduced by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, does not limit other types of suspensions, such as those related to violence.

At an April hearing of the California Senate’s education committee, Skinner pointed to the use of willful defiance suspensions for small infractions like not taking a hat off or smirking at a teacher. The bill encourages teachers and administrators to de-escalate conflict with students and emphasizes that suspensions are a punishment of last resort.

“I completely appreciate a teacher could have a particularly bad day…this kid sets them off,” Skinner said in the hearing. “But we have other alternatives. We don’t need to kick the kid out.”

Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged Hunter Biden with lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in 2018.

The three-count indictment is the latest twist in a series of legal issues for Hunter Biden that could impact the reelection campaign of his father, President Joe Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that is based largely on Hunter’s past efforts to profit off of his perceived access to his father.

The new charges against Hunter Biden follow the late June collapse of a plea deal that his lawyers had negotiated with the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, under which Biden would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes, along with a felony gun charge that could have been wiped off his record if he adhered to the deal’s terms. That agreement fell apart when questions from US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika revealed that prosecutors and Biden’s lawyers had differing understandings of its provisions.

When Attorney General Merrick Garland assumed office in 2021, he left in place Weiss, a Donald Trump appointee, in an effort to avoid the appearance of interference with the ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden. Garland last month gave Weiss special counsel status in an attempt to further ensure his independence. And Weiss has insisted he has faced no pressure from Garland, President Biden, or others to curtail the probe.

Still, congressional Republicans have alleged that Weiss is going easy on the president’s son, and they have touted the disputed accounts of two IRS whistleblowers who claim their investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion was limited by political pressure. The notion that Hunter Biden is receiving special protection is a virtual article of faith on the right. Prosecutors on the case have faced threats and harassment from people convinced they are failing to enforce the law, NBC News reported Thursday.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office recently issued warrants for three artworks by Egon Schiele on the claim they had been stolen from a Jewish art collector that was killed during the Holocaust.

The warrants were issued to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. New York prosecutors are arguing the artworks by Schiele from these institutions belong to the three living heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, who was forced to liquidate his assets during his internment at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the news Wednesday, Grünbaum was a prominent Jewish art collector and cabaret artist who was eventually killed at Dachau in 1941. Before his internment, Grünbaum’s art collection grew to nearly 500 pieces, with with at least 80 works by Schiele.

The warrants were for the watercolor-and-pencil drawing on paper Russian War Prisoner (1916) from the Art Institute of Chicago; the pencil-on-paper drawing Portrait of a Man (1917) from the Carnegie Museum of Art; as well as the watercolor-and-pencil on paper work Girl With Black Hair (1911) from Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum.

According to the New York Times, all the works were valued between $1 million and $1.5 million, and will be transported to New York at a later date.

Egyptian government officials have ordered the close of the contemporary art center Darb 1718 in Cairo, the Art Newspaper reported on Thursday. The center is being demolished for the construction of a new major road.

The head of the center’s local district and the deputy governor reportedly showed up at Darb 1718 and told staff to leave the building in 30 minutes.

“When we asked for an official notification, they could not provide us with anything,” Darb 1718 founder Moataz Nasr told the Art Newspaper.

One of the first cultural spaces in the city to host exhibitions, concerts, events, and workshops, Darb 1718 announced the news of its closure in an online petition, which has garnered more than 11,000 signatures since it was posted on July 27. Nasr also filed a lawsuit with the state council. These efforts have so far delayed the center’s demolition.

Meanwhile, Nasr has said the center’s social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram have been suspended.

A New York court has dismissed one claim against Gagosian in a years-long legal drama surrounding a Richard Prince photograph, yielding a small victory for the mega-gallery as the case continues on.

The suit was first filed in 2015 by the photographer Donald Graham, who claimed that Prince had infringed on his copyright by using his photographs in works presented at Gagosian the year before.

The Graham work at the center of the lawsuit, Untitled (Portrait of Rastajay92), shows a crouched-over man smoking a joint. Prince’s take on it features that same image in the form of a screenshot of an Instagram post containing it, along with all the comments and likes that accompanied the image.

After that work was included in a 2014 show called “New Portraits” at Gagosian, Graham filed a cease-and-desist order against Prince. Other Prince works in the exhibition were publicly decried by the people represented, with their subjects claiming that he had not sought their permission before using their images.

Untitled (Portrait of Rastajay92) had not sold since Gagosian first purchased it, and Judge Sidney H. Stein’s decision rested on “indirect and unrealized profits,” or money that the gallery would have brought in, had the work found a buyer. He said that there was not enough evidence that those potential profits were “connected to the alleged infringement and [were] overly speculative.”

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.

Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance.