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 the pandemic hit in 2020, wealthy New Yorkers made a beeline for the Hamptons. Soon enough, galleries and auction houses followed the exodus down Montauk Highway and set up shop.

That year, Pace, Skarstedt, Van de Weghe, Michael Werner, David Lewis, Hauser & Wirth, and Sotheby’s opened spaces in East Hampton and Southampton. For a while, the Hamptons appeared ready to mature into a robust art scene, commensurate with the astounding real estate market that regularly sees one-percenters drop $50 million or more on an oceanfront villa. And yet, post-Covid, only David Lewis and Hauser & Wirth remain. Turns out, it’s difficult to hack it in the Hamptons, especially after most Manhattanites have retreated to the city.

“There’s this false conception,” Ryan Wallace, cofounder of Halsey McKay, in operation in East Hampton since 2011, told ARTnews, “that because of the wealth here, you can open up a store and billionaires are gonna walk in and buy art from you. But that’s just not how it works.”

While Wallace said that he didn’t see a dramatic shift in sales during the pandemic, nor did he feel in serious competition with gallery giants like Pace, his longtime clientele were suddenly more available. The second the fairs reopened, that changed.

Could Ryan Gosling's performance in the summer blockbuster win him an Oscar?

Marcus and Andy are back with big news! Everyone wants to leave Fulham.

They discuss what playmaker-keeper André Onana will bring to Erik Ten Hag’s ranks and there’s some heated debate about King of the Cottage, Marco Silva!

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There is much to admire in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on Friday. The directing, script, editing, sound design and acting are all extraordinary. Nolan deserves high praise for tackling this difficult and sprawling subject and raising questions about one of the most sensitive issues in our history, a raw nerve even today: America’s use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed at least 150,000 civilians.

Even in a three-hour movie, Nolan had to leave out a lot of vital material, in part because of his secondary focus on Oppenheimer’s infamous security clearance hearing almost a decade after he left Los Alamos. Still, his film omits or downplays several important—even crucial—aspects of America’s 1945 detonations that continue to haunt us today.

Notably, the new film barely touches on arguments that were expressed back then, not in retrospect, against using the bomb. Ditto the deadly radiation the new weapon produced,  and the secrecy that surrounded it—starting with the Trinity test, when a radioactive cloud drifted over nearby villagers who were not warned, and were then lied to about the fallout effects. This combination of lethality and secrecy would have extensive and tragic results in the decades after Hiroshima.

Nagasaki’s fate is also ignored, save three or four brief and rather forced mentions in the final hour of the picture. But Nolan’s most significant failing lies in not confronting—and in some ways sustaining—the popular narrative around the decision to drop the bombs, one that endures in government and media circles and among many historians, and is thereby reflected in public opinion polls.

That narrative holds that it was the detonation of the two bombs, and only that, which brought the Pacific war to an end. Simple cause-and-effect. The key scene in this regard in Nolan’s film, largely accurate, depicts the late-May 1945 meeting of the Interim Committee, President Harry Truman’s top advisory panel on the matter. One or two advisers question the necessity of deploying such a terrible weapon against Japanese cities, but their doubts are silenced by an officer who insists the Japanese won’t surrender otherwise, and a host of American soldiers will then have to die storming the country’s beaches. The panel is reminded of how savagely the Japanese have fought to the last man in other circumstances.

How a meme-filled pop culture phenomenon has deeper reverberations

The Florida Board of Education’s new standards dictating how Black history will be taught in public schools includes a provision implying that enslaved African-Americans learned skills for “their own personal benefit.” The guidelines, approved on Wednesday, have come under fire from civil rights advocates who’ve called them “a sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.” 

“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history.”

Two of the most contentious inclusions in the Board’s current guidelines include:

State Senator Geraldine Thompson, who worked on legislation to designate scholarships for the descendants Occoee Race massacre, on Wednesday blasted the new standards for blaming the victims, according to the Washington Post.

The policies add to Florida’s ongoing war against educational material Gov. Ron DeSantis and his conservative allies believe are objectionable, including content in courses focusing on African-American studies. Since his gubernatorial campaign, DeSantis has made combatting “wokeness” a large part of his platform and has signed off on several pieces of legislation aiming to control the way racism and history are taught to young Floridians in public schools. Perhaps the most severe form of legislation came in the form of the “Stop the Woke Act” which prohibits schools from teaching anything that implies the existence of systemic racism.

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

Sometimes, my rage gets the better of me.

To bike into downtown Denver, I need to take a left at a dangerous intersection. Despite being labeled as “cyclist friendly” by Google Maps, the crossing has no discernible bike infrastructure. There is a left turn lane but no signal; at rush hour, turning is impossible.

So, I use the crosswalk.

I was recently doing just that—rolling through the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal—when a car taking a right turn pulled in front of me. The driver rolled down his window, shook his finger at me, and said: “Not where you belong.” I was taken aback. Not where I belong? In the fucking crosswalk? With no pedestrians around, at an otherwise impassable intersection?

When I am zipping through town on a bicycle, my body protected only by a plastic sheath around my skull, I know that it is a bad idea to argue with motorists But, whoops, I yelled back at him.

Kylian Mbappé’s deadline to extend his PSG contract is approaching. Today, Jonathan Johnson joins Dotun and Andy to explain why Harry Kane to PSG would never have made sense and Andy explains why Dušan Vlahović is a much better fit. It’s fair to say the PSG ultras don’t agree…

Elsewhere, we celebrate the romance of Ángel Di María’s return to Benfica before Andy and Jonathan talk about the transfers that have caught their eye so far this summer.

We'll be back with another OTC Transfer Special next week. Got a question for us? Ask away! Find 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..

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As a UC Berkeley graduate, I never thought I’d type these words, but okay: Go Wesleyan!

Wesleyan University, a small, elite college in Middletown, Connecticut, costs about $85,000 a year, including room and board and sundries. On Wednesday, it announced that, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action in higher education (and possibly elsewhere), it would finally ditch legacy admissions, the practice of giving a preference to applicants whose parents—and in some cases grandparents, siblings, and other relatives—attended the school in question. It’s a practice that amounts to affirmative action for children of privilege.

Johns Hopkins and Amherst also ended legacy admissions in recent years, and MIT ditched them more than a decade ago. (“If you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that,” one admissions staffer noted in a 2012 blog post.) But all of the Ivy League colleges, and the majority of so-called Ivy Plus schools (the traditional Ivies plus the likes of Duke, MIT, and Stanford) still use them. In fact, a 2018 survey of admissions directors by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public ones gave an admissions boost to children of alumni, and sometimes to grandchildren and siblings. Children of faculty may also get special consideration, as they do at Harvard.

Legacy admissions, if it even need be said, are unfair, unpopular, and un-American—or at least run contrary to the ideals of the America we mythologize. I poked that alligator in an earlier piece about how the Ivies are grappling with their slavery ties. And whatever you think of affirmative action, legacy admissions look even less fair when you outlaw preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. That’s because the history of racial exclusion in US higher education ensures that the legacy admits at most elite schools, deserving or not, are dominated by well-off white kids. From that earlier piece:

Why do legacies persist? The optics, after all, are atrocious. “Back in the old days,” Matt Feeney wrote in the New Yorker after Amherst ended legacy admissions in 2021, “the rich kids probably liked having a few smart kids from the lower classes around, or at least conceded that they were necessary. The raw bookishness of the smart kids ratified the larger enterprise that they were all participating in—it was a college, after all. But now that the aristocrats are siphoning status from the meritocrats, the social bargain is starting to look like a bad one.”