Over the past 15 years, Los Angeles–based dealer François Ghebaly has established himself as a major player. He represents some of today’s most important artists, from Farah Al Qasimi to Candice Lin; expanded to New York two years ago; and opened a second LA space earlier this month. Even still, he never considered pursuing a career in art until he moved to LA in the mid-2000s, when he was in his early 20s. 

Ghebaly grew up in Saint-Louis, France, on the other side of the French-Swiss border from Basel. Growing up in a suburb of Basel, Ghebaly regularly took advantage of the “world-class culture” the city had to offer, from its esteemed museums and musical offerings to Art Basel, the marquee art fair that has taken place there since 1970.

“I had a business degree by default because it’s something that runs in the family—I had a job waiting for me in a bank in Switzerland,” Ghebaly said. “No one in my family was connected to the art business, so it was not the kind of business I thought I could do.”

Shortly after landing in LA, Ghebaly started working at the Brewery Art Colony, a former 16-acre Edison power plant in the city’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood that was converted into artist lofts in the 1980s. “I very quickly ended up being surrounded by a fascinating community of artists, some of whom became my dear friends. The community that I came across in LA was so fascinating that I wanted to apply my skills in business for artists,” he said. 

In 2006, Mihai Nicodim, who had also recently arrived to LA from Europe, opened up his own gallery, then called Kontainer Gallery, in Chinatown, and one of his first hires was Ghebaly, as an intern. By his third month on the job, Ghebaly was a director.

Two Florida–based Native American activists are asking the city of Miami to stop an ongoing archaeological dig in the Brickell neighborhood. The site is being developed for residential housing.

The artifacts found at the site include pottery sherds, stone tools, and humans remains likely dating back to the Tequesta people who lived along the Miami river.

Will Pestle, a bioarchaeologist and University of Miami professor, told Local 10 News that the site dates back as far as 7,000 years: “[It’s] older than the pyramids. It is older than the colosseum in Rome.”

Meanwhile Robert Rosa of the American Indian Movement of Florida and Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida are requesting that the city stop the excavation.

“I was a little bit angered and felt like our ancestors were being disrespected,” Osceola told Local 10 News. She also suggested the area be preserved like the nearby Miami Circle.

At the opening of Frieze Los Angeles on Thursday, collectors and museums appeared especially keen to acquire art, with dealers reporting success in placing works in institutional collections based in the U.S. and Europe.

In their sales reports, dealers said that the return to Los Angeles for this year’s edition of the heralded fair was fruitful. Works valued as high as $3.5 million landed buyers, signaling that business was taking place at a steady pace on opening day.

A few dealers said this opening outpaced expectations. “The energy both at the fair and beyond has been contagious,” Lehmann Maupin partner Jessica Kreps said in an email to ARTnews. “My conversations with curators and collectors seem deeper and much more calculated this year. People are interested in learning more about long-lived and established careers, rather than looking out for the next best thing.”

Gagosian reported that its entire booth of nine works on paper and painting by Rick Lowe sold within the fair’s opening hours. Antwaun Sargent, a director at the gallery’s New York locations, told ARTnews that the fair’s results indicate that excitement over the artist “only continues to grow.”

It was not just mega-dealers who saw multiple works by attention-grabbing artists sell out in the early hours. London’s Victoria Miro reported that 18 paintings, each priced at under $80,000, sold from its solo booth of new work by Doron Langberg.

Shipping might not be a glamorous aspect of the art industry, but it is an essential service crucial to successful exhibitions, acquisitions, and archival collections, as well as the growing import and export of art.

For the Frieze Los Angeles art fair, this means dozens of galleries — from across the city and around the world — shipping artworks to the Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar in hopes they will be snapped up by collectors, curators, and other institutions.

Art shipping and transport is a service often provided at a premium by logistics companies like Maquette Fine Art Services and Crozier Fine Arts. Many of these companies offer art shipping and transport in conjunction with custom touring crates and protective containers, shipping preparation, and installation, as well as short and long-term storage. Art insurance is a separate matter, purchased from companies like Chubb and Berkeley Asset Protection.

In addition to arranging transportation logistics, art shipping companies help clients navigate security issues, customs, taxes, duties, as well as import and export regulations for different countries. With the international nature of the modern art industry, all of this is necessary in order to ensure artworks are moved safely and securely to and from artist studios, museums, galleries, and 300-plus art fairs and biennales, as well as the homes of private collectors.

Here are the most important things experts told ARTnews about art shipping:

Catalan authorities have recovered a cache of graphic works by Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró that were stolen last year in Barcelona. 

Police have detained three brothers, aged 50, 53 and 55, who allegedly targeted homes in Barcelona’s high-end neighboorhoods that held fine art and luxury goods. The robbery ring has been under investigation since January 2022 as part of operation ‘Gresca,’ and, on Friday, police announced that a trove of stolen jewelry and banknotes and art, including two 100-year-old illustrations by Dalí, were seized from the suspect’s hideout.

The Dalí charcoal drawings, pastoral scenes on brown paper and valued around $300,000, were authenticated by the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, which manages the Surrealist’s legacy. The two works date to 1922 and were created on the request of the writer Pere Coromine for his book Les Gràcies de l’Empordà (The Empordà’s Graces in Catalan).

Two other suspects were arrested on charges of receiving the stolen goods and have been released along with the three brothers were released on bail ahead of the trial, per a report in Reuters in Friday.

Five works attributed to Miro were recovered and are currently awaiting authentication by the artist’s estate. Two pieces by the painter Paco Sola were also found on the scene, along with precious antiques, such as silver and golden pens, as well as coins and jewels.

ARTnews and Los Angeles–based lifestyle brand, PLEASURES, announced Friday that they will be releasing a unisex apparel collaboration. The collection will launch on February 18.

“We wanted to educate our audience about the importance of art not only in culture, but also in media through one of the most premier platforms: ARTnews,” said PLEASURES cofounder, Alex James. “The merging of fashion and art is not a new concept but something that will surely live on.” 

Collaborations between the art world and fashion have a long history. For example, the O.G. art/fashion project, Dalí + Schiaparelli, as ARTnews editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas wrote in 2021, brought us the Shoe hat, the Lobster dress, the Tears dress, and the Skeleton dress. Other artist x fashion collaborations have included Hank Willis Thomas and Helmut Lang, Richard Prince and Louis Vuitton, and Anne Imhof and Burberry. Most recently, Louis Vuitton released a new collaboration with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

The ARTnews and PLEASURES collection includes a hoodie in black and gray colorways, a long-sleeve T-shirt in both black and white, a T-shirt available in black and gray, and baseball caps in black and in white.

Have a look at the new collection below and watch out for the drop here:

Thursday’s VIP preview at Frieze Los Angeles was packed with celebrities and art world heavy hitters alike, including actress Margot Robbie, record producer Benny Blanco, model Heidi Klum, and entrepreneur Laure Hériard Dubreuil. With significant interest following the pandemic, the fair appeared to be back in full swing.

Past VIP days at Frieze’s various editions have felt more “like waiting for a sneaker drop than trying to get into an art fair,” an adviser told ARTnews senior editor Daniel Cassady, who reported on the tumult of prior scenes. This one felt no different, with the aisles crowded throughout the day.

Below are selected highlights from the fair’s preview.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC sentenced a veteran GOP operative to 18 months in prison for funneling $25,000 from a Russian businessman to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Jesse Benton, a longtime aide to both Ron and Rand Paul, was convicted in November on six related charges. The court found that he and another GOP operative accepted $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko, a St. Petersburg-based influencer who wanted photos with Trump to display on his social media accounts. Benton kept most of the money for himself but donated $25,000 to the Republican National Committee as part of a plan to secure two tickets to a fundraising event for Trump in Philadelphia. At the event, Vasilenko was allowed to sit close to Trump at a roundtable discussion and later took a photo with him. Foreign nationals, like Vasilenko, are not allowed to donate to US political campaigns or committees, and it is illegal to make a donation on behalf of someone else. 

“It’s difficult for me to read your letter talking about your integrity and faith with this pattern of deception.”

Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s grandaughter, was previously convicted in 2016 of a scheme to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul ahead of the state’s 2012 republican presidential caucus. In that case, Benton, after pleading that he had reformed and had a family to support, was sentenced to home confinement. Just six days later, the Trump fundraiser at which Vasilenko met Trump took place. A few weeks after that, Benton was caught in an undercover sting orchestrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph, whose reporters posed as representatives of a Chinese businessman who wanted to donate $2 million to Trump’s campaign. Benton told them he could arrange it. He apparently violated the terms of his home confinement in the Iowa case to meet with the undercover reporters.

In a letter submitted to the judge before his sentencing this week, Benton said he had suffered enormously in the face of federal investigations over the last eight years, which he said had nearly bankrupted him and ruined his good name. Benton wrote that he currently delivers for DoorDash to make ends meet, and, in asking for more home confinement instead of prison time, argued that being separated from his family would be painful for them, including his young daughter. In pleading for leniency, Benton cited his Christianity and claimed he was no longer involved with politics. (In 2016, he had also pointed to his faith and claimed to be out of the business.)

At Benton’s sentencing hearing Friday, U.S. District Court judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump-appointee whose light sentences of January 6 defendants have been controversial, was not in the mood for Benton’s argument. 

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to  Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. 

In adulthood I have found that intense pleasure and intense grief are startlingly similar experiences—both ecstatic states of being, from the Greek word ekstasis: “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place.” “Estoy Aquí” articulates the specific contours of feeling left behind in a great love’s wake. But, also in adulthood and much to my disappointment, I have found that most affairs end in anticlimax. Twice I have been overcome by the obsessive conjuring of a lost lover; countless times, a budding romance has fizzled out unspectacularly. Infatuation often fails to coalesce into substance. As a child I knew no anthems for the guilt that comes with ghosting or, worse, for the blunt anxiety born of receiving text messages with decreasing frequency. I must admit I feel a little ripped off. “The letters I wrote, I never sent,” sings young Shakira, but what about the pages you leave blank because passion would be unwarranted? 

I suppose it is apt that, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, “Estoy Aquí” ends not with a bang but a whimper. The song fades with no resounding note, just a watered down repetition of what has already been stated, a languid dissolution of something that started off so strong.

Workers at the Minneapolis Institute of Art have begun an informational picket outside of the museum, the Minnesota Reformer reported Thursday.

Temporary employees at the museum, who refer to themselves as “casuals,” unionized in 2021 with OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees Union) Local 12. The unionization process was prompted by massive layoffs of “casual” employees during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, those employees numbered around 100, but were then shaved down to 35. Before unionization, most of the “casual” workers did not make the Minneapolis-suggested wage of $15 an hour.

The workers have criticized the way museum leadership handled the economic hardships of 2020, pointing out that the leadership at Mia only took a 15% pay cut whereas leaders at other museums sacrificed much more of their high salaries to keep staff on retention.

“Instead, Mia officials decided to layoff those that are in the lowest-paid positions and the most precarious of financial positions,” reads a 2021 petition from when the Mia staff were first agitating for unionization. “As a result, these decisions have disproportionately affected Mia’s BIPOC staff (which primarily retain non-managerial or grant-funded positions in the museum).”

The union now represents 150 curators and other non-managerial staff who have been fighting for a 16% wage increase over two-and-a-half years, as well as medical benefits.