This week, a French appeals court upheld the charges against Jean-Luc Martinez, the former president and director of the Louvre in Paris, for his alleged complicity in the trafficking of antiquities from Egypt.  

Martinez, who led the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, was charged in May for “complicity in fraud,” money laundering, and “facilitating” the purchase of artifacts linked to a vast trafficking ring that has been the target of a years-long police inquiry. French authorities suspect that the network of smugglers and their accomplices have sold art and relics to museums and galleries worldwide, including the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi outpost between 2014 and 2017. 

Martinez’s former colleague, the curator and archaeologist Jean-Francois Charnier, was also charged for his suspected involvement in the operation. Both are expected to appeal the ruling in France’s supreme court, per Le Monde. 

When Martinez and Charnier were first charged last year, the art community in Paris and beyond was stunned. Martinez, France’s current official ambassador for international cooperation on cultural heritage issue, had dedicated his recent career to the preservation of art in conflict zones and had authored a report that France presented to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that detailed new strategies for deterring looting. 

In November 2022, the public prosecutor requested to have the charges against Martinez dismissed following a re-examination of the evidence against him. The prosecutor’s decision seemed to signal that Martinez, a trained archeologist, had been wrongfully implicated in the case. According to the French legal system, an indictment does not ensure the defendant will stand trial, and charges can be overturned by a special magistrate at any point in the investigation.

Over the past year I have read and reread Angelica Nuzzo’s book Approaching Hegel’s Logic, Obliquely, in which Nuzzo guides the reader through Hegel’s Science of Logic. Nuzzo presents the question of how we are to think about history as it unfolds amid chaos and relentless crises. How, in other words, are we to find a means to think outside the incessant whirr of our times? The answer she provides is one I find wholly satisfactory: it is through the work of Hegel that we are best able to think about and think through the current state of the world, precisely because his work is itself an exploration of thinking—particularly Science of Logic, as Nuzzo eloquently explains:

Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic is the only one that aims at—and succeeds in—accounting for the dynamic of real processes: natural, psychological but also social, political, and historical processes. It is a logic that attempts to think of change and transformation in their dynamic flux not by fixating movement in abstract static descriptions but by performing movement itself. 

By tracking the movement of the mind, a movement that is incessant and fluid, we are best equipped to study the crises of our time as they occur. In particular, we are best able to examine and analyze the structure of capitalism itself, a structure which is formed by exchange value and is thus a system of infinite repetition and reproduction. A system of infinite plasticity—appropriating everything it comes in contact with. A system, in other words, akin to that of the mind. Hegel does not merely explain how the mind works but enacts its very movement. He places us in the center of its whirr. 

—Cynthia Cruz, author of “Charity Balls”

It may have been only a couple days since word leaked out that a long-awaited Anish Kapoor sculpture in New York was finally complete, but already, crowds have begun to form on a previously unremarkable corner on Leonard Street in Tribeca to see it. They’re there to greet a 19-foot-tall sculpture that resembles a legume being squashed by a luxury building, its steel form appearing to bulge out beneath the weight of a sleek outcropping.

The New Yorker once termed the sculpture, which is not yet titled, “the mini-Bean,” a reference to the nickname given to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the work this piece is loosely based on. That Chicago sculpture, which debuted in 2006, is well-loved, both by locals and tourists, and its following may explain why this new Kapoor work has already attracted so many influencers and curious onlookers.

Yet this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether. Kapoor’s latest is a big, shiny, reflective object that feels like the final boss of ugly public art in New York—not that that will stop people from flocking to it.

In some ways, it feels like a mistake to call Kapoor’s sculpture public art, however, since the structure above it is about as private as it gets. Designed by the starchitect firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building, known as the Jenga Tower, contains 60 stories of luxury condominiums, some of which even overlook the mini-Bean. (Kapoor bought one of those units for more than $13.5 million.) The tower rises so high, you can’t see its uppermost floors from the street, but if you were in an airplane, you’d notice that portions of them jut out like unevenly laid blocks.

This new sculpture, which may have cost as much as $10 million to fabricate, had always been a part of the building plan, appearing in reporting on the Herzog & de Meuron building as early as 2008. (The building itself was completed more than five years ago.) Manufacturing difficulties and the pandemic caused the piece’s years-long delay, and for a while, the mini-Bean existed only as a partially empty shell New Yorkers could see from the street. In 2021 Curbed New York made a plea for the piece to remain that way, arguing that Chicago’s Bean should be allowed to retain its glory, but alas, that was not to be.

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The Headlines

ARTIST MIRA LEHR, whose multifarious art tackled environmental issues, and who was involved in founding Continuum, a cooperative gallery in Miami Beach, Florida, for women artists in 1966, has died at the age of 88, Neil Genzlinger reports in the New York Times. Powerfully influenced by her participation in a 1969 experiment by inventor R. Buckminster Fuller that looked at how to allocate natural resources, Lehr made work in a variety of mediums—paint, video, gunpowder, and more—that addresses ecosystems, animal life, and other topics. While being profiled by the Times in 2020, Lehr said, “We have to think of the loss and destruction and that there is more of this to come.”

SHOWTIME. One of the most anticipated exhibitions of the season in New York has to be Sarah Sze’s outing at the Guggenheim, which will open in March. In WSJ Magazine, the wily installation artist spoke about what she has on tap—video projections on the outside of the building, for one thing—with journalist Ted Loos. “I wanted to make pieces you could only do at the Guggenheim,” Sze said. “The building became a tool for making the work.” Meanwhile, painter and musician Mike Henderson spoke with David Smith in the Guardian about his just-opened show at the University of California, Davis’s art museum. It includes his “protest paintings” from the 1960s to ‘80s, which look at racist violence in the United States. He knew they “weren’t going to hang in anybody’s living room but the paintings were coming through me,” he said. “There was a deeper calling.”

The Digest

Pete’s back! He brings tales of alligator-infested trips to the Flamingo Land Stadium alongside ten other Brackley Town fans. They didn’t know who he was, either.

Marcus, Vish and Jim are also here to look ahead to a bumper weekend of Barclays, as Sean Dyche bans sombreros from the Everton training ground and Todd Boehly finds Kenedy down the back of the Stamford Bridge sofa. Plus, can Jesse Marsch survive an inaccurate aerial bombardment from Jonjo Shelvey n’ co?

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The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of southeast Atlanta. The forest—once the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, then the site of a slave plantation and notorious prison camp—for at least a year has been occupied by activists who call themselves “forest defenders.” They have camped among the trees with the goal of blocking the construction of the PSTC, a massive complex for law enforcement that would include training and recreational facilities.  For them and other opponents of the project, PSTC is known instead as “Cop City.”

On January 18, a multi-agency task force that included Atlanta police, the Georgia State Patrol, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided what they estimated to be about 25 campsites throughout the forest. During the operation, a Georgia state patrol trooper shot and killed a 26-year-old activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” The state’s Bureau of Investigation released a statement claiming that officers approached Terán in a tent, and then Terán shot at a state trooper first, wounding him, before officers returned fire. Law enforcement has said there is no body camera footage. 

Fellow activists dispute this account and have called for an independent investigation. Terán’s mother, who is originally from Venezuela but now lives in Panama City, Panama told The Guardian that she believes her child was “murdered in cold blood” and that she will work to “clear Manuel’s name.” Protests following Terán’s killing led to a police cruiser in flames and smashed windows at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters, Wells Fargo, and Truist Bank branches in downtown Atlanta. In response, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called a state of emergency and activated the Georgia National Guard (though they were not deployed).

In his State of the State address the day before the state of emergency was declared, Kemp decried the violence of “out-of-state rioters” and applauded the police response to the protests. “That’s just the latest example of why here in Georgia, we’ll always back the blue!” he said. 

In countries in the global south that are on the frontiers of resource extraction, being an environmental activist is extraordinarily dangerous. A 2021 Global Witness report estimated 1,700 environmental activists have been killed in the last decade. But, as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, Terán’s death is a worrisome sign that this deadly violence against environmental protesters could become a reality in the United States, too. Terán’s death is the first known example of someone killed by law enforcement while engaged in environmental “land defense” activism.

On January 5, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted about the unexpected passing of Quentin Williams, a Democratic member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “Terrible news today of Q Williams sudden death,” he wrote. “I’m sending every good thought I have to his family and friends today.” Most of the replies to Murphy’s tweet echoed the senator’s sentiments; many commented that it was especially sad to lose someone so young—Williams was just 39 when he died. But some of the commenters seemed determined to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “Vaccine related?” asked one. “How many shots did he get?” wrote another. “Let me guess he has taken the Covid vaccine,” speculated a third. At least one tweeter added a hashtag you may have seen popping up: #diedsuddenly.

Williams’ vaccination status had nothing to do with his death—he was one of two people killed in a head-on collision. But the commenters on Murphy’s tweet reflect an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that healthy people are dying shortly after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, in the last two months, every time a celebrity dies—from former NFL player Ahmaad Galloway to Lisa Marie Presley—adherents of this theory have swarmed social media to blame the shots. Despite no evidence that such a correlation exists, this myth is remarkably persistent, especially since the November 2022 release of a slickly produced documentary called Died Suddenly, which baselessly claims that many people who take the vaccines develop potentially fatal blood clots.

The film has been widely debunked, even by some people within the anti-vaccine movement, but that hasn’t stopped it from going viral. By late December, the phrase “died suddenly” was surging on Twitter, with an average of nearly 4,000 mentions per day. Then, on January 2, NFL player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest after a relatively routine tackle. Experts believe the most likely cause was a rare phenomenon called commotio cordis, which can happen if a person receives a blow to the chest between beats of the heart. According to an analysis by the online extremism watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, the morning after the game, the number of mentions skyrocketed to nearly 17,000—an increase of 328 percent. Hamlin did not die—after a week in the hospital, he was discharged—and neither did the hashtag. Nearly a month after Hamlin’s collapse, it’s still trending on Twitter.

The 16 million people who have watched the film Died Suddenly on the far-right platform Rumble may have been expecting more of what they saw on social media: titillating speculation about Covid vaccines’ role in celebrity deaths. Yet viewers of Died Suddenly encounter much more than just a tired and repeatedly discredited strain of medical misinformation. Its premise is that the vaccines are a tool of global elites who want to “depopulate” the world—a variation on the “Great Reset” narrative that “globalists” like George Soros and Bill Gates orchestrated the pandemic in order to reprogram people to accept a new age of Marxism. This conspiracy theory gained traction in neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, which are increasingly intermingling with the anti-vaccine movement.

One of the leaders in combining these two movements is Stew Peters, the 42-year-old producer of Died Suddenly. Although his name may not be as well-known as Alex Jones or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his influence is considerable. He didn’t start out as an anti-vaccine crusader. Rather, Peters launched his far-right media career several years ago, when he began posting videos of himself monologuing about his work as a bounty hunter in Minneapolis. Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, suggests that Peters has discovered that vaccine skepticism is a powerful way to mobilize new followers. “This is a guy from the far right who sees an opportunity to weaponize the pandemic, to increase distrust in the government,” he says. “Even among otherwise hostile, non-aligned groups, if they can find a point of mutual interest, they will coalesce around it.”

At first I figured the Republicans would be all over this. I guess I figured wrong.

I’m referring to the bombshell working paper that made headlines earlier this week, in which a team of academic and Treasury Department economists found that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at roughly three to five times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. 

The authors, whose findings were based on an anonymized 2014 dataset consisting of more than 148 million tax returns and 780,000 audits, write that the disparities seem to be driven largely by racial differences in audit rates among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit.” 

The IRS has long scrutinized claimants of the EITC and certain other refundable tax credits at higher-than-average rates, regardless of race, in part because they are low-hanging fruit. The credit—aimed at low- to moderate-income taxpayers—is often claimed in error, and such audits are a cheap and easy by-mail job for a chronically underfunded tax agency.

Even among those claimants, the study found, Black taxpayers, who accounted for an estimated 21 percent of EITC filers, were selected for 43 percent of the audits. Now, IRS staffers don’t sit around deciding whom to audit—the selection is algorithmic and nominally race-blind. But the agency’s secret sauce somehow produced results that are far from colorblind.

Why country-pop superstar Shania Twain is riding higher than ever

The exhibition “But Tell Me, Is It a Civilized Country?” is the result of Max Guy’s deep dive into the Land of Oz, a territory the self-deprecating Witch of the North described as uncivilized because it harbors wizards and witches like her. The exhibition title—actually, the witch’s question to Dorothy about Kansas from the first Oz book, published in Chicago in 1900—brings to mind the racist and criminal inhospitalities of recent times, from Texas and Arizona governors’ callous shuttling of migrants north to Donald Trump’s question about why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.”

For Guy, Oz is a mirror. In an artist talk when the show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, he compared the interrelated Oz literature and films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as one self-perpetuating franchise. Two keystones of this franchise, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Wiz (1978), play side by side in Guy’s silent video The City and the City, sixth cut (2022). The first effort features an Emerald City that feels at times like Chicago while the later rendition involves many New York filming locations. (Guy’s connection here: he grew up in New York and is now based in Chicago.) In its time, The Wiz suffered at the hands of white critics who questioned the need for revisiting Oz with Black actors, a new script, and new songs. Guy’s video suggests his own study of the changes. He has slowed down both films and plays them to end at precisely the same time, as if to put on equal footing Motown and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an all-white cast and an all-Black one, and Dorothy as played by Judy Garland and by Diana Ross.

Max Guy: The City and the City, sixth cut, 2022, single channel video, 3 hours, 5 minutes, and 35 seconds.

Guy’s cultural critique through juxtaposition continues in Emerald City Leperello (Featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno), 2022, which stands open on a table at the center of the gallery. The pages of the giant book comprise eight vintage copies of a poster showing the Chicago skyline; the poster promoted a 1989 exhibition in which the Renaissance Society paired 24 of On Kawara’s deadpan “Date Paintings” with contemporaneous works by 24 artists, from heavyweights with minimalist and conceptual leanings, such as Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth, to those associated with the Windy City, including the Hairy Who. At the time, this exhibition may have appeared far-reaching and representative for putting Kawara in dialogue with peers and local traditions, but in retrospect, the curatorial conceit appears exclusive. The artists were almost all white, and are now mainstream. Guy added a harlequin-pattern border and yellow, green, and black architectonic forms to the exhibition posters, making the cityscape look more like the Emerald City and implying that Kawara and the other artists could stand in the place of Dorothy and her famous traveling buddies—Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Whom would an artist choose to accompany them on the Yellow Brick Road as they create imagined worlds? Who is cast to walk beside them? If Guy had traveling companions, they might include the artist Lorenzo Bueno (mentioned in the book’s title), whose Pointless Rendering (2018) is part of a whimsical proposal to build an upside-down replica of New York’s Citigroup Center building right on top of the actual structure on Lexington Avenue. We can imagine that Guy likes how this ambitious-but-impossible proposition plays with monumentality and implies an alternate universe.

Max Guy: Emerald City Leperello (featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno) (detail), 2022, acrylic ink, laser print, enamel paint, and colored pencil on vintage On Kawara posters, cotton fabric, chipboard.

Another sort of inversion happens when viewers look up to see a gigantic, multicolored flag draped across the immense ceiling of the Renaissance Society. It’s called Dargerino (2022) and intends to summon and perhaps commune with Henry Darger, the legendary Chicago outsider artist who worked alone in a tiny apartment, sometimes under the influence of Oz, and was undiscovered until the last year of his life. The flag’s colors represent the regions of Oz, though the flag adds an extra point to the usual Emerald City star, making it more like the six-point stars of the Chicago flag. What if Chicago were Oz? Or, what if we made Chicago into a kind of Oz? Guy proposes that we would then have to distinguish meaningful gestures from small arrogant ones. In his artist talk, when discussing Dargerino, Guy referred to the colossal torn American flag sculpture Trinket (2008/15) by William Pope.L, who told Artforum that his sculpture refers to “our mouse nature” and “how we blot out the sky with our paw and think we’ve vanquished the sun.”

Chicagoans dye their river bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day. Guy captured this bizarre tradition on video for Chicago (2022). In the context of this exhibition, the festivities appear so entirely out of this world that they could almost have taken place in Emerald City. In so many ways, we mortals create and re-create highly developed worlds, determine their strange rituals and exclusive memberships, and exalt them. In The Wiz, the denizens of Emerald City extol green as the height of fashion until The Great and Powerful Oz declares green dead, and endorses red. “I wouldn’t be seen green,” the chorus sings. By bringing Oz into the present, Guy’s smart show prompts the question: With the forcefulness of the collective imagination that we regularly display and sometimes shift at the drop of a hat, how can we reimagine, stand on end, and remake the careless, rough, stained, and unwelcoming parts of our world?