If there’s one thing wealthy people have access to, it’s lawyers. As a result, a client of Christie’s recently filed an class-action lawsuit against the auction house after it experienced a cyberattack in May.

The incident, which Christie’s had previously referred to as a “technology security incident,” shut down its website for ten days before and during the house’s marquee New York sales.

The cyber-extortion group RansomHub claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on May 27. A dark-web message from the group also said it “attempted to come to a reasonable resolution,” but the auction house cut off communication halfway through negotiations. Christie’s emailed its clients on May 30 acknowledging the cyberattack, but said only identification data, not financial or transaction data, had been stolen.

The complaint filed in the Southern District of New York on June 3 alleges that Christie’s was unable to protect the “personally identifiable information”, or PII, of its clients, of which is estimated to be at least half a million current and former buyers in its databases. The complaint describes the breach as “a direct result of [Christie’s] failure to implement adequate and reasonable cyber-security procedures and protocols necessary to protect consumers’ PII from a foreseeable and preventable cyberattack”. The complaint filed also alleges that “data thieves have already engaged in identity theft and fraud and can in the future commit a variety of crimes” using the stolen information, which it said includes full names, passport numbers, as well as other sensitive details from passport scans, including dates of birth, birth places, genders, and barcode-like “machine-readable zones” or MRZs.

The complaint alleges the breach of data resulted in multiple “concrete injuries,” including invasion of privacy; lost time and opportunity costs from “attempting to mitigate the actual consequences of the Data Breach.”

A second suspect has plead guilty to charges of fraud in the case dubbed by investigators as “Canada’s largest art fraud investigation,” according to CBC News.

On June 6, David Voss plead guilty to one charge of forgery and one charge of uttering forged documents, in this case the fake provenance materials he used while operating an art fraud ring between 1996 and 2019. Based in the northern Ontario city of Thunder Bay, Voss oversaw the production of thousands of artworks falsely attributed to Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. Notably, it was a “paint by numbers” assembly process that helped investigators identify 26 out of 30 suspected works.

According to a statement of facts read in Ontario Superior Court, investigators had identified more than 1,500 forgeries from Voss’ fraud operation and seized nearly 500 so far. Additionally, Voss was stated to have “never met, acquired artwork from or otherwise interacted with, Norval Morrisseau.”

Last March, investigators from the Thunder Bay Police Service and Ontario Provincial Police announced that they had charged eight people on a total of 40 charges for their involvement in the manufacture and distribution of fake paintings, prints, and other artworks attributed to Morrisseau.

Morrisseau, a prolific artist from the Ojibway Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation, was known for his distinctive Woodland School of Art style. Morrisseau’s work was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, the first staged at the institution for a contemporary Indigenous artist. He died in 2007 at the age of 75 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

MO.CO, a contemporary art museum in Montpellier, France, accused a French art publication of “exploitation” on Friday after it ran a report on the suicide of Vincent Honoré, who formerly served as the institution’s head of exhibitions.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported last week that Honoré’s suicide had been determined a “work accident” by French social security and featured allegations from unnamed MO.CO workers who claimed Honoré had a tense relationship with museum management. The publication quoted a text from Honoré to a friend in which he said he felt “trapped.”

In an unusual move, MO.CO issued a lengthy statement Friday rebutting the Le Quotidien de l’Art article, saying that the museum considered the report “an unbearable exploitation of a tragic event which deserves dignified, measured and respectful treatment for all.”

The museum said it had set up a “psychological support unit” for staff there following Honoré’s suicide in November and wrote that his “memory was sensitively honored” in a number of ways, including via the staging of a Huma Bhabha exhibition that he had organized, which the museum has offered to the public free of charge.

Responding to Honore’s text about feeling “trapped,” the museum said that he had never taken sick leave “in recent years,” and that it had never denied a request by him for time off.

A federal court earlier this month dismissed a lawsuit against the Japanese company Sompo Holdings surrounding Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), which the heirs of a German Jewish banker said had been looted by the Nazis.

The company bought the work from Christie’s London in 1987 for $39.9 million, a record at the time. The heirs of its previous owner, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had sought to get it back, claiming that it had been stolen during World War II.

According to the Art Newspaper, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s heirs claimed that Sompo Holdings ignored the work’s potential provenance issues. A judge in Illinois, however, dismissed the case due to lack of jurisdiction over the Tokyo-based holdings company. 

The lawsuit was filed in Illinois in part because Sompo has business dealings in the state and because the picture had been part of the 2001 exhibition “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” at the Art Institute of Chicago. During negotiations with Sompo’s museum in Tokyo, a museum official allegedly told the Art Institute that there was concern over the work’s provenance, and that that while they believed Sunflowers nothing to do with Nazi-looted art, they were “not 100% sure.”  

According to the complaint, filed in December 2022, the heirs claim that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy “never intended to transfer any of his paintings and that he was forced to transfer them only because of threats and economic pressures by the Nazi government.”

Just days after announcing its sudden closure, Philadelphia’s University of the Arts was hit with a class action lawsuit by nine of its employees, including several professors and department directors. The news was first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in the city’s federal court and accuses the school, commonly called UArts, of violating the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act), a 1988 law that requires most employers with at least 100 employees to provide a 60-day notice of mass closings or layoffs. The plaintiffs also accuse the college leadership of withholding wages for hours worked and unused vacation time, a violation of the Pennsylvania Wage Payment Collection Law.

The United Academics of Philadelphia, the union representing UArts professors, called the decision of the UArts board and management “cruel,” and has demanded the board pay staff for all hours worked and provide a severance package.

“This situation reflects a complete failure of leadership,” Eric Lechtzin, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, told Philadelphia Magazine. “It is incomprehensible how they could announce the closing of the university within seven days, with no prior warning to anyone. In fact, I’ve heard from people who recently left tenured positions at other schools to join the faculty and staff of UArts, only to learn mere weeks or months into their new position that UArts is closing.”

On June 7, the school’s last day of operation, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state lawmakers announced that they were investigating the circumstances of the closures, as well as “any transfer or loss of assets,” according to the New York Times. 

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On Tuesday, the US House voted to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to the court’s prosecutor seeking an arrest warrant for Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and another Israeli official. The prosecutor is also calling for arrest warrants for three senior Hamas leaders. But the main concern for politicians was the crackdown on Israel, a close ally. Nearly all of the Republican legislators, and 42 Democrats, supported the ICC sanction measure, which passed by a vote of 247–155.

The bill, which would prohibit any member of the ICC from using US banking networks or entering the country and places restrictions on those who follow the ICC’s ruling, is not likely to make it through the Democart-controlled Senate. But it marks another clash between the United States and international governing bodies since the beginning of Israel’s incursion into Gaza.

The relationship between the ICC and the US has long been complicated. The US was one of seven countries that participated in negotiations leading to the creation of the court. But it also has opted out of the ICC’s judgments. The rulings, which are meant to determine when countries have committed war crimes such as genocide, don’t apply to the US.

This policy, standard for the US over the years—of creating systems to impose laws on others that often do not apply to its own actions—was summed up well in a quote from the recent battle in the House. “The ICC has to be punished,” said House speaker Mike Johnson in a press conference Tuesday morning after the court called for arrest warrants for Israel’s president. “We cannot allow this to stand. If the ICC was allowed to do this and go after the leaders of countries whose actions they disagree with, why would they not come after America?”

Earlier this week, the Biden administration officially announced a long-anticipated border crackdown. The executive action—which relies on the same presidential authority former President Donald Trump invoked to enact an entry ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries—circumvents a key provision of US law: The legal right to seek asylum, regardless of where or how a person enters the country.

Under Biden’s order, with narrow exceptions, only migrants coming to official ports of entry will qualify for asylum after encounters at the border reach a certain threshold. This may sound wonky. But it is in line with what Biden vowed to try to do as the November election approaches: shut down the border “right now.”

And, still, not even a Democratic president gutting asylum has placated the anti-immigrant fearmongers on the right.

Even before Biden gave his speech about the new border proclamation, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was live on Fox News calling the measures “mass amnesty” for “illegals.” He was echoed by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump and president of the “lawfare” America First Legal group, who wasted no time cherry-picking sections of the executive order and sharing them without context to baselessly claim the new rule gives “fast-pass entry to unlimited numbers of fighting-age” migrants. “This border EO makes mass migration permanent,” Miller wrote on X.

Tif Sigfrids, a dealer who has run a gallery in Athens, Georgia, for more than a decade, has closed up her art space and joined Canada, a blue-chip New York gallery that is well-regarded for its painting shows, as a partner.

Between 2021 and 2023, Sigfrids ran a gallery in New York as well. She is the second dealer in the city to announce a closure this week, after Simone Subal, who will shutter her 12-year-old Lower East Side gallery this month. News of the closure of Sigfrids’s gallery and her hiring by Canada was first reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet News’s “Wet Paint” column.

First opened in 2013 in Los Angeles, Tif Sigfrids showed artists such as Thomas Dozol, Mimi Lauter, and Becky Kolsrud. The gallery relocated to Athens, Georgia, in 2018. The gallery’s last show, a group exhibition called “Bedroom Furniture,” closed in May.

“I’ve been doing this thing by myself for 11 years now, and while some people would love to have all that autonomy, I miss being part of a bigger world, or something that feels bigger than myself,” she told Artnet.

Although artists that Sigfrids has shown will be integrated into Canada’s programming, her roster will not be entirely ported over to that gallery.

When photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 at 40, his immediate reaction was to destroy the work he would leave behind. After overcoming the initial shock, however, he settled on the idea of planning his estate, which led to the establishment of Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988, the year before his passing.

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“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

Thaddaeus Ropac will bring Robert Mapplethorpe’s Ken and Lydia and Tyler (1985) to Art Basel next week.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”