More than 50 artworks were donated for the 19th edition of the event by contemporary artists including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Allison Katz, Emma McIntyre, Shota Nakamura, and Marina Perez Simao. The ArtCrush Gala, slated for August 2nd, is the museum’s largest annual fundraiser, generating support for the museum’s exhibitions and educational programs. In celebration of the Aspen Art Museum 45th anniversary, the artists for the first time have been invited to retain up to 30% of the proceeds from their works sold during the auction. 

“As an artist-founded institution, artists are centered within all we do, and the fulfilment of our mission depends on their trust,” Nicola Lees, the museum’s director, said in a statement shared with ARTnews. “This year’s outstanding ArtCrush auction is a testament to the remarkable artists and supporters within our community…and we invite artists to retain a portion of the proceeds of their donated works, thereby promoting continuity, equitability, and sustainability. It is a policy we will be proud to implement long into the future.”

In the lead-up to the gala, the ArtCrush 2024 Auction Exhibition will be on display at the museum starting July 17. For the first time, the museum is partnering with Design Miami to include an array of design works in the auction, broadening the scope of the event. 

Christie’s, the museum’s auction partner, will conduct two auctions for the event. The first will be a live auction during the gala, led by Adrien Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales and co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art. The second auction will take place virtually, with online bidding opening on Christie’s website on July 25. 

WAIT AND SEE. The cultural sector in France was relieved, when the final results of the parliamentary election were announced on Sunday, reports The Art Newspaper. The left-wing New Popular Front won 182 seats, the highest number, but failed to win an overall majority, leaving France to face a hung parliament. The threat lies in Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which came third after President Emmanuel Macron‘s centrist coalition. Before the election, one thousand doctors, scholars and researchers urged the public to “reject the obscurantism”, followed by 800 artists and culture leaders who called on voters “to preserve the France of the Enlightenment”. The French committee of art historians warned against the “xenophobic hold up of cultural heritage” and the union of art gallery owners said its “values are not those of the National Rally”. The art world, which is heavily dependent on public support, raised concerns about potential cuts to state subsidies by a National Rally government. For now, no-one really knows what will happen next.

THE TRUMAN SHOW. Actor Jim Carrey, known for his onscreen work in Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, moonlights as an artist. As a collector, he has amassed some significant piece of fine art and modern design. On July 25 Bonhams L.A. will sell some of the items that Carrey has acquired over nearly 30 years. The 35 lots include Adam Kurtzman’s 2004 work Pair of Hands (estimate: $2,000–3,000) and Martin C. Herbst’s 1965 stainless-steel work, Sphere ($3,000–5,000), a lily pad-shaped coffee table by Paula Swinnen ($6,000–8,000), and a cloud-shaped table by Joris Laarman ($60,000–80,000), evocative of the actor’s taste for organic forms. There is also a group of 1960s designs by French sculptor Philippe Hiquily. A console co-designed with Jean-Claude Farhi ($20,000–30,000), an armchair crafted out of brass and steel ($20,000–30,000), and a rug dotted with hummingbirds, handwoven with metallic thread and silk by Alexander McQueen ($15,000–20,000).

THE DIGEST

Claudine Colin Communication, France’s leading arts and culture communication agency created 1990, has been acquired by the US-based marketing firm Finn Partners, joining the company’s Polskin Arts division in its art-related interests. Its team includes 25 people and its clients Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Louvre-Lens, Lyon’s Contemporary Art Biennial. [The Art Newspaper]

Ten duos, each formed by an artist and an art critic, have been awarded the Ekphrasis grant, including Nicolas Boulard & Camille Viéville, Lucie Douriaud & Hélène Meisel, Collectif Grapain & Jil Gasparina, Ludovic Landolt & Estelle Nabeyrat… The texts written on each artist will be published monthly in Le Quotidien de l’Art in 2025. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Christie’s has announced that an “emblematic work” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, unseen in public since 1931, will be offered at auction this fall. The work, made with grease pencil and graphite on cardboard, is a preparatory study for the lithograph “Divan Japonais”, and is estimated to fetch between  $2.7 million and $3.8 million.” [Barrons]

Thomas Austin, a professional engineer and retired U.S. Army Colonel, recently began his appointment as Architect of the Capitol (AOC), taking over from interim AOC Chere Rexroat who took power in February 2023 after the 12th AOC, amid controversy over his personal use of a taxpayer-funded vehicle and questions about his adherence to agency policies. Austin is now responsible for preserving and maintaining 18.4 million square feet of buildings and 570 acres of campus grounds throughout Washington, D.C. [The Architect’s Newspaper]

At the Vatican Francesca Peacock came across a by the late 14th-century Florentine painter Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni featuring a pregnant Madonna, which seemed odd at first, because most familiar depictions of the Virgin don’t show her pregnant. Could this be because it doesn’t depict a clear biblical story? A couple of theories intertwine. [Apollo]

THE KICKER

ACTION! American actor Willem Dafoe has been appointed the Artistic Director of the Venice Biennale theater department for 2025 and 2026, which was founded in 1934 as an independent department of La Biennale di Venezia, following the departments for art (1895), music (1930) and cinema (1932). Its previous directors include Renato Simoni, Luca Ronconi, Franco Quadri, Carmelo Bene and Lluís Pasqual, and it is programmed yearly alongside major cultural events like the Venice Film Festival. “Theater taught me about art and life. I worked with the Wooster Group for twenty-seven years, and I have collaborated with great directors from Richard Foreman to Bob Wilson. The direction of my Theatre program will be charted by my personal development. A sort of exploration of the essence of the body.” [La Biennale]

“If one is able to collect experiences, I can’t imagine anyone discussing this hefty topic better than these women,” she told the 90 or so people in attendance.

Prior to the event, Naveira told ARTnews that experiential art has “existed since the advent of installation art, ‘artist environments,’ ‘happenings’—a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late ’50s—and time-based performance.” (Naveira and Sartogo were part of the founding team of Miami experiential art center Superblue).

Before the speakers dissected the topic at hand, the room was quickly profiled via a quiz entered by scanning a QR code on a flyer to reveal each audience member’s “artistic persona.” Answering a series of multiple-choice questions led to one of four personality outcomes: “aesthetic enthusiast”; “modern maverick”; social collector”; or “experiences explorer.” When the results came in, a show of hands indicated most people were the latter. Things were off to a good start.

“We launched VIV Arts this year with a mission to support artists creating experiences, and what we mean by experiences is essentially putting audiences at the center of artistic experiences.” Naveira said. “Having them become active participants of the experience instead of being passive viewers of arts.”

Is being a “passive viewer of art” becoming passé or even unacceptable? Naveira would probably argue so, and not just in the field of art. In an email she sent ARTnews prior to the event, she wrote that numerous reports have pointed to the “growing importance of experiences in many luxury and consumer industries.” (A survey released Tuesday by Dotdash Meredith and market research firm Ipsos, for example, found that luxury consumers, particularly Gen Z, value “experience over product.”)

Naveira gave the floor to Ofak. She explained that Transmoderna, which she co-founded with DJ Steffen “Dixon” Berkhahn in 2018, is both an artistic collective based in Berlin and also a small studio comprised of a team of artists, “developers from the computational realm,” engineers, and sonographers. They “explore the possibilities that arise from merging electronic music with computational arts.”

“Transmoderna is moving away from our home in the digital realm into a hybrid of sound imaging and media setup,” Ofak said. “We have tried, uncommonly, to intervene in the scene of clubbing and dance music. When we started, we wanted to break with DJing and introduce something more involved in internet and digital art, meaning introducing VR and AR into dance experiences.”

Does Ofak think there’s a tangible shift in the art world towards more immersive, ambient experiences? “Absolutely,” she told ARTnews after the panel. She described seeing the crowd at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021 pass by the traditional gallery booths “without taking much notice” of the art, when Transmoderna first showed an installation at the fair.

“In a smaller hall dedicated to digital and experiential art there were several queues meandering around the space, mostly for non-screen-based work, so larger scale installations or VR,” Ofak said. “It was a bit like at the onset on video art being shown in museums – it was a sign to all that the (not so new) domain of computational art had arrived and was here to stay. Museums are slowly exploring the possibilities of integrating experiential art into their exhibitions.”

But can you collect this stuff? In Transmoderna’s case, yes. This is where VIV Arts comes in. The first-ever artwork for sale on the platform is the Berlin-based collective’s Mycoforest, 35 editions of which are available privately for an unspecified price. Naveira told ARTnews that all works listed on the VIV Arts platform are somewhere between $100 and $30,000.

Naveira described Mycoforest as a “screen-based work derived from Transmoderna’s VR installation Terraforming CIR… it’s a digital artwork on a loop,” which was recently exhibited at Centre-Pompidou Metz in France. Post-panel discussion, VIV Arts sent me a link to a viewing room showing the trippy video, accompanied by an electronic soundtrack. Was I propelled to protagonist status in an artistic experience? Not really. It felt like I was watching a video on my laptop and – having been branded an “experiences explorer” – I reverted to type as a passive viewer. According to Ofak, Mycoforest is “about the underground world of mushrooms and how mushrooms, under the harshest conditions, are able to build new worlds.”

Founder of Studio INI, Inglessis, then spoke about physically engaging viewers in her work as a more abstract way for them to “collect” experiences. She showed the audience a video of her installation Disobedience, which was placed in Somerset House’s London courtyard in 2018, when Studio INI represented the Greek Pavilion at the London Design Biennale. It is a 17-meter-long wall fashioned from steel and recycled plastic that moves as people walk through it. Disobedience “challenges our perception of architecture as something static, or emotionally inert,” it reads on Studio INI’s website.

“My research explores the future of our physical world and what it might look like,” Inglessis said. “How might we interact with it as individuals and as a collective in a manner that can converge rather than diverge from our expanded intelligence? In this process emerged new ways of sculpting matter and structures, with a vision that we can look as our physical bodies and architecture as more of an interface and less of a boundary. Disobedience is a wall that’s not actually functioning as a boundary because you can walk through it.”

Inglessis also spoke about Urban Imprint, another kinetic outdoor installation Studio INI made in New York in response to the question, “How do you make an urban environment feel more natural?” The work is a low-hanging ceiling that creates an indent to accommodate the height of the person walking beneath it.

“VIV Arts is paving the way in anticipating and negotiating the forms of our artworks in Studio INI that manifest in the embodied experience across scale and contexts,” Inglessis told ARTnews. “They are raising awareness and understanding of the radically different creative process that governs my practice and explores the capacity of meaningful audience engagement throughout the journey that is integral to the realization of my works.”

VIV Arts told ARTnews it is focused on its first Transmoderna sales but would be “thrilled” to sell works by Studio INI “in the future as the platform develops.” What form Inglessis’ large-scale architectural projects would take on VIV Arts remains to be seen.

Experiential art is gaining traction and immersive experiences are drawing in the crowds around the world, with The Art Newspaper reporting that 100-plus “immersive institutions” have emerged over the last five years. There is obviously a public thirst for a more enveloping style of participation.

“We have been noticing this trend very actively since 2019, when teamLab in Tokyo became the most visited single-artist museum in the world, and when the world saw the explosion of pseudo-artistic experiences like The Museum of Ice Cream, and later the Van Gogh experiences that garnered a lot of attention pre- and post-pandemic,” Naveira told ARTnews.

“Locally in London, Tate Modern is a great example of a major institution that is increasingly betting on experiential art, with Yayoi Kusama – a sell-out experiential art show which has been extended several times over – their recent Yoko Ono exhibit, the Anthony McCall exhibition that just opened, as well as ‘Electric Dreams’ which is due to open in November.”

It was eventually inherited by Ceawilin Thynn, the 8th Marquess of Bath, who resides in Longleat House in Wiltshire, UK. Together with the Longleat Trustees, he offered it to Christie’s as part of “their long-term investment strategy.”

“This sublime early masterpiece by Titian is one of the most poetic products of his youth,” Orlando Rock, chairman of Christie’s UK, said. “Of impeccable provenance and having passed through the hands of dukes, archdukes, and holy Roman emperors, this magical devotional painting has the rare notoriety of having been stolen not once but twice – firstly by Napoleon and secondly in the late mid-1990s.”

After being stolen from the Longleat Estate in 1995, the painting was found without its frame in a plastic bag in London seven years later.

Titian’s previous auction record was $16.9 million for A Sacra Conversazione (c.1560), which was sold in 2011 by Sotheby’s New York.

According to a press release signed by Sebastian Fahey, Sotheby’s managing director of global fine art, Helena Newman, who has served as chairman of Sotheby’s Europe since 2016, has been named worldwide chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art. Newman will pull double duty, retaining her roles as European chairman and auctioneer.

In Asia, Sotheby’s has brought on the Hong Kong-based specialist Elaine Holt, who worked at Christies for over a decade, most recently as deputy chairman and international director of Christie’s Asia Pacific. Holt’s role as head of the Modern and Contemporary Art team in Asia will be bolstered by two new senior specialists in Contemporary art, Joseph Yang who joins us from the Chinese auction house Poly and former Sotheby’s employee Boris Cornelissen, who left the house in 2020 to run his own gallery in Australia.

Holt’s new position comes at a precarious time in the Asian art market tensions rise between China, the US, and Taiwan, which could forecast unfavorable economic and security implications, and Beijing juggling the a real estate crisis that could prove disastrous. Still, Asia has been a major target for all the auction houses in recent years with all Christie’s, Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams making moves to strengthen their presence in the region. In 2022 Sotheby’s announced a new Asia headquarters, a 24,000 square foot space in Hong Kong’s luxury hub, Landmark Chater, which is set to open this year. 

Alex Branczik and Max Moore, who together led the Modern and Contemporary business in Asia for the last three years will move head back to London and New York, respectively, also with new titles and responsibilities. Branczik will become chairman and head of Modern and Contemporary art Europe, while Moore will become head of Sotheby’s Sealed and senior private sales specialist for Modern and Contemporary art. 

James Sevier, who for three years worked as European head of Contemporary art, has transitioned to deputy chairman of Contemporary art, Europe, a position which, according to the press release, “will provide him space to work more closely with his portfolio of major clients.” Auctioneer and deputy chairman of Contemporary art, London, Michael Macaulay will move into Sevier’s position as head of Contemporary art, Europe while retaining his deputy chairman title.

When most people talk about the art market, they talk about the pieces by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and others that regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars. What those observers don’t talk about, most of the time, is South Asian art.

“Historically, in the larger art world, Indian art, Bangladeshi art, and Pakistani art has been severely undervalued,” art adviser and art dealer Arushi Kapoor told ARTnews. But that is starting to change as the prices for South Asian artists rise, even as talk of a market correction continues.

This past March, Sotheby’s brought in $19.8 million for its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week New York. Last year, the same sale made less than half that, just $7 million. In 2020, just before lockdown set in, Sotheby’s brought in $4.8 million at its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week. 

“This market has come a long way, even in the last four or five years,” Manjari Sihare-Sutin, vice president and worldwide co-head Sotheby’s modern and contemporary South Asian art department, told ARTnews.

Experts said there were several factors behind this rise in activity: more high-quality lots coming to auction, a growing collector base, and the shrinking availability of work by the Progressive Artists Group, a network of modernists that was active in post-Partition India.

Nishad Avari, the New York–based head of Christie’s South Asian modern and contemporary art department, which also brought in nearly $20 million for its Asia Week sale in March, described a sense of competition among collectors for works such as those. “They realized that if there are museums participating in the acquisition process, those works are never going to come back to market,” he explained. “So, they have to step up the level at which they compete.”

“There’s real demand from Indian citizens that don’t want to send the best works abroad,” Kapoor said. “They want to keep the best works in their house.”

And while the category has grown to include artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi, Nilima Sheikh, Zubeida Agha, and Zainul Abedin, the biggest sales have been and continue to be for works by male Indian artists.

These include new auction records for Indian modernists like S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza. At Sotheby’s, Raza’s painting Kallisté (1959) sold for $5.6 million on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million, smashing the artist’s previous record of $1.33 million set last March. At Christie’s, Souza’s The Lovers sold for nearly $4.9 million on an estimate of $700,000 to $1 million. The artist’s previous record of just over $4 million was for the 8-foot-wide painting Birth (1955), which also sold at Christie’s in September 2015.

Compared with the amounts typically seen in the Indian art market, “these are not small prices,” Sihare-Sutin said.

Other results were similarly high. At Christie’s, Gulammohammed Shiekh’s Portrait of a Tree (1975) sold for $1.38 million, more than $1 million above its high estimate. Meanwhile, at Sotheby’s, the late Bhupen Khakhar, a participant in the current Venice Biennale, was represented by the painting Hatha Yogi (1978), which sold for $1.8 million, more than double its high estimate. Neither work set a record, but these prices suggest that there is a good amount energy fueling the market for Indian art right now.

That energy is partially the result of efforts to study and acquire South Asian art at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, themselves part of a larger attempt to expand the history of modernism. That’s evident right now in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries, where a work by Indian painter Mohan B. Samant hangs not far from a suite of paintings by Mark Rothko. MoMA acquired the Samant painting in 1963, but prior to the museum’s recent rehang, the piece hadn’t been seen in the permanent galleries since the year after the institution obtained it.

Sotheby’s is among the auction houses seeking to bounce off this institutional momentum. The house’s educational outreach efforts for its clients have included invitation-only guided tours of exhibitions of South Asian artists, like Shahzia Sikander’s show at New York’s Morgan Library in 2021. And in 2023, the year that Paris’s Centre Pompidou mounted a Raza retrospective, Sotheby’s staged a non-selling exhibition focused on the artist at its offices in London.

“No matter where someone entered the building, they could not miss the Raza exhibition,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We had contemporary clients come and look.”

The pieces coming up for sale tend not to be the product of flipping. “It’s 90 to 95 percent privately sourced, fresh-to-market property,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We have to be careful and cognizant of the ecosystem. The galleries are doing great work. We have to be responsible and think about who we want to sell it to.” 

Avari echoed this, saying his clientele is mainly long-term collectors. Like Sihare-Sutin, he said his focus was generally modern art over contemporary art. “We’re still establishing ourselves in the primary market,” he explained. “Unlike other categories, we don’t have that phenomenon of studio to auction block necessarily. These are all works that have been in established collections and traded hands a couple of times.”

(That hasn’t stopped advisers like Kapoor getting more inquiries from non-Indian international collectors about acquiring South Asian works as alternative investment assets. “There’s an opportunity currently to spend a certain amount of money to get a really good art piece, which also has significant upside,” she said.)

According to Sihare-Sutin, there’s a misconception that the market for South Asian modern and contemporary is a regional one. If you follow that logic, much of the interest in South Asian art should come from within South Asia itself. But, she said, this all fails to consider how large and successful the diaspora is in the United States.

“The CEO of every top company is Indian,” she pointed out.

The seven-foot-wide work seems to have significantly declined in value. When Christie’s brought the work to auction in 2022, that house gave it a $30 million estimate; just before the sale, the work was quietly withdrawn. This time, Sotheby’s has awarded the work an approximately $20 million–$25 million estimate.

Any Basquiat coming to auction is deemed an event, largely due to the phenomenally high prices his work typically commands. Although the recent secondary market prices are still high, Basquiats used to more regularly outpace their high estimates by large sums at auction. The dip in prices could be explained by collectors being more thoughtful about how many millions they are willing to spend at auction, and by auction houses adjusting estimates to better fit those new, high interest rate–driven buying habits.

In May, Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, led a modern and contemporary art sale at Philips, selling for $46.5 million. That painting had been estimated to sell for $60 million. The other two Basquiats sold by the house in evening sales that month—Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982)—headed to auction at lower values, selling for $7.8 million and $12.6 million, respectively. Those figures, which all include buyer’s premium, were squarely within the works’ estimates.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, too, had Basquiats for sale in May. An untitled 1984 collaboration between Basquiat and Andy Warhol went to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. It sold for $19.3 million. Meanwhile, yet another 1982 work, The Italian Version of Popeye Has no Pork in His Diet, sold at Christie’s for $32 million on an estimate of around $30 million.

Earlier this year, Phillips’s Americas president Jean-Paul Engelen told Puck’s Marion Maneker that Basquiat was “the new Picasso,” a euphemism for the fact that the artist has now achieved legendary status on the market. According to Maneker, roughly $125 million worth of Basquiat’s work sold in May. Look back to the last four years, and that figure crosses the billion-dollar mark.

There’s no question that Basquiat’s market has juice at the moment, a trend that it likely to continue. The only question is whether Sotheby’s priced the work low enough to get collectors interested. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. The work, according to Sotheby’s website, has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, which means it has effectively already sold. The question, now, is who’s taking it home.

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.”

The lawsuit also states that Christie’s clients are also at risk of multiple forms of identity theft, including the possibility of bad actors opening fraudulent financial accounts and loans in the names of exposed individuals; illegally securing government benefits, or even acquiring identification with alternate photographs and “giving false information to police during an arrest”.

The only plaintiff currently named in the class-action lawsuit is Efstathios Maroulis, who is defined in the complaint as a resident and citizen of Dallas, Texas. Profiles on Instagram and LinkedIn matching Maroulis’ name and location said the individual was the founder and CEO of dental enterprise software company Jarvis Analytics, as well as the founder and CEO of digital marketing company Mesa Six. Jarvis Analytics was acquired by dental and medical supply company Henry Schein in 2021.

Messages from ARTnews to the Instagram and LinkedIn profiles believed to belong to Maroulis did not result in a response.

Maroulis’s complaint also argues that hackers with at least two forms of PII can use those illegally acquired details in combination with publicly available data found elsewhere to “assemble complete dossiers on individuals” with “an astonishingly complete scope and degree of accuracy”. The Art Newspaper, which first reported the lawsuit, noted that these dossiers, called “fullz” in hacker circles, “typically bring considerably higher prices on the dark web than partial records thanks to their considerably higher utility in perpetrating identity theft.”

The lawsuit’s definition of the scope of alleged harm as a result of the cyberattack also includes data brokers. Maroulis’ complaint alleges that clients affected by the data breach at Christie’s can no longer voluntarily sell their own personal data at full value as a result of its exposure from RansomHub, and that information “may also fall into the hands of companies that will use [it] for targeted marketing” without their consent or permission.

According to a document filed on June 5, United States District Court Judge Jesse M. Furman has ordered that counsel for all parties appear at a initial pre-trial conference at the court on September 10.

The auction house also filed a breach notification with the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta. The letter states that Christie’s discovered it was the victim of a cybersecurity incident on May 9, engaged external cybersecurity experts, and notified law enforcement. The letter also states the auction house is offering a “complimentary twelve-month subscription to CyEx Identity Defense Total,” an identity theft and fraud monitoring service which would notify any changes to Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion credit reports.

The letter is signed by Christie’s chief operating officer Ben Gore. CyEx’s website states the reference value of “Identity Defense Total” at $19.99 per month.

A Christie’s spokesperson declined to comment to ARTnews on the lawsuit. When asked whether other breach notifications had been filed, a spokesperson wrote in an email, “Breach notifications have been issued to the appropriate authorities in line with continued compliance with GDPR and other relevant national and state regulations.”

Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, the law firm representing Maroulis, also had not responded to a request for comment from ARTnews by publication.

Despite the cyberattack, the auction house was still able to generate $114.7 million for the Rosa de la Cruz and 21st Century sales and $413 million during its 20th Century Evening sale in New York through bids by phone, in-person, and its online platform Christie’s Live.

News of the class-action lawsuit was first reported by The Art Newspaper. Brett Callow, threat analyst for the New Zealand–based cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, first posted news of the breach notification with the California Attorney General’s office on X.

The sales included plenty of guarantees and several works by artists whose momentum has cooled amid higher interest rates, ongoing geopolitical conflict, and concerns over the upcoming US national election.

While Phillips’ spring evening sale in Hong Kong had only 24 lots, the auction house managed to ride the ongoing wave of demand for Jean-Michel Basquiat by selling Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari for HK$99 million or U$12.6 million, the highest amount for the season across all the auction houses and categories in Hong Kong. The work carried an estimate of HK$90 million to HK$120 million.

Phillips was also the only auction house to consign a work by Banksy. The popular street artist was absent from this past New York spring auction season but The Leopard and Lamb sold at Phillips Hong Kong on May 31 for HK$36.8 million or $4.7 million on an estimate of HK$18 million to $28 million.

Phillips said its Modern and Contemporary art spring sales in Hong were 22 percent higher compared to last season, with works by Zao Wou-Ki, Yoshitomo Nara, Yayoi Kusama, and Andy Warhol accounting for six out of the top ten lots.

Christie’s said in a press release that its Asia Spring auctions on May 28 and 29 generated a total of HK$963 million ($124 million), with “close to 90% sold by lot and by value and over 40% of lots sold over high estimate.” However, last year Christie’s spring auctions in Hong Kong generated HK$1.24 billion ($159 million), indicating a drop of 22 percent in sales including fees.

Other declines included the number of works which sold for above HK$10 million ($1.3 million) compared to last year (22 for 2024, versus 36 for 2023). There were also fewer lots (81 in 2024; 88 in 2023) in this year’s 20th and 21st Century evening sales compared to the 20th/21st Century and Post-Millennium evening sales, as well as more works that did not sell (14 in 2024; 12 in 2023).

A bright yellow acrylic and silkscreen Flowers painting from 1965 by Andy Warhol was the top lot, at HK$66.625 million with fees ($8.5million USD), on an estimate of (HK $62.8 million – HK $92.8 million). Other top sellers included Zao Wou-Ki’s 10.01.68 for HK $63.175 million, or approximately $8.13 million (estimate of HK$68 million to HK$ 98 million), Yayoi Kusama’s 83-inch tall sculpture Pumpkin (2012) for HK $48.775 million, or $6.28 million (estimate of HK$40 million to HK$60 million), and Rene Magritte’s 1944 painting of a rose L’Invitation au voyage for HK $42.725 million or just under $5.5 million (estimate of HK$28 million to HK$38 million).

Eight of the top ten lots across Christie’s four sales on May 28 and May 29 had guarantees, with the exception of Yoshitomo Nara’s Portrait of AE (2009) and Rock You! (2006).

It’s worth noting that Paul Cezanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves (circa 1902-1906) sold for HK$22.16 million or $4.5 million, on an estimate of HK$20 million to HK$30 million. That figure was a drop from when the consignor purchased the work in June 2014 from Christie’s in London for £3.55 million or about $6 million.

The selling price for Zao Wou-Ki’s 10.01.68 was also lower than when it previously appeared at auction at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in November 2018, when it sold for HK$68.9 million or $8.8 million, as the lead lot for a sale of Abstract artworks in the house’s Brushwork series.

Breakout results included a Salvo for HK$3.2 million (estimate HK$1 million to HK$1.5 million), a Marina Perez Simao painting for HK$2.1 million (estimate of HK$700,000 to HK$1.2 million), and a Ben Sledsen work for HK$1.6 million (estimate of HK$200,000 to HK$400,000). Works by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Miriam Cahn, Lee Bae, Xia Yu, Katherine Bernhardt, and Sholto Blissett also sold above high estimates.

Christie’s said world auctions records were also set for Rhee Seundja, Nguyen Tu Nghiem, Skygolpe, Ay-o, Sholto Blissett, Jeong Young-do, Son Dong-Hyun, Daniel Correa Mejia, Jeon Hyun-Sun and Kim Su-Yeon.

Notably, two works by Nicholas Party did not sell (one had an estimate of HK$22 million to HK$28 million, or $2.8 million to $3.6 million), as well as a Wayne Thiebaud (estimate of HK$30 million to HK$40 million, or $3.8 million to $5.1 million), which had the third highest estimate of the house’s 21st Century sale.

Christie’s also officially announced at the end of its sales that it would hold its inaugural auctions at its new Asia Pacific headquarters at The Henderson building in Central district on September 26 and September 27, starting with sales of 20th and 21st Century art.

THE HEADLINES

MONET’S POPPIES VANDALIZED. Claude Monet’s famous 1873 bucolic Impressionist painting of a woman and child walking through a field of red poppies that all but engulfs them was vandalized Saturday at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris by a climate activist from the group Riposte Alimentaire [Food Response], reports Francesca Aton for ARTnews. A young woman from the group stuck a poster of a burnt-red landscape onto the center of the painting, and glued her hand to the wall beside it, before stating to the visitors in French: “This nightmarish painting in front of us is what awaits us if no alternative is put into place. At over 4 degrees (Celsius) hell is what awaits us.” The French government predicts a four-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by 2100. However, contrary to a mistaken report by The Guardian, the Monet painting was protected by glass. As a result, it was unharmed, confirmed the museum to ARTnews. After careful inspection, the painting was placed back on view later the same day.

SHOCK CLOSURE. The University of the Arts in Philadelphia has suddenly announced it will close on June 7, and many, including its 1,149 students and about 700 faculty and staff, only learned of the news from a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer as late as Friday, or on social media, reports The New York Times. Reasons include “a fragile financial state,” as well as declining enrollment, revenue and rising expenses, stated the school on its website. A “space for questions and concerns,” is set to take place today at a town hall meeting and may address what exactly led to such an urgent financial crisis, a question which the Inquirer reported has not been sufficiently explained, though rising major infrastructure repair costs appear to have been the tipping point. The school’s Board of Trustees formally voted on June 1 to close the school after the Middle States Commission on Higher Education revoked the University’s accreditation. “We know that the news of UArts’ closure comes as a shock,” said the school in a Friday statement. “We could not overcome the ultimate challenge we faced: with a cash position that has steadily weakened, we could not cover significant, unanticipated expenses. The situation came to light very suddenly.”

THE DIGEST

RansomHub, the gang behind the Christie’s hack and ransom of client information, has claimed it is auctioning off the stolen data. Christie’s told clients their names and some personal identity information was compromised, but had no evidence financial or transactional records were taken. Apparently unable to extort a ransom, RansomHub posted: “Let us sell the data by auction. We abide by the rules of RansomHub and only sell once… Find something you like in the sample, then contact us.” [Artnet News]

Paris officials have linked three men suspected of planting five coffins at the foot of the Eiffel Tower on Saturday to a group with ties to Moscow, which is also suspected of being behind the vandalism of the Paris Holocaust Memorial museum’s Wall of the Righteous in May. Five coffins filled with plaster, draped with the French flag, and bearing the message, “French soldiers of Ukraine,” were discovered near the Eiffel Tower Saturday morning, and three people were arrested. [Le Monde]

The suicide of French curator Vincent Honoré was ruled a “work accident,” by France’s public health organization, Caisse primaire d’assurances maladie, following a three-month investigation, according to Le Quotidient de l’Art. Honoré served as head of exhibitions at the MO.CO Montpellier museum, which reportedly “vigorously contests this decision and has filed an appeal.” Meanwhile, Honoré’s family has the possibility to seek criminal charges against the museum. [ARTnews]

Pro-Palestinian protestors demonstrated at the Brooklyn Museum Friday, calling for the institution to condemn the deaths in Gaza as a genocide, and to disclose and divest its financial ties to Israel. Towards the end of the protest, a group scrawled the slogans across Deborah Kass’ OY/YO installation: “Fuck Bullshit Museum,” and “NYPD KKK.” Arrests were eventually made. [ARTnews]

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) is planning an upgrade, by purchasing the building it occupies on East Seventh Street, incorporating residencies, and adding a café. [The New York Times]

Tate director Maria Balshaw discusses criticism ofenergy company BP’s new £50-million partnership with the British Museum in an interview with the Observer, saying “the issue the BM faces in taking BP’s money is that the public has moved to a position where they think it is inappropriate, and there’s a dissonance between wishing to be seen as extremely sensitive in the way we relate to other cultures and careful about the resources we consume, and then taking money from a company that has not yet demonstrated whether it’s really committed to changing.” [The Guardian/The Observer]

Arts workers in Edinburgh have warned in a petition of a pending cultural crisis ahead of the planned sale of a beloved arts venue called Summerhall. The 130,00-square-foot complex of galleries, theaters, and cinemas is one of the city’s most famous cultural hubs, but it has emerged that its owner, Oesselman Estates, has put it on the market. [The Guardian]

THE KICKER

SOUNDS OF JOSHUA TREES. Artist Scott Kildall talks about making music from Joshua trees and his recent sound installation “Infrared Reflections,” with NPR’s Christopher Intagliata. The piece “transforms near-infrared light bouncing off the iconic scraggly yuccas into a shimmering mosaic of otherworldly music – essentially turning the Joshua tree into an instrument,” writes Intagliata. Using a microcontroller with an infrared sensor about the size of a credit card, Kildall is able to capture light wavelengths invisible to the human eye, and then map that data into sounds that we can hear. “It’s kind of like magic,” says the artist. “And the magic is just revealing something that’s right beyond our levels of perception.”