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. 

As the chairman and chief executive of the Related Group, Pérez has built a real estate empire in Miami and donated hundreds of millions to arts organizations in the city, including $80 million to a contemporary art museum that bears his name.

“A lot of the people who are coming from New York are involved in the arts, participate in the arts,” Pérez, who has appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list, said in an interview with Bloomberg about the budget cuts. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”

Last summer, Miami Beach sold $97.6 million of municipal debt to help fund theaters, concert venues, and museums, in push to cleanse the city of it’s “Spring Break or Bust” reputation.

Earlier this month, DeSantis vetoed more than $32 million in arts and culture grants from the 2025 state budget, which led both politicians and supporters of the arts to warn that the move could disadvantage institutions across Florida state.

DeSantis later told the press that the reason for the budget cuts was his view that some programs weren’t appropriate for state funding. As an example, DeSantis pointed to the Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival, which he called overly “sexual.”

“When I see money being spent that way, I have to be the one to stand up for taxpayers and say, ‘You know what, that is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars,’” DeSantis said of the event.

Pérez compared Florida state’s budget for culture and the arts to New York’s, saying, “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.” Earlier this year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the state would make $82 million available for arts and culture organizations. 

Richard Milstein, board chair of Trust for Miami’s largest venue for theater and music, the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center, voiced a similar sentiment, saying, “If we talk about New York, Chicago, or other major communities, they have this component built in to their lifestyle already. So the question is, ‘Is there that component within our lifestyle in Miami-Dade County or the rest of Florida?’” 

While the Performing Arts Center was among the institutions that will feel the pinch come next year—it’s out $70,500 because of the DeSantis budget cuts—it is among the lucky ones, thanks to was Bloomberg described as a “a long list of deep-pocketed patrons.”

Not every institution is so lucky. The Orchestra Miami, which is run by founder Elaine Rinaldi, stages multiple free shows each year and has a robust music teaching program for public school children, lost a state grant worth $34,866. That was enough to fund the operation for two months. Rinaldi told Bloomberg that if she can’t make up the money with donations, she’ll have to cut her salary, let go of part-time staff, or cancel some of the orchestra’s free programing. 

In a recent Sky News appearance, the politician called the Banksy work “vile and unacceptable.” On Instagram today, Banksy fired back, saying that that response seemed “a bit over the top.”

“The real boat I fund, the MV Louise Michel, rescued 17 unaccompanied children from the central Med on Monday night,” Banksy wrote. “As punishment the Italian authorities have detained it – which seems vile and unacceptable to me.”

Cleverly claimed in the Sky News interview that the Banksy piece was “a celebration of loss of life in the Channel.” When the secretary was asked whether it was possible that Banksy, “who makes political commentary on all sorts of things,” could have been criticizing the conservative government’s inability to confront the migrant smuggling industry, Cleverly dodged the question.

Instead, Cleverly railed against the UKs Labour party, which he said “aspires to run border control” and has hindered Conservative efforts to tighten the influx of migrants into Great Britain. 

The number of migrants reaching Great Britain via small boats that cross that English Chanel has steeply risen since 2018, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, with 12,646 small boat arrivals recorded during the first half of 2024, up 16 percent from the same period last year. 

In May, three men were arrested and charged with the deaths of five migrants, including a 7-year-old girl, who were crushed while trying to illegally enter the UK via a small boat. The UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, told reporters that the trips across the channel were the result of “criminal gangs are exploiting vulnerable people; they are packing more and more people into these unseaworthy dinghies.”

Migration was a major theme at Glastonbury this year, with an entire section of the festival called Terminal 1 dedicated to the topic. 

The Louise Michel is a 98-foot former French Navy vessel funded by Banksy from the sale of his artworks; it performs search and rescue missions along the European coast. The ship was launched in August 2019 and saved 350 people during its first week as sea. It was seized by Italian authorities following an attempt to rescue 37 migrants from the central Mediterranean sea.

The “secret clown room” is hidden behind a sliding door on the gallery’s first floor and has eight painted portraits of, you guessed it, clowns, who are shown in varying states of joy (or distress). These works are outliers in Mesler’s show, titled “Kitchens are good rooms to cry in,” which is made up of new paintings, sculptures, and installation. They’re kind of an inside joke. “If someone hasn’t seen that room,” Mesler said in an interview, “they probably left too soon. When they do hear about it, maybe they’ll feel they have to come back.”

“More foot traffic,” he said, flashing a wide, toothy grin.

The Lévy Gorvy Dayan show is, in a way, the end of a chapter of Mesler’s life—and also the start of something new. “It really feels like the end of the first act,” the 50-year-old artist said. “After this, I won’t have to tell my story again. I can stop living in the past and start just being in the world, in the present. Maybe I’ll even help other people tell their stories.”

Walking through the show is like stepping gingerly through the molted Technicolor skins that Mesler has sloughed off over the years, from his childhood in Los Angeles, to his time as an booze-addled art dealer in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to his move out the Hamptons in 2016. It was there, out East, that he Twelve Stepped into sobriety. In the basement of his art space Rental Gallery, he began making paintings: brightly colored pictures often adorned with text written in jaunty bubble letters. 

The first room of his current Lévy Gorvy Dayan show is covered in wallpaper that mimics the way summer light dances and slithers across the top of a swimming pool. Mesler co-designed it with the brand Martinique specifically for the show. On small pilasters sit 200-pound beach balls, cast in bronze and painted to match the room. Each is decorated with a different word—“LIFE”, “LOVE”, “MOM”—and painted to look like the metallic helium-filled balloons that are ubiquitous at children’s birthday parties.

The second room downstairs is darker in tone. The bright, six-foot-tall paintings featured here contain phrases like “PLAY THE HITS” and “GO GO” in ’70s-inspired fonts. The words are set above scenic mountain ranges, the snow on top acting as a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine binges and the subsequent come-downs that follow. One picture captures that feeling with the words “ITS FINE”, thick and brown, melting into a murky river below. Rising above it all is a crisp white mountain “slopes” with a rainbow peeking out. A disco ball gleams from the top left, as if it were hung from an unseen cloud. Another has the words “PARTY TIME” cut out in messy lines. The rainbow this time feels menacing behind the shadowy white slopes.

Upstairs is where it gets interesting. In one gallery, among display cases filled with little drawings, tchotchkes, and childhood ephemera, Mesler has placed a desk and a sofa. There are two cozy chairs, a rug, and a table. “It’s an extension of my office, really,” he said. “I call it my office.” Mesler was not joking: he is there every day. He keeps banker’s hours, sitting in the chair behind his desk under a hanging balloon sculpture that spells out the word “JOY.” There’s even a working phone. In one corner, next to a pile of CDs, there’s an easel on which he’ll make portraits of the LGD staff.

“I literally just sit here and wait to see what will happen,” Mesler said. “People peek in and ask if they can come in. I say, ‘Of course!’ Soon, they’re sitting. We start chatting about the art, about whatever. It creates a whole different experience.” 

Art galleries in general can be intimidating, even unwelcoming. Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s space, with its regal staircase and elegant molding, has the air of a venerable institution. It’s definitely not somewhere you’d come to shoot the breeze. But that’s what makes Mesler’s project work. 

While the pictures and sculptures downstairs have sinister undertones—he said the first room was inspired by “those awkward childhood pool parties where the grownups drink too much”—the upstairs is filled with messages of healthy positivity and acceptance. Words like “PRAYER” and “FEELINGS” are painted on tie-dye backgrounds. The office space functions similarly, acting as a symbol of an artist at peace, finally comfortable at middle age.

Mesler’s expansive rolodex has led to a mass of visitors. Over the course of one morning in mid-June, visitors to the office included a gossipy art adviser who used to work at Pace Wildenstein, a lovely older couple from Florida who were visiting their granddaughter, art advisor and podcaster Benjamin Godsill, and Mesler’s friend, the artist Rashid Johnson, who brought sushi. The staff at the gallery’s front desk told me that, on some days, between 80 and 100 people pass though.

If the show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan were the only thing going on for Joel Mesler this summer, he’d be batting 1000. But it’s not. In late May, he threw out the first pitch at Mets Stadium in Queens as part of the two “artist series” giveaways. That Saturday night, the first 15,000 fans through the gate were given a beach tote he designed. Later this month, it’ll be Rashid Johnson behind home plate. 

What can be bigger than throwing the first pitch at a New York City ball game? How about taking over Rockefeller Plaza. On Tuesday, a grand public installation turned 30 Rock’s Ice Rink into a Mesler-designed “pool party.” The wavy, deep blue wallpaper from the first room at Lévy Gorvy Dayan was spread over the ground, making the whole plaza from above look cool enough that your feet felt pleasantly wet. Extra-large versions of his beach-ball sculptures, weighing in at more than 500 pounds, were installed along with giant versions of his balloon letters that spell out “LOVE” and “JOY.” Each of the 193 flags that surround the plaza was replaced with rainbow-colored banners straight out of Mesler’s mind. Massive pool noodles really drive home summer vibes. 

Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home” gently swept through the air and during the ribbon cutting on Tuesday morning. A few tracks later, it was “I Can’t Go For That” by Hall & Oates. It was a real ’80s pool party. 

Kids were decorating actual beach balls on picnic benches, sitting on the pool noodle sculptures and posing pictures while hanging off the letter “L” or hugging the letter “Y.” Pink and white beach balls were floating in the Prometheus statue’s fountain. Art-world heavies like Hank Willis Thomas, Rujeko Hockley, Sarah Harrelson, Hiba Schahbaz, Brett Gorvy, and Glori Cohen mingled with French Canadian tourists slathered in sunscreen and would-be influencers who snapped pics of their dogs for Instagram. Mesler-designed swag, including the Martinique wallpaper, was on sale in the gift shop. Later in the day, ice cream was served.

“Joel stands out for his humor, yes, but also his pathos,” Gorvy told me while standing next to a hefty pink and white beach ball emblazoned with the word “YOU.” “To him, the public is as important as the collector. How many artists today have really touched the public in a way that isn’t ironic or cynical, or filled with false sentiment? Joel’s putting his tremendous positivity out there in the world and it works, because he’s an honest guy, a good guy.”

Every so often, it seems, the good guys do win.

The Mafia-obsessed Enger first served prison time at 19, one year after he made his professional soccer debut with Vålerenga. In 1988 he began a series of art and jewelry thefts, including a semi-failed attempt to steal a version of The Scream from the National Gallery in Oslo. A miscalculation about the painting’s location in the museum led to Enger stealing another of Munch’s pictures, Love and Pain (1895), which has been mistakenly called Vampire.

In a 2023 documentary about Enger’s life, The Man Who Stole The Scream, he said that miscalculation led to “disappointment [that] lasted for days.” But the danger involved, and the mechanics of hiding the work from the police “started to become fun.”

Enger served a four year prison sentence for the theft—not quite long enough for him to shake the idea of becoming a world-renowned art thief.

His most famous heist occurred on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics, held in Lillehammer that year, when he stole The Scream from the National Gallery in Oslo. The painting, then valued at $55 million, was recovered undamaged after Enger confessed to hiding it in a secret compartment in his family’s home.

Over the years, Enger was repeatedly convicted for art thefts and drug crimes, and he continued to attract media attention. In 1999, he famously escaped a minimum-security prison, and while on the lam gave interviews to the news and television outlets, much to the chagrin of the police. He was later re-arrested, after “attracting attention by wearing sunglasses late at night.” He began painting during a 2007 prison stay and debuted as an artist with a series of abstract paintings that were shown in a Norwegian gallery in 2011.

Despite his artistic pursuits, Enger continued his criminal activities. In 2015 he was arrested and charged with stealing 17 paintings from an Oslo gallery after he left his wallet and ID at the scene of the crime. His one-time lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhu, described him in Dagbladet as a “gentleman” thief who would be missed. (Enger, who was not married, claimed he had four children with four different women from four countries.)

Svein Graff of Vålerenga Fotball reflected on Enger’s potential as a soccer player, recalled what Enger had once said “that while he was not the best soccer player, he was the best criminal so that’s the path he chose to take,” according to the AP report. 

The free exhibition is titled Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail. According to the museum the show will focus on both her childhood, recording legacy, and rise to superstardom, with 13 distinct stops on the “trail” that correspond to a point in Swift’s career, beginning with her move to Nashville at 14-years-old.

Among the standout items in the collection are a pair of cowboy boots Swift wore during her country music days and the black ruffled dress she wore in the music video for Fortnight, the single from her recently released album The Tortured  Poet’s Department.

“Taylor Swift’s songs like objects tell stories, often drawing from art, history and literature. We hope this theatrical trail across the museum will inspire curious visitors to discover more about the performer, her creativity and V&A objects,” Kate Bailey, Senior Curator, Theatre & Performance at the V&A said in a press release.

The Songbook Trail comes on the heels of the UK leg of Swift’s monumental Eras tour, which by one account has taken over the British capital city. So much so that London’s mayor Sadiq Khan commissioned and shared a map of the city’s subway system called “Tube Map (Taylor’s Version),” with each line named after one of her albums and each stop after one of her songs, to be displayed at Wembley Park station, with an insert included in last Friday’s Evening Standard.

The tour was expected to bring around £300 million pounds into London, with Barclay’s estimating that the UK economy as a whole would get a £997 million boost thanks to Swifties spending more than 12 times the average UK citizen’s spends on a night out. 

The V&A was ahead of the game. In February of this year the institution began looking for a Taylor Swift consultant who was “versed in handmade memorabilia, such as concert signs and friendship bracelets (which Swift is known for gifting at her shows).”

The Songbook Trail was conceived by the award-winning designer Tom Piper (mastermind of the V&A’s 2021 Alice in Wonderland exhibition). It will be staged in the South Kensington museum’s permanent galleries through September 8, 2024.

According to a story published in the Tampa Bay Times, DeSantis said the cause was Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival, which he characterized as being overtly “sexual” and therefore an inappropriate recipient of state funds. 

While it’s unclear if the Orlando festival was slated to receive any money from the grants, the state of Florida awards money for cultural projects based on a ranked list. The Fringe Festival was ranked toward the bottom. DeSantis said the event should spur Florida lawmakers to reevaluate how state money is spent. 

“You have your tax dollars being given in grants to things like the Fringe Festival, which is like a sexual festival where they’re doing all this stuff,” the Governor said at a press conference, adding later that “when I see money being spent that way, I have to be the one to stand up for taxpayers and say, you know what, that is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” 

“In referring to the fringe as a ‘sexual’ festival, he incorrectly characterized our festival and misrepresented our contributions to the arts community, locally, nationally and internationally,” Tempestt Halstead, producer of the Orlando Fringe Festival, said in a statement. Halstead said the festival was one of 200 such events around the world that are “contributing to a global movement of artistic expression and cultural exchange.”

Democratic Representative Anna Eskamani of Orlando said this year’s festival was not “sexual,” though she noted that it “does feature drag queens and other forms of artistic expression that DeSantis has wanted to censor despite courts telling him otherwise!”

In 2023, lawmakers asked to ban drag shows that allow children and stop venues from admitting children to adult live performances. That proposed legislation was blocked by a federal judge due to violating First Amendment rights, a decision that was later bolstered by the Supreme Court.

Among the institutions affected by DeSantis’s culture funding veto were the Tampa Museum of Art and the Orlando Museum of Art.

The decision was related to a provision in a settlement involving Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical company, which produces OxyContin, a painkiller that has addictive properties. The 5-4 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, states that the federal bankruptcy code does not allow for third-party liability shields in bankruptcy agreements.

The ruling affects a proposed settlement in which the Sacklers would have paid up to $6 billion to address the opioid epidemic.

The dissent, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, called the decision “wrong on the law” and “devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families.”

The settlement deal, as it was approved in 2021, was to dissolve Purdue Pharma and distribute $4.5 billion in company funds to help curb the opioid epidemic and resolve hundreds of related claims. That deal included a controversial provision that would guarantee the Sacklers from future civil claims.

Later that year, a federal judge overturned the settlement agreement, stating that Sacklers should not have been released from civil liability in opioid-related lawsuits. An appeals court in May 2023 found that the Sacklers could in fact be protected from civil liability after the family sweetened the settlement by around $1.73 billion.

Earlier this month, the US Trustee Program, part of the Justice Department, argued that the liability shield was an improper use of the bankruptcy system and requested that the Supreme Court look into the deal.

Members Sackler family were for many years major donors to some of the world’s most prestigious art institutions. Since the fallout surrounding Purdue, however, a number of those institutions, including the London’s National Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum, removed the Sackler name from their buildings following protests from activists.

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.

That puts the Paris auction house three blocks from its current location. The move is scheduled for mid-October, and is part of a larger strategy to expand Sotheby’s presence in France.

The house has previously announced plans to relocate two of its other spaces. In July, it will open a new Hong Kong location, and in 2025, Sotheby’s will move its New York space to the Marcel Breuer–designed Brutalist structure completed in 1966 for the Whitney Museum.

Sotheby’s new Paris headquarters will cover more than 10,800 square feet across five floors, offering 30 percent more exhibition space than its current location in the French capital. The venue, which is not far from the Champs-Élysées, will house a café and a wine cellar with a tasting area, and play host to year-round master classes, dining, and, of course, auctions.

The new Paris location will support Sotheby’s 15 specialist departments, covering areas such as ancient, modern, and contemporary art, as well as Asian and African art, design, luxury goods, and jewelry.

Upstairs will be a luxury showroom called “the Salon,” with items for sale at fixed prices, as well as rooms dedicated to private sales. Additional areas in the new Paris headquarters will provide spaces for concerts, parties, conferences, cocktail parties, fashion shows, and dinners. The auction house’s “state-of-the-art scenographic and technical equipment” will enable the exhibition of a wide range of works and objects.

The building was once the site of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which closed in 2019 after more than a century in business. The gallery held Van Gogh’s first retrospective and once employed famed art critic Félix Fénéon.

Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said the move “underscores our commitment to France and highlights the growing importance of the French art and luxury markets to our company.”

The building will feature restored Art Deco elements, modern amenities, and sustainable lighting, and will be accessible to people with reduced mobility. Access to both exhibitions and auctions will be free to the public. According to the house’s announcement, there will be more than 15 miles of cable installed in the new space to ensure the house’s “digital prowess” and global connectivity.

Paris’s reputation as a European art market hub has grown considerably in recent years, with galleries and art fairs, including the recently rechristened Art Basel Paris, moving to the French capital.