Shanti Escalante-De Mattei's column 'Link Rot' examines the debate over generative AI in creative fields, focusing on the argument that AI is just another tool like a paintbrush. The article critiques this view by highlighting how AI is being used by clients and studios to pressure animators, cut pay, and impose unrealistic deadlines, while the technology was built on ethically questionable datasets scraped from public websites without permission.
Christie's online sale of decorative arts from the collection of Jonathan Burden, titled 'Crafted and Collected: The Jonathan Burden Sale,' achieved over $1.07 million with fees, more than doubling the low estimate of $487,500. The sale featured 151 lots, with only five unsold, a 97% sell-through rate. The top lot was a 10-foot-long French Incarnat Turquin marble dining table that sold for $101,600, far exceeding its $30,000 high estimate. The auction employed an innovative 'in-situ' viewing at Burden's studio in Long Island City, where potential bidders could meet the dealer, hear stories, and see pieces demonstrated. Many items sold for multiples of their estimates, including a Victorian metamorphic chair that brought $27,940 against a $3,000 high estimate.
A federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit against Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, ruling that its digital assets—including Bored Ape NFTs and ApeCoin—do not qualify as securities under the Howey test. Plaintiffs Adonis Real and Adam Titcher had alleged that Yuga Labs colluded with celebrities like Justin Bieber, Madonna, and Steph Curry, as well as talent agent Guy Oseary and crypto platform MoonPay, to inflate prices and violate securities laws. Judge Fernando Olguin found that while the plaintiffs satisfied one prong of the Howey test—expectation of profits from others' efforts—they failed to meet the other requirements, leading to the dismissal.
A controversial 12-foot-tall statue depicting President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has returned to Washington, D.C.'s National Mall after being removed by the National Parks Service late last month. Originally titled *The Secret Handshake*, the work was created by anonymous artists to "celebrate" Trump's ties to Epstein during Friendship Month, and features plaques with a message Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein. The National Parks Service cited the statue's height as non-compliant with its permit, and the artists accused the Trump administration of suppressing free speech. The statue has since been repaired and retitled *Why Can't We Be Friends?*.
A Rhode Island federal court ruled on Friday that National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants do not have to comply with President Trump’s executive order banning “gender ideology.” The order, introduced in February, prohibited federal funds from being used to promote the idea that males can identify as women and vice versa, and was applied to the NEA grant application process. The ACLU’s Rhode Island branch filed a lawsuit in March on behalf of several theaters, arguing the policy violated First Amendment rights by restricting the types of works that could receive funding. Judge William E. Smith, appointed by former President George W. Bush, found the policy unconstitutional, noting that the 1965 law establishing the NEA requires grants to be awarded solely on merit. A subsequent “final notice” allowing the NEA chair to review applications on a case-by-case basis was also struck down as a viewpoint-based restriction on artists’ speech.
New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota that was overhauled by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 to become a conservative institution, announced on September 17, 2025, that it will commission a statue of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and founder of Turning Point USA who was assassinated in Utah the previous week. The statue, privately funded by community leaders, will depict Kirk seated at a table with two empty chairs, speaking into a microphone, and is intended to honor his legacy and commitment to free speech and civil discourse on campus.
Egyptian doctor Ashraf Omar Eldarir has been sentenced to six months in prison by U.S. District Judge Rachel P. Kovner for smuggling hundreds of ancient Egyptian artifacts into the United States. Eldarir was arrested in 2019 after importing over 600 artifacts without declaring them on customs forms, including a polychrome relief, Roman limestone pieces, gold amulets, and wooden tomb model figures dating to 1900 BCE. The largest seizure of smuggled antiquities at JFK Airport occurred in January 2020, when customs officers found 590 artifacts wrapped in bubble wrap and foam, with loose sand and dirt indicating recent excavation. Eldarir pleaded guilty to four counts of smuggling and used fake provenances—including forged documents and photoshopped photographs—to sell artifacts at U.S. auction houses.
On July 23, U.S. Senator John Fetterman introduced the Art Market Integrity Act, a bill that would apply anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing regulations to art dealers, auction houses, galleries, advisers, consultants, custodians, museums, collectors, and other intermediaries in the art market. The legislation amends the Bank Secrecy Act, requiring these entities to conduct client due diligence, maintain records, and report suspicious transactions. It exempts artists selling their own work, nonprofits, and businesses with under $50,000 in annual art transactions. The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley, Sheldon Whitehouse, Bill Cassidy, Andy Kim, and David McCormick.
Weill Cornell Medicine is proceeding with plans to develop a research facility at 1334 York Avenue, the former headquarters of Sotheby’s, despite a federal funding freeze that has disrupted hundreds of research projects. The 200,000-square-foot leased space is intended for medical research, patient care, and teaching, and the university has stated the lease is not contingent on government funding. However, S&P Global Ratings has revised the property’s valuation downward by nearly 12% since last year, citing uncertainty over Weill Cornell’s financial commitment to complete the build-out.
Phillips auction house will launch a new "priority bidding" fee structure this September, offering a lower buyer's premium rate to bidders who place a binding written bid at least 48 hours before a live auction, provided the bid meets or exceeds the lot's low estimate. The standard buyer's premium will remain at 29/22/15 percent for New York sales, while priority bidding rates drop to 25/20/14 percent. The policy applies to live auctions across New York, London, Hong Kong, Geneva, and Paris, but excludes watch auctions and timed online-only sales.
Gallery Les Bois has opened its inaugural exhibition, “Offline,” in London’s Chelsea neighborhood, running through July 22, 2025. The show explores digital saturation, online engagement pressures, and the environmental and human costs of the digital ecosystem. It features work by the artist duo Volcan, including their “Offline Series” (shown at the 60th Venice Biennale) and “Roadworks Series,” alongside contributions from Steve Foster, Oliver Tanay, Miranda Carter, and Jasmine Pradissitto. The gallery, founded by Claire-Julia Hill in 2024, aims to integrate sustainability with contemporary art.
UNESCO has granted World Heritage status to Murujuga, an ancient Aboriginal rock art site in Western Australia's Pilbara region, despite concerns about its vulnerability to emissions from nearby gas and fertilizer plants. The site contains over 1 million petroglyphs, including the oldest known depiction of a human face, dating back up to 50,000 years. Indigenous groups campaigned for two decades for protection, and the Australian government nominated the site in 2023. However, the Karratha Gas Plant, operated by Woodside Energy, sits on the nominated land, and ICOMOS had warned that emissions pose a risk to the rock art. The UNESCO designation was unanimous, but an amendment was added requiring Australia to continue monitoring industrial impact.
Artist Walter Paul Bebirian discusses the Volord Kingdom Art Collection, a vast and growing trove of hundreds of thousands of digital artworks he has created over decades. In an interview with Artnet News, Bebirian recounts significant personal challenges since 2022, including a stroke in April 2023 that led to rheumatoid arthritis, limiting his mobility and forcing a hiatus from his practice. He lowered his prices to make his art more affordable and gradually resumed work despite physical difficulties. The collection, born from a need to unify his oeuvre and create a generative artistic world, blends abstraction and representation, photography and digital imagination.
A 54-pound chunk of Mars, believed to be the largest Martian meteorite ever discovered on Earth, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s New York on July 16 with an estimate of $2 million to $4 million. Named NWA 16788, the meteorite was found in November 2023 in Niger’s Agadez region and accounts for 6.5 percent of all known Martian material on Earth, making it 70 percent larger than the next largest piece. Sotheby’s is billing it as the most valuable meteorite ever offered at auction, and it will be on public view from July 8–15 before the live sale.
Nick Axel and Daniele Balleri have written a reply to this article. The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, organized by MIT professor Carlo Ratti under the theme “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” features A.I.-generated summaries alongside traditional wall texts for each exhibit. These two-sentence distillations, labeled “A.I. Summary,” are designed to help visitors quickly grasp core ideas and choose their pace through the dense show. An example is Beatriz Colomina, Roberto Kolter, Patricia Urquiola, Geoffrey West, and Mark Wigley's installation *The Other Side of the Hill*, whose 200-word wall text is condensed into a succinct A.I. summary about microbial intelligence and demographic collapse.
Artnet is co-presenting Midnight Moment in partnership with Times Square Arts this June, featuring Yuge Zhou's video work *Trampoline Color Exercise*. The piece uses archival Olympic footage to show gymnasts tumbling on pink-gridded trampolines in a seamless collage, exploring themes of globalization, geopolitical tension, and humanity's pursuit of perfection. Zhou, a video artist with a background in computer science and a former child singer in China, discusses her creative journey and the inspiration behind the work in an accompanying interview.
Thieves in Syria are looting ancient artifacts from archaeological sites like Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage city dating back to the 3rd century BCE, and selling them on Facebook Marketplace. The looting has surged since the overthrow of former president Bashar al-Assad in December, with traffickers listing funerary gold, statues, and mosaics alongside ordinary secondhand goods. The Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project reports that nearly one-third of its 1,500 Syrian cases occurred in December alone, and sales are happening faster than ever—mosaics that once took a year to sell now move in two weeks.
Researchers from Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, and the Saxony-Anhalt-State Museum of Prehistory, in collaboration with engineering firm DeltaSigma Analytics and coppersmith Herbert Bauer, have successfully replicated the manufacturing process of the Nebra Sky Disk, a 3,600-year-old bronze artifact depicting the cosmos. By analyzing a small sample of the disk using advanced techniques like energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and electron backscatter diffraction, the team determined the disk was cast and then forged at least 10 times through repeated heating and hammering. Bauer replicated this by annealing a similar metal mixture 55 times, revealing that the disk's microstructure matches a stage after 10 forging cycles, not the final 55, indicating the original preform was thinner and wider than assumed.
A team of researchers has successfully recreated Egyptian blue, the world's oldest synthetic pigment, which was used by ancient Egyptians from as early as 3100 B.C.E. The study, published in NPJ Heritage Science, was led by John S. McCloy of Washington State University and Edward P. Vicenzi of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute, in collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The researchers experimented with various minerals, heating them in ovens at around 1,000 degrees Celsius for up to 11 hours, and used modern microscopy and analysis techniques to compare their results with ancient artifacts from the Carnegie Museum's collection.
The Venice Biennale will proceed with its 2026 edition despite the unexpected death of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, earlier this month. The Biennale announced on Tuesday that it will realize Kouoh's exhibition, titled "In Minor Keys," which she had already begun planning before her passing. Kouoh had selected artists, developed commissions, and established the central concept. The show will be carried forward by a team of five advisers she personally chose: curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, and Rasha Salti; critic Siddartha Mitter as editor; and Rory Tsapayi as assistant. The exhibition remains scheduled to open on May 9, 2026, with the full support of Kouoh's family.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) debuted a massive art installation called the Freedom to Be Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., coinciding with the start of WorldPride 2025. The 9,000-square-foot piece consists of 258 six-foot-square quilts created by over 1,000 trans artists and allies from across the country, celebrating trans joy and resilience. The project aims to rally support for the trans community ahead of the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, which will decide whether state bans on gender-affirming care for minors violate the Equal Protection Clause, and comes amid efforts by President Donald Trump and conservative lawmakers to roll back trans rights.
A New York court has summoned art dealers Count Edmondo di Robilant and Marco Voena to answer a civil complaint filed by former employee and curator Virginia Brilliant. The lawsuit, filed in New York, alleges repeated verbal harassment, misogynistic, antisemitic, racist, and homophobic comments, and other inappropriate behavior at their gallery Robilant and Voena, which has locations in New York, London, Milan, Paris, and St. Moritz. Brilliant, who holds a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, began working as an independent contractor in 2019. She claims the dealers created a toxic workplace, failed to pay promised medical expenses during her chemotherapy for breast cancer, and owes her commissions, back pay, and damages totaling at least $3.13 million. Robilant was served papers at the TEFAF New York art fair on May 13.
Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has filed an administrative lawsuit against the production company of YouTuber MrBeast (James Donaldson) over a video titled “I Explored 2000 Year Old Ancient Temples,” uploaded on May 10, 2025. The video shows MrBeast and his companions exploring Mayan sites in Yucatán, including Chichén Itzá, Calakmul, and Balamcanché, and features a scene where he promotes his snack brand Feastables as “the only Mayan-approved snack on the planet.” INAH alleges that the permit granted to Full Circle Media did not authorize commercial advertising or false information, and it demands compensation and a public retraction. The controversy escalated after Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum called for further investigation into whether the permit was violated.
London-based Gallery Les Bois, founded in late 2024 by Claire-Julia Hill, is establishing itself as a pioneering force in sustainable contemporary art. The gallery features a diverse roster of artists who work with eco-conscious materials and techniques, such as transforming natural resources from impacted waterways into pigments and repurposing textile waste. In an interview, Hill discusses her background studying art history at Cambridge University, her inspiration to integrate sustainability into the art world, and the gallery's mission to champion artists who combine ecological responsibility with aesthetic excellence and conceptual rigor.
Teravarna Art Gallery has launched a digital group exhibition titled "Kaleidoscope," featuring works by seven artists: Caitlin Accurso, Stephanie Bing, Diane Burchette-Gomez, Carina Imbrogno, Daniel Juric, Valeri Larko, and Debra Shapiro. The show, on view through May 16, 2025, spans figurative and abstract painting, collage, and mixed media, with highlights including Valeri Larko's photorealist "Secor Avenue Train Bridge" (2022) and Debra Shapiro's mixed-media piece "Las Tres Gracias" (2024). The exhibition is hosted entirely online, allowing global access.
A group of 71 House Democrats, led by Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Paul Tonko, is urging the Smithsonian Institution's inspector general to investigate Executive Order 14253, issued by President Donald Trump in March 2025. The order mandates the removal of exhibits and materials deemed "divisive" or promoting "race-centered ideology" from federally funded museums, including the Smithsonian. The lawmakers argue that the directive threatens the Smithsonian's congressionally mandated independence and could breach federal law, as the institution is expected to remain nonpartisan and free from political interference.
The article examines the enduring mystery of who the Great Sphinx of Giza was modeled after. While the 66-foot-tall statue is universally recognized, its origins remain debated among Egyptologists. Some believe Pharaoh Khafre commissioned it in his own image, citing a 1853 discovery of a Khafre statue nearby and a connecting road to his pyramid. Others argue it was built by Khafre's brother Redjedef to honor their father Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid. Damage to the Sphinx's nose from erosion and human conflict complicates identification.
President Donald Trump fired Biden-appointed members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversees the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Those removed include former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, former labor secretary Tom Perez, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and Jill Biden’s senior adviser Anthony Bernal. The appointments had been announced in January 2025. Emhoff, who is Jewish, condemned the move as politicizing Holocaust remembrance, while the White House stated Trump will appoint new members who honor the Holocaust and support Israel. The museum issued a statement expressing commitment to its mission without directly addressing the firings.
Four Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives—Joseph Morelle, Terri Sewell, Norma Torres, and Julie Johnson—sent a letter to Vice President J.D. Vance on Thursday urging him to reject an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution. The letter responds to President Donald Trump's March 27 executive order, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which aims to eliminate "divisive" and "anti-American" content from Smithsonian exhibitions and restore removed monuments. The lawmakers argue that the order threatens the curatorial independence that has made the Smithsonian a globally respected cultural institution.
Multiple open calls for artists and grants have been announced for April 2026 deadlines. The 2027 Creative Capital Open Call offers unrestricted project grants up to $50,000 for artists across all 50 states, while also selecting recipients for the new State of the Art Prize, which grants $10,000 to one artist from each state and territory. Delfina Foundation, in partnership with the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, is offering four fully funded residencies for Latin American and Caribbean artists, with two spots available in this round. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art is accepting submissions for its Louisiana Contemporary 2026 statewide juried exhibition, and the Handweaver’s Guild of America has issued calls for entries for its Convergence 2026 fiber art exhibitions.