Auction Fever, Restitution Fights, and Workers Rising

Sotheby’s staged a double-header evening in New York that brought in four hundred seven dollars million hammer, or four hundred thirty three dollars million with fees, landing squarely inside the pre-sale range of three hundred twenty five dollars million to four hundred forty four dollars million. The Art Newspaper says the sale opened with 11 works from the collection of Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street titan turned art dealer who died last December at 92. Every lot carried a house or third-party guarantee, making it a “white glove” result totaling one hundred forty dollars million hammer, one hundred sixty six dollars million with fees. The headline was Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), which reached seventy four dollars million hammer, eighty five dollars million with fees, just shy of the artist’s auction record.

In London, British artist and set designer Es Devlin is inviting the entire U.K. to help create what’s being billed as a living national portrait inside the National Portrait Gallery. The project runs through October 27 and asks all 69 million U.K. residents to upload a selfie to a dedicated page, then watch their face morph into charcoal-and-chalk marks in Devlin’s drawing style. In the gallery’s History Makers space, a framed screen will display a continuous stream of these everyday faces. The work is titled A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery and was made with engineers and technicians at Google, who trained an image-generation model on Devlin’s drawings. The museum is also offering an online drawing class and hosting onsite drawing classes during the run.

Art Dubai opened to VIPs on Thursday in a delayed 20th edition that looked smaller, but felt busy. Artnet reports the fair was originally planned for mid-April, but moved after geopolitical upheaval; it ultimately presented 50 largely regional galleries—about 60 percent fewer than the roughly 120 exhibitors originally expected. Outside Madinat Jumeirah, UAE flags lined the road after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum urged residents to raise them following an April 8 ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. Inside, the halls were packed with collectors largely from the Gulf and wider Middle East. Dealers noted the fair refunded booth costs, charging exhibitors only if they sell, and for the first time, entry was free for all.

The art world lost a major figure in avant-garde performance and feminist art: Valie Export has died at 85. According to Artnet, her gallery Thaddaeus Ropac announced the death, noting no cause and listing no survivors. Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, she adopted the name Valie Export in 1967, taking her surname from a cigarette brand. Ropac described her “Expanded Cinema” practice—using her own body as an artistic medium—as placing her among the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. The obituary recounts her 1968 Aktionhose Genitalpanik in Munich, and her 1968–71 TAPP und TASTKINO performances across 10 European cities. In 1980, she and Maria Lassnig became the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale.

Rome’s Borghese Gallery is facing backlash after a newly released proposal to build an adjacent facility. Artnet reports heritage groups argue the plan prioritizes commercial aims over cultural ones, and that it could disrupt the aesthetics of the 17th-century villa and its gardens. Earlier this year, the museum commissioned an engineering firm to assess feasibility for a new building that could help display more works and accommodate more visitors. The gallery currently limits entry to 360 visitors in two-hour slots, and it welcomed more than six hundred thirty thousand visitors in 2025—about a 25 percent increase from 2015. A press conference is scheduled for May 19, and a spokesperson stressed the process is “purely administrative in nature” at this stage. Rome City Council approved an initial feasibility study in January, with culture councilor Massimiliano Smeriglio saying no decision has been made.

In Spain, Catalonia has formally demanded €seven hundred ninety one thousand from Aragón tied to the return of 56 artworks from the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Sigena. The report, citing El País, says the Catalan government is seeking to recoup costs related to the value and upkeep of works it was ordered to return in 2017. Of the 56, 12 had been kept at the National Art Museum of Catalonia and 44 at the Diocesan Museum of Lleida, after being removed from the monastery in 1936 to protect them during the Spanish Civil War. A 2021 Supreme Court ruling said the items formed part of the monastery’s artistic treasure when it was declared a National Monument in 1923, and that protection extends to that treasure. Catalonia’s document says it intends to negotiate within 30 days, otherwise it will return to court.

Seattle Art Museum employees are organizing. ARTnews reports that more than 100 workers announced plans to unionize under the name Seattle Art Museum Workers United, representing staff across more than 20 departments. They notified SAM director and CEO Scott Stulen in a letter that cites “unsustainable wages,” “subpar health benefits,” and “siloed, top-down decision-making.” The museum did not respond to an ARTnews request for comment. Organizers say they have a supermajority of support and have filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board, while also saying they’ll withdraw that petition if SAM voluntarily recognizes the union before May 27. Security staff, already organized as the independent SAM VSO union, won’t be part of the new unit. Organizer Drew Davis, an art handler, said the push is about having “a voice in decision-making.”

In New York, Independent has moved into Pier 36 on the Lower East Side waterfront, and the vibe is shifting with the venue. Hyperallergic says entering the fair involves passing through hanging sheets of thick yellow plastic, then walking a long grid of booths—76 in total—stretching down a warehouse-like space. On the by-invitation opening night, May 14, hundreds of people circulated through the aisles, and the fair felt airier and less claustrophobic than last year’s Tribeca edition. Writer Hindley Wang told Hyperallergic the new layout feels “less hierarchical,” and artist Jeanette Hayes compared it to moving “classroom to classroom.” But the piece also notes Independent, now in its 17th year, felt tamer, older, and glossier—less downtown scrappiness, more cosmopolitan polish.

Hyperallergic’s Frieze New York dispatch leans hard into the trade-show fatigue—and finds a few moments that cut through it. The piece follows Lucien Zayan, founder of the Invisible Dog Art Center, who visited The Shed at Hudson Yards looking for art about food as he curates the NAFAS Festival in Tokyo this September. Zayan found an installation by Aki Goto at Europa involving a glittery dentist’s chair and multimedia elements that prompted him to think about sugar and cavities in European history. The article also points to works like David Lamelas’s To Pour Milk into a Glass (1972) from Dia’s archives, and Mungo Thomson’s Snowman (2023) at Karma, a stack of painted bronze Amazon boxes. Frieze runs through the weekend, and the writer describes brief, welcome jolts that made the fair feel less monotonous.

London’s Wellcome Collection is transferring two thousand Jain manuscripts to the Jain community—but the manuscripts will remain in the U.K. The announcement says they will go to the University of Birmingham’s Dharmanath Network in Jain Studies, established in 2023 and financed by Jain communities in the U.K., the U.S., and India. Wellcome said it believes this is the best place to maximize community access, deepen research opportunities, and safeguard the collection’s future, after “several years of open dialogue” with the Institute of Jainology. The manuscripts date from the 15th to 19th centuries and cover religion, culture, medicine, and literature, in scripts including Prakrit and Sanskrit, Gujarati, Rajasthani, and early Hindi. Highlights include a 16th-century Kalpasutra copy and an independence-era text critical of British rule. The Wellcome says this sets a high bar for collaborative restitution.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art-world news you can actually use, and until then: Chinga la migra.

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