Museum Power Plays, AI Reality Checks

Dubai has announced plans for a new Museum of Digital Art, or MODA, as the Gulf ramps up investment in tech-driven cultural infrastructure. The museum is part of Dubai’s twenty seven dollars billion plan to transform its financial center into a tech hub, and it’s pitched as a platform for art forms that rely on emerging technologies, including immersive and interactive experiences. No budget or completion date has been announced. Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, chairperson of Dubai Culture, said MODA will advance the city’s “commitment to shaping a future where creativity and technology converge.” MODA will be designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture; Adrian Smith also designed Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

Seoul’s new Centre Pompidou Hanwha opens to the public on 4 June, launching a four-year partnership between the Hanwha Foundation of Culture and the Centre Pompidou. The deal includes two touring exhibitions per year from the Pompidou collection, beginning with The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision, running until 4 October. The museum occupies eleven thousand square meters across four floors inside the Hanwha Group’s headquarters, 63 Building. One main hall will present early 20th-century European art from the Pompidou; the other will show global contemporary art with a 21st-century Korean focus, curated in-house. The inaugural Korea Focus section links Cubism to Korean artists including Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk.

M+ in Hong Kong and the Centre Pompidou in Paris have announced a multi-year partnership signed earlier this month by Laurent Le Bon and Suhanya Raffel, building on a 2024 memorandum of understanding. The agreement sets out joint curatorial research, exhibition development and sharing, co-commissions and artwork displays, and collection exchange. A “landmark exhibition” presenting French and Chinese culture is planned to appear at both institutions, first at the Centre Pompidou after its reopening in 2030. M+ will also host additional co-organised exhibitions starting in 2027. The partnership includes a four-year postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Huo Family Foundation, and new moving-image commissions to be shown on the M+ Facade and at the Centre Pompidou Francilien–fabrique de l’art in Massy from 2027.

In Winnipeg, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has been threatened with legal action over an exhibition about the Nakba. Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center says it has sent a formal legal demand to the museum’s board and leadership over “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” scheduled to open June 27. In a statement included with its filing, Shurat HaDin president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner warned the federally funded museum that the show could “contribut[e] to division and misunderstanding,” alleging it “eras[es] Jewish history” and “delegitim[izes] Jewish self-determination.” The exhibition focuses on the expulsion of approximately seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians in 1948 and presents personal stories from Palestinian Canadians through video testimonies, photography, visual art, and text.

The Palm Springs Art Museum says an outside investigation found no wrongdoing after a whistleblower complaint alleged mismanagement and fraud, but the museum is not releasing the report. In a three-page statement, the museum said “allegations of fraud, theft, and other malicious conduct were not substantiated,” while allowing that errors may have occurred without improper intent. The museum hired Barnes & Thornburg and RSM US for a six-month investigation that, it says, reviewed more than three hundred fifty thousand documents and included interviews with current and former staff, board members, finance personnel, and consultants. The statement acknowledges a board-acknowledged practice of using proceeds from deaccessioned art sales beyond acquisitions during operating stress, treated as an internal loan to be repaid by 2030.

Hamburg is renaming a major culture prize after evidence emerged of its namesake’s Nazi Party ties. The Senator Biermann Ratjen Medal will now be called the Medal for Art and Culture in Hamburg, following a 2024 article in Die Welt am Sonntag in which historian Helmut Stubbe da Luz said Hans Harder Biermann-Ratjen confirmed Nazi Party membership in a 1943 application to the Third Reich’s literary authority. Biermann-Ratjen later took on management of art and cultural affairs in Hamburg in 1945 and served in the Hamburg parliament from 1949 to 1966. The medal, inaugurated by the Hamburg Senate in 1978, has been awarded more than 100 times. The first newly named medal will be awarded this summer to Peter Hess.

A three-day program at Giorno Poetry Systems on the Bowery took on how images and reality feel in an era shaped by AI, virtual reality, and constant simulation. The early May series was titled “Exert: The Physics of Metaphysics,” and artist-curator Mark Leckey described it as an effort to “give the internet a body.” Novelist Hari Kunzru read from a novel in progress about a young man watching simulation encroach on daily life. Critic Gideon Jacobs presented a performance lecture, “All Images Are Quite Useless,” blending a monologue, an essay excerpt, a guided meditation featuring an AI video work by Cassandra Jenkins, and a website that auto-transcribed his words and converted sections into prompts for image generation, producing a stream of sometimes eerie, sometimes poetic visuals.

Maddox Gallery has been accused by Luxury Asset Capital of inflating the value of artworks used as loan collateral, a claim the gallery denies. In a civil complaint filed last August in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, LAC alleges Maddox provided knowingly false “good faith estimates” of secondary market value for works by Duncan McCormick and Albert Willem to induce LAC to accept them as substitute collateral in exchange for a George Condo painting. The dispute stems from loans LAC made in July 2022 to dealer Seth Carmichael, who later defaulted. Maddox co-founder and managing director Nick Sharp called the accusation “bizarre and irrational,” said a 2023 private agreement settled a good-faith dispute, and noted Maddox has moved to dismiss the complaint.

In Chicago, the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center is presenting Paris in Black: Internationalism and the Black Renaissance, an exhibition about Black American artists, writers, musicians, and performers who sought refuge in Paris following World War II. Curated by Danny Dunson, it spans galleries across two floors and includes more than 100 artworks, drawing significantly from the museum’s permanent collection. The show places this movement within a broader web of social, political, and economic forces, and includes context on Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance’s global reach. Visitors encounter works by artists including Archibald J. Motley Jr., as well as sculpture highlights by Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, and William Artis. The exhibition also features a section on Josephine Baker and Paris fashion figures like Patrick Kelly.

That’s today’s download. Links to every story are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for more art world news, and until then, Chinga la migra

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