AI Photo Scandals and $45 Masterpieces

Hyperallergic’s editor-in-chief Hakim Bishara opens a weekend note titled “Gabrielle Goliath, Richard Avedon, ‘Chicken Linda’” with a kind of intentional art-world detox: skipping the New York art fairs, then watching the auction season peak with a Jackson Pollock selling for a record-breaking one hundred eighty one dollars million at Christie’s. He says he wasn’t there either, and had “181 million reasons to not care.” Instead, he points readers toward other kinds of attention: a profile by Taliesin Thomas of pioneering performance artist Linda Mary Montano—now 84—who welcomed Thomas into her Upstate New York home-shrine in a devotional chicken costume. He also highlights Aruna D’Souza’s review of Gabrielle Goliath’s exhibition “Elegy,” now in a church in Venice after South Africa’s culture minister banned it from the country’s pavilion.

Artnet News looks at Studio 54 Fine Art and its bet on a more nimble gallery model—one not tied to a permanent brick-and-mortar space. The gallery meets collectors where they are, whether staging in-person exhibitions across a rotating roster of locations or working behind the scenes to match collectors with specific works. Studio 54 Fine Art was founded and is directed by Gary Williamson, who says his path into the gallery world wasn’t conventional: he spent more than three decades across luxury goods, property investment, and high-net-worth client environments before founding the gallery in Milan in 2016. He describes an early £two hundred fifty thousand (three hundred thirty five thousand eight hundred dollars) collection placed with a single client and a first acquisition: a David Yarrow lion photograph negotiated through a mutual contact. Right now, the gallery is presenting “Empire of Silence: The Untamed Majesty of Rowan Blackwell,” on view through August 31.

ARTnews reports that tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum will run as high as £33—about forty five dollars—for a standard adult ticket during “peak” times. The tapestry goes on view September 10 through July 11, 2027, and every ticket includes a 40-minute visit. During off-peak times—non-holiday, non-summer weekdays until 5:10 p.m.—adult tickets drop to £27. Students and disabled visitors pay a flat £25. There are also “super off-peak” tickets for £25 for the last weekday time slot, 3:30 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. Members get free tickets but must book, with only two free visits allowed over the entire run. The first and last two weeks are treated as “peak” no matter the timing.

ARTnews also covers a sharp rebuke from the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, which released a statement on Saturday criticizing New York’s Danziger Gallery for offering an AI-generated artwork at the 2026 AIPAD Photography Show in April. The untitled work is headlined “A.I. GENERATED” and includes the prompt: “Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic ‘Moonrise Over Hernandez’.” It’s listed as printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi and appeared in Danziger’s booth at the fair, which ran April 22 to April 26, alongside works by Seydou Keïta, Hoda Afshar, and Matthew Porter, among others. The trust said it did not authorize or consent, argued the piece exploited Adams’s name and image, and said the gallery was asked to remove it but appears not to have done so.

That’s today’s download—links to all four stories are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art-world turbulence, triumphs, and tabloid-level auction drama, and until then: Chinga la migra

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