Auction Fever, Digital Backlash, and Stolen Masterpieces

The market story leading the day comes from Sotheby’s in London, where British billionaire Joe Lewis’s collection set a new record for a single-owner sale in Europe. Artnet News reports the 25-lot auction brought in £296.3 million, or three hundred ninety two dollars million—nearly double the roughly two hundred dollars million estimate—without any of the lots being guaranteed. Only one lot failed to sell: an 1880 Edgar Degas estimated at £3 million to £4 million. The top lot was Amadeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier (1917–18), which sold for £48.2 million (sixty three dollars million) with fees after Oliver Barker opened bidding at £38 million. Sotheby’s also said a subsequent sale brought the house’s total to £393.4 million (five hundred twenty dollars million) in one night.

Staying in London for a cultural flashpoint, The Art Newspaper reports that Turner Prize–winning artist Helen Cammock has removed her 40-minute moving-image work Persistence from the National Portrait Gallery after controversy over its reference to Winston Churchill and the 1943 Bengal famine. The film had been on temporary display since September last year in Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture, due to end in August. Historian Andrew Roberts, a Churchill biographer and member of the House of Lords, wrote to the NPG’s interim chair of trustees, Shearer West, in a letter signed by more than 50 peers, including Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames. The NPG said the work was presented as an artistic piece, not a documentary, and that the views in the film do not necessarily reflect the gallery’s.

Across the Channel, The Art Newspaper has an almost cinematic twist: French police recovered a stolen Pablo Picasso portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter during a drug bust. According to Le Parisien, the Brigade des Stupéfiants found it on 15 June while raiding a house owned by the aunt of a suspected drug dealer in Champigny-sur-Marne, near Paris. Officers reportedly also seized 20kg of cannabis, €two hundred thousand worth of luxury clothes, and €seven thousand in cash. A police source told The Art Newspaper the theft appeared “opportunistic” and that the gang “had no idea what to do with it.” Four men appeared in court on 19 June, and one confessed to thefts from a Paris storage facility where he worked as a security guard. The painting is valued at around €12m.

In the legal-and-platform lane, a piece examines how recent jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube could have knock-on effects for artists and activists online. In California, a jury found YouTube and Meta liable for platform designs that ultimately addicted and harmed a young woman. In New Mexico, Meta was found guilty of concealing what it knew about child exploitation within its messaging features, effectively enabling it. The argument is that plaintiffs focused on design—autoplay, recommendations, notifications, likes, infinite scroll—rather than content, helping them get around Section 230, the long-standing legal shield that generally prevents platforms from being treated as publishers of user-generated content. Critics warn that treating how content is displayed as product design could narrow Section 230 protections and invite more lawsuits, affecting how online communities function.

Jumping to the US, The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has made a major leadership move following its newly inaugurated one hundred fourteen thousand-square-foot campus expansion in Bentonville, Arkansas. It has hired Courtenay Finn as chief curator, with a role spanning both Crystal Bridges and its contemporary and performing arts wing, the Momentary. Finn will start on 24 August. She previously served as chief curator and director of programmes at California’s Orange County Museum of Art, now the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, where she led the curatorial programme as the museum opened its Morphosis-designed building in Costa Mesa in October 2022. Crystal Bridges said Finn succeeds Austen Barron Bailly, who was promoted to deputy director of curatorial affairs in February. The institutions also appointed Ryan Owen as chief development officer, starting 15 June, and Shayne Hart as chief communications and marketing officer, beginning in February.

ARTnews spotlights Diné weaver Marilou Schultz, whose first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York. Curated by Candice Hopkins, it brings together around 55 works, along with contextual archival materials, and traces how Schultz has explored connections between weaving and computing since the 1960s, with a sustained focus over the last thirty years on computer chips. Schultz grew up in Leupp on the Navajo Nation and began weaving at age five, later working as a math teacher in Mesa, which supported experimentation with yarn, dyes, wool, and even looms. The exhibition also includes work by four generations of weavers in her family, including her mother Martha Gorman Schultz, who died last year at 93, and her final weaving.

In New York, Pratt Manhattan Gallery is opening Beyond Digital: Living Systems & Distributed Intelligence, a group exhibition featuring seven artists from Pratt Institute’s Digital Arts alumni community. Curated by Elena Soterakis—artist, curator, and co-founder and director of BioBAT Art Space—the show explores blurred boundaries between technology, biology, and the environments people inhabit, proposing intelligence as something distributed across bodies, machines, and ecosystems. The participating artists are Tess Adams, Nicolás Cuestas, Nate King, Caroline Voagen Nelson, Taezoo Park, Karolina Rojas, and Ruyin Tsai & Jung-Shang Chang. Pratt says the exhibition runs from June 26 through September 5, 2026, with a public reception on Thursday, June 25. The gallery is free and open to the public, and the show emphasizes interactive installations, experimental media, and works that evolve through participation, duration, and shifting relationships with viewers.

Another New York story: hundreds of city-based artists and cultural workers are pushing the mayor to hit pause on AI in public schools. In an open letter published by the AI Moratorium Coalition, about 500 visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to implement a two-year moratorium on artificial intelligence in classrooms. Signatories include Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons, Carroll Dunham, art critic Jerry Saltz, and writer-artist Molly Crabapple. The letter argues AI is “built on theft” and says it has “invaded the city’s classrooms,” citing studies suggesting tools like ChatGPT may atrophy critical thinking and creativity for students. A City Council oversight hearing scheduled for today is set to examine data privacy and security concerns, as advocates point to majority Council support and a petition with more than four thousand signatures from NYC parents and educators.

ARTnews reports a growing controversy in Australia involving artist Jane Allan, based in Lennox Head, about two hours south of Brisbane. Philip Bacon, a Brisbane art dealer who represents Nicholas Harding’s estate, accused Allan of making a “blatant copy” of Harding’s Two Estuary Figures (2011) in her painting Seascape Explorers, which won the landscape category at the 2025 Doyles Art Awards and a twenty thousand Australian dollar prize. Bacon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the works are “exactly the same,” with a key difference being scale, and noted Harding’s painting sold at a 2011 auction for fourteen thousand dollars and “is not well known.” After the Guardian reported further concerns, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra said Allan’s Weight of the Mind’s Periapt (2021) was “clearly influenced” by Basquiat’s Untitled (Two Heads on Gold) (1982). Allan has not responded to the allegations.

Finally, Hyperallergic features an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Matthew Campbell about his book The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy. The book focuses on Douglas Latchford, an Englishman who moved to Bangkok in the late 1950s and became a major conduit for looted Khmer antiquities, directing everything from telling looters where to dig to placing objects with wealthy collectors. Campbell says Latchford sometimes kept buyers in the dark, but letters and other evidence show he often boasted about sources. In 2019, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Latchford with wire fraud, smuggling, conspiracy, and other trafficking charges, but he died a year later at 88 before trial. Campbell also discusses how the Met expanded its Southeast Asian art collection in the 1970s under director Thomas Hoving and curator Martin Lerner, with an emphasis on Cambodia.

That’s your Daily Art Download for today. Links to every story are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for the next round.

Today's Stories