Heatwave Museums, Restitution Storms, and Market Mysteries

Art Basel’s digital sector Zero 10 made its Swiss debut last week in the Messeplatz in Basel, across from the fair’s Unlimited sector. The edition was titled “The Condition,” co-curated by Eli Scheinman and the artist Trevor Paglen, and it was the largest yet, with 20 exhibitors. Visitors were greeted by Fellowship’s presentation of John Gerrard’s works Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017), Flare (Oceania) (2022), and STANDARD (2023), shown side by side for the first time. The commentary describes a sector preoccupied with gravitas, even as an internal tension surfaced—participants and Paglen distancing themselves from prompt-based visual art in favor of more elaborate or code-based approaches.

Staying in Europe, a heatwave is making museum preparedness impossible to ignore. The Art Newspaper reports that with temperatures in the mid to high 30Cs, museums with climate control are becoming part of their cities’ response—Staatsgalerie Stuttgart even posted, “38C in the shade? We have air con in our collection rooms!” In Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon, and Strasbourg, local authorities have made entry free or kept museums open on normal closing days as “islands of freshness.” Elsewhere, smaller museums in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva have closed rooms or limited access as interior temperatures hit 30C. In Paris, Musée Carnavalet shut everything except its air-conditioned temporary exhibition rooms, while the Louvre announced it would close two hours earlier from Wednesday to Saturday.

Also from The Art Newspaper: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg opens Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present to the public tomorrow, 27 June, amid unprecedented opposition from some members of Canada’s Jewish community, legal threats from an Israeli organisation, and the resignation of the museum’s only Jewish board member. Curator Isabelle Masson says to critics: “come and see it first.” The exhibition spans three displays on two walls on the fifth floor, beginning with panels of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in English, French, and Arabic, doubling as projection screens tying poetry to lived experience. Objects include a citrus fruit wrapper from the Al Taji family’s orchard in Wadi Hunayn, a Gazan thobe, and touchable house keys, alongside videos of Palestinian Canadians.

Across the Mediterranean, Artnet News reports from Hydra, where Dakis Ioannou’s annual Deste Foundation fete marked the solstice. On June 23, crowds gathered at the Slaughterhouse—Deste’s cliffside project space, a former abattoir—to see Nari Ward’s “Until That Day,” on view through October 31. The suite includes 10 new works exploring migration and memory, particularly among the Afro-Greek community. The central sculpture, Fire Hose Man, is a towering structure of old luggage bound with lengths of fire hose—an object Ward repeatedly uses, carrying associations of both crisis and relief. Outside, visitors played dominoes on tables of scorched poplar, while unmoving flags made from emergency blankets stood along the path and on a rocky outcrop, staking a claim for all people rather than one nation.

Back in Italy, the Vatican Museums have launched a major restoration of Raphael’s Loggias. The project is unprecedented in scale: more than 20 experts will clean a 65-meter fresco cycle in the Apostolic Palace over five years. Created between 1517 and 1519 by Raphael for Pope Leo X, the Loggias span 13 bays on the second floor, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments set within Roman-inspired ornament. Restorers have found deterioration likely linked to a microclimate created by glass windows installed in the 19th century—originally intended to protect works that were exposed for about 400 years. Deputy head restorer Angela Cerreta says the team will stabilize paint, clean with fiber lasers, and retouch by color-matching in ways that keep restorations visually distinct.

Crossing to Ireland, a committee is urging the government to overhaul how restitution and repatriation are handled. The Advisory Committee on the Restitution and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage—formed in summer 2023—delivered its final report last month, aiming to address “practical and legal impediments” that can block responses to claims involving colonial-era artifacts or Nazi-looted property. The report recommends a national advisory panel to oversee claims and funding to tackle limited provenance research, incomplete cataloguing and digitization, and lack of specialist access. A survey found 90% of Irish institutions lack comprehensive online catalogs, with large documentation backlogs and only a small fraction digitized. Only 23% employ staff trained in provenance research, and completed research is rarely shared publicly.

Now to the art market: Sotheby’s will stage a series of sales starting in October, offering more than 900 works from an unnamed collector, estimated in total at more than sixty dollars million. The collection—dubbed “Magnum Opus”—spans antiquity through the 20th century and includes names like Canaletto, Edgar Degas, Max Ernst, Francesco Guardi, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Luis Meléndez, Pablo Picasso, and Jacob van Ruisdael. Four New York sales from October 21 to 23 will bring around 600 works to auction, with the remainder spread across Sotheby’s New York and Paris into 2027, across roughly 25 categories. Catherine Foster Ellison called the holdings the mark of “a collector who approached each acquisition with the same exacting standards.” Highlights include a Julio-Claudian marble torso estimated at eight dollars–twelve dollars million and a Canaletto estimated at six dollars–eight dollars million.

Over to Britain, Hyperallergic reports that photographer and activist Misan Harriman will step down as chair of London’s Southbank Centre. Harriman said in an Instagram video that he decided to leave before the May tabloid scrutiny, writing: “It’s semi-public knowledge that my term is coming to an end anyway… I had decided way before this madness that I was going to do two terms.” A Southbank Centre spokesperson confirmed he will not seek a third term and will depart this autumn, with succession planning to be discussed following the annual general meeting in July. The announcement follows a wave of right-wing reports about his response to the April 29 attack in Golders Green, after which over one hundred thousand people complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation in May about coverage characterizing his comments as antisemitic.

Staying with institutions and politics, the US State Department is accepting design proposals for the US Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale—and the language is unusually explicit. The submission guidelines call for designs that “exemplify America’s exceptionalism” and “advance and complement U.S. foreign policy and public diplomacy objectives,” aiming to promote American architectural achievements and “enhance America’s global competitiveness.” The deadline is July 23, tied to a four hundred seventy five thousand dollars grant, up one hundred thousand dollars from the previous cycle. The main exhibition theme for 2027 is “Do Architecture—For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality,” directed by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu of Amateur Architecture Studio. The State Department also provided downloadable drawings of the 1929 Palladian US Pavilion by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich.

Finally, Hyperallergic turns to William Kentridge and a very specific material obsession: lapis blue. In an excerpt from a new book based on a 2024 Oxford lecture, Kentridge describes being given a block of pure lapis lazuli watercolor from Afghanistan—an intense blue long used sparingly in Renaissance painting and now often replaced by French ultramarine. He writes that in projections, photography, and printing, the blue “always loses its power.” Though he doesn’t use color in his drawings, he painted squares and circles to test the pigment, feeling “caught” between wanting to devour the color and not knowing how to bring it into what he was drawing. While waiting, he began painting texts and phrases with it—letting a single pigment redirect the work.

That’s the download for today. Links to every story are waiting for you in the show notes—come back tomorrow for more. Chinga la migra

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