Museum Feuds, Funding Frenzies, and Market Heat

Canada’s museum politics are flaring up after a new exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg sparked a federal fight. The Art Newspaper says the 11-metre-long display, “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” opened on 27 June after drawing intense attention, including a pre-opening threat of legal action from an Israeli organisation. On 29 June, heritage minister Marc Miller told the Canadian Press the museum made “an error,” pointing to exhibit wording he called “regrettable,” including not identifying Hamas as a terrorist organisation and not clearly stating Hamas “intended to kill Jews.” On 30 June, NDP federal leader Avi Lewis called Miller’s remarks “unacceptable political interference” and urged him to retract and apologise.

Staying in France, leadership turmoil has hit Marseille’s Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, better known as Mucem. The Art Newspaper reports that president Pierre-Olivier Costa and general manager Véronique Haché have been suspended, following an IGAC report describing rising discontent at the museum and after accusations of sexual and moral harassment were brought against Costa—allegations he denies. Culture minister Catherine Pégard announced Costa’s departure on 30 June, saying she wanted to “resume the social dialogue and restore a climate of trust.” Anne-Marie Le Guével of IGAC became interim president and arrived the next day to tell staff Haché was also suspended. A staff complaint was forwarded to the district attorney, which opened a preliminary investigation in March.

Across the Channel, London’s Old Master auctions delivered a week of big-ticket results—and a bronze statue stole the show. The Art Newspaper reports that Sotheby’s opened its Old Master and 19th century paintings sale with Auguste-Jean-Marie Carbonneaux’s 1817 full-size bronze replica of the Laocoön group. After a 15-minute bidding duel among at least four telephone clients, it sold for £13.6m with fees—nearly seven times the £2m low estimate—and was knocked down to Margi Schwartz, Sotheby’s New York-based worldwide head of sculpture. The price was the second-highest ever paid at auction for a pre-Modern sculpture. The same report notes Christie’s sold Sir Thomas Lawrence’s 1821 portrait of the 1st Duke of Wellington for £9.7m, a record for the artist.

In Vienna, the Belvedere is staging a major survey of Polish artist Erna Rosenstein, placing grief, memory, and displacement at the center of the story. The Art Newspaper says “Erna Rosenstein: On the Other Side of Silence” spans the career of the painter, poet, and assemblage artist, born in 1913 in Lviv—then part of Poland, now Ukraine—and who studied in Vienna in the early 1930s before returning to Kraków. During Nazi occupation, she survived using false identities and fleeing across Poland, and she witnessed the murder of her parents—trauma that curator Stephanie Auer calls the “dark gravitational centre” of her art. The show highlights recurring severed, floating heads of her parents, and points to the 1951 painting “Screens” as an indirect evocation.

In Lithuania, a targeted theft has hit the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. ARTnews reports that a photograph by Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov was stolen from the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius on June 28 while on view in “Ukrainian Dreamers: Kharkiv School of Photography.” Staff discovered the work missing from a second-floor gallery shortly after 1:30 p.m., and police are investigating after the incident was captured on security cameras. Museum director general Arūnas Gelūnas told Ocula officials believe the perpetrator likely knew Mikhailov was the most prominent artist in the show and that his works are among the most valuable. Police valued the photograph at about €seven thousand, and the museum is reviewing protections for smaller works.

Now to New York, where the numbers for arts funding just hit a new high. ARTnews reports that mayor Zohran Mamdani and the speaker of the city council announced their first budget, totaling one hundred twenty five dollars billion, including a record three hundred twenty three dollars million for the Department of Cultural Affairs for the city’s 2027 fiscal year. That’s more than a 6 percent increase from last year’s record two hundred ninety nine dollars million. The DCLA is described as the largest cultural funding agency in the US, subsidizing the 39 Cultural Institutions Group members, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Lincoln Center, and the American Museum of Natural History, along with groups like El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The budget also includes a Cultural Stability Fund providing ten dollars million annually through fiscal year 2029.

Up in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts is rethinking the 18th-century “Americas” with a reinstallation built to clash, converse, and complicate. Hyperallergic reports that “Art of the Americas: 1700–1800” was unveiled during the museum’s annual Juneteenth open house, marking the first ground-level reinstallation in the Art of the Americas Wing. The display includes more than 400 objects from North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean, and global touchpoints tied to the 18th-century Americas, organized into eight themed sections. In “Power and Resistance,” Paul Revere’s “Sons of Liberty Bowl” (1768) appears near a ceramic jar by enslaved poet and potter David Drake. Nearby, Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s silver bust “Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect” (2024) faces Thomas Sully’s “The Passage of the Delaware” (1819), and yes, a Dunkin’ cup shows up too.

Across the Atlantic again, Manifesta 16 is facing a plagiarism dispute inside a church installation in Essen, Germany. ARTnews reports that Bochum-based artist Dorothee Bielfeld has asked organizers to remove Nasan Tur’s work “Elevation,” made from reclaimed church pews installed on their side inside St. Gertud Church and engraved with anonymous public musings. Bielfeld told WAZ that the central visual idea resembles her 2010 work “Aufrichten (Raising Up),” created for Ruhr.2010, which used 29 wooden pews positioned upright in Hamburg’s Christ-König-Kirche, alongside a participatory element where visitors deposited slips of paper into pipes. A Manifesta 16 spokesperson said similarities were “superficial,” citing an assessment by curators Leonie Herweg and René Block that Tur’s work is artistically independent; Tur called the accusations “false and baseless.”

The market fallout from Lisa Schiff’s case is still playing out—now in hard totals and hammer prices. ARTnews reports that Phillips has sold one dollars million worth of art from Schiff’s collection, with 231 pieces sold so far, and more sales planned. Two years ago, bankruptcy trustees retained Phillips to sell some 220 pieces from Schiff’s collection and inventory from Schiff Fine Art, with a combined presale estimate of about two dollars million, to benefit creditors including Candace Carmel Barasch and Richard Grossman. Recent results include a 2022 Corydon Cowansage painting selling for seven thousand ninety five dollars and a 1987 Richard Prince print on a T-shirt mounted on board selling for fifty one thousand six hundred dollars in an online auction that concluded earlier this week. Schiff pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in October 2024 to defrauding clients out of six dollars million and was sentenced in March 2025 to two and a half years.

To close, a headline about Doug Aitken is circulating this week: “How Doug Aitken Thinks in Music,” from Artnet News. The piece positions music as a key framework for understanding Aitken’s creative process, tying his art to the way rhythm, structure, and sound can shape how we experience a work over time. It’s a reminder that for artists working across moving image, installation, and environment, “music” isn’t just accompaniment—it can be the organizing logic for pacing, repetition, and attention. Even without a single painting to hang on a wall, that kind of thinking can dictate everything: how long you stay, where you pause, and what you feel first. The upshot is simple—Aitken’s work keeps asking us to listen with our eyes.

That’s your Daily Art Download for today—links to every story are waiting in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for the next round of headlines and hot takes, and until then: Chinga la migra

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