Looted Legacies, Museum Scandals, and AI Showdowns

Yemen’s Antiquities Authority says it has identified 28 Yemeni artifacts it alleges were looted and are now overseas—eight that appeared in antiquities sales in London and about 20 held by the British Museum. Yemen’s General Authority for Antiquities and Museums said the auction pieces showed up around July 2 at Bonhams in London and at Apollo Art Auctions, including statue heads, a statue, an inscription, and funerary stelae. Auction catalogues often list objects from present-day Yemen as “South Arabian” or “Ancient Arabian,” and two South Arabian alabaster heads—one male, one female—were in the Bonhams catalogue and reported as sold. Yemen published the findings through its “Our Looted Heritage” project, part of an ongoing series it calls its 34th list.

A new White House report is accusing the Smithsonian Institution of promoting what it calls “anti-white” ideology, with the National Museum of American History as its main target and additional criticism aimed at art institutions and staff. The 162-page report, titled “Saving America’s Story,” was published online by the White House Domestic Policy Council on the Fourth of July. It reproduces a Smithsonian American Art Museum webpage titled “Furthering the Conversation About Whiteness,” created to accompany the exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which closed last September. The council objected to language on that page describing whiteness as socially constructed and operating as a system of power. Smithsonian spokesperson Julissa Marenco told the New York Times the institution remains committed to nonpartisan, independent scholarship.

The Art Newspaper is digging into how complicated museum mergers can be, using New York’s Neue Galerie merging with the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a major case study. The details are still being finalized, but the reporting says that in 2028 the Met will fully take over the Neue, housed in the William Starr Miller House, and it will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie. The Met is described as the fourth-largest museum in the world, with almost two million objects; the Neue, founded in 2001, has around 600 works estimated at one dollars billion, collected by Ronald S. Lauder. Lauder said the merger will preserve the Neue’s legacy, while Met director Max Hollein praised the museum Lauder built as “a work of art.”

In Basel, Chloe Wise’s “Extrasensory” is staging a collision of devotion, pop culture, and “the phenomenon”—Wise’s umbrella term that can include UFOs, divinity, telepathy, ghosts, and consciousness. The exhibition at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger begins with a gift shop-slash botánica: crucifixes and rosaries alongside UFO keychains, tarot decks, alien figurines, and movie posters for films that don’t exist. Many prayer candles depict figures from Wise’s three-channel film PsyFi, her longest video work to date at 34 minutes, featuring people including Michael Buscemi, JT of City Girls, and Martine Gutierrez. Wise frames the project as more about how such phenomena are felt and narrated than proving what’s real, arguing that religion “sanitize[s] and domesticate[s] something that’s actually so wild.”

In London, a U.K. court has delivered what’s being described as the first reported conviction under the country’s ban on luxury exports to Russia. Jonathan Hornby, 54, was fined £twenty eight thousand after pleading guilty on July 1 at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to charges of making luxury goods available for use in Russia. The case involved four artworks, including a Russian icon depicting St. Vladimir, that were seized by border officials at Heathrow Airport in February 2024, according to HM Revenue and Customs. The consignment was linked to Hornby’s businesses, Global Customs Systems U.K. Limited and In Time Worldwide Express Ltd. The U.K. banned exports of luxury items—including art and antiques valued over £250—to Russia in April 2022, and HMRC said the conviction shows the consequences of breaching sanctions.

Venezuela is still reeling from two major earthquakes that struck on 24 June, killing more than three thousand people and destroying more than fifty eight thousand buildings, including many national monuments. Archaeologist José Miguel Pérez-Gómez of Simón Bolívar University said the hardest-hit areas appear to be Caracas and nearby La Guaira, where seismic waves “bounced back and forth from the Caribbean to the mountains.” La Guaira, added to Unesco’s World Heritage tentative list in 1999, suffered damage to sites including Casa Guipuzcoana, which Pérez-Gómez says should be prioritized for inspection. Reports also cite major damage at the San Pedro Apóstol Diocesan Seminary, near-total collapse of the façade of San Sebastián de Maiquetía Church, and damage to the San Pedro Apóstol Cathedral and Ermita del Carmen.

A brazen museum robbery in France has left the Musée Lalique in the Bas-Rhin region temporarily closed as investigators work the case. French media reported that thieves struck early Sunday morning, July 5, smashing several display cases and stealing 27 pieces of fine jewelry valued around €4 million, roughly four dollars million. Le Monde reported the burglary began around 5:30 a.m. and lasted only a few minutes, drawing comparisons to the eight-minute Louvre heist last October. The museum, which opened in 2011 in Wingen-sur-Moder and houses more than 650 works by René Lalique, is devoted to the designer known for Art Nouveau and Art Deco creations. Mayor Christian Dorschner said the stolen works were unique and “unsellable,” and criticized a security company for not alerting gendarmes immediately.

In Chicago, two exhibitions are being framed as a powerful pairing—one mourning what colonialism extracted, the other leaning into dance and music as collective liberation. At Wrightwood 659, Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present opens with Saskia Calderón’s video performance “Coro de plantas extintas” (2020), a lament for endangered and extinct plant species. Across town at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón begins with sound too: Radamés “Juni” Figueroa’s “Karaoke El Nuevo Horizonte” (2014/25), where visitors can sing during the museum’s free hours. The review highlights works like Ana Mendieta’s “Burial Pyramid” (1974) and the Archivo de la Memoria Trans’s Exilio (1988–2007), emphasizing archiving and embodiment.

Midjourney is escalating its legal fight with major Hollywood studios by asking a federal court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose how they use artificial intelligence. The studios sued Midjourney, accusing it of facilitating widespread infringement of copyrighted characters, and Midjourney has claimed “fair use.” A magistrate judge denied a broad request for the studios’ behind-the-scenes AI information on June 15, calling it irrelevant, but Midjourney’s attorneys have now asked Judge John Kronstadt to overturn that decision. Attorney Bobby Ghajar argued that if the studios are doing the same thing they want to punish, it bears on Midjourney’s defenses, including “unclean hands.” The motion seeks extensive materials, including training datasets, model weights, and even board presentations, while the studios’ lawyer David Singer called it a “fishing expedition.”

Yervant Gianikian, the Italian filmmaker whose work helped Armenia win the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, has died at 84, according to Italian press reports. Gianikian frequently worked with his partner Angela Ricci Lucchi, who died in 2018, creating experimental films that often repurposed and altered archival footage—slowing it down and changing its look—while grappling with dispossession and historical trauma. Born in 1942 in Merano to Armenian parents, he attended the Armenian College in Venice and studied architecture there, meeting Ricci Lucchi on New Year’s Eve in 1974. Their subjects included Italian colonialism in Africa, French intervention in New Caledonia, mass killings of Roma people during World War II, and the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Their work appeared in the Biennale’s main exhibition in 2001 and 2013 and in Documenta 14 in 2017.

That’s today’s Daily Art Download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for your next hit of art-world reality; until then, Chinga la migra.

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