Heritage Under Fire, Art Power Plays

Cultural heritage protection is back in the spotlight after Israeli forces detonated 700 tonnes of explosives near Lebanon’s World Heritage-listed Beaufort Castle—also known as Qalaat Al Shaqif—prompting Icomos Lebanon to urge Unesco to investigate. Shortly after midnight on Thursday, 30 July, flashes lit up the sky and explosions rocked Nabatieh governorate; Lebanon’s National Centre for Geophysics recorded seismic waves equivalent to a 3.8-magnitude earthquake. On Friday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz confirmed the attack, saying it targeted “terror tunnels in the Beaufort area.” Lebanon’s culture ministry refuted social media claims the castle was destroyed, while warning damage is possible and assessment is impossible under Israeli occupation. Unesco said it is concerned and a technical assessment will be necessary.

Staying with accountability, a London Times report says the £45 million (sixty two dollars million at the time) raised by British artist Sacha Jafri’s 2021 Dubai sale of The Journey of Humanity has still not been disbursed as intended to UNICEF, UNESCO, and the Global Gift Foundation. Dubai Cares, the UAE-based organization meant to receive and distribute the funds, filed an ongoing legal case in 2022 against the winning buyer, French-Algerian crypto-businessman André Abdoune, for failing to pay. A judge dismissed Dubai Cares’s claims that Jafri unlawfully seized the painting and exploited the charity, while Abdoune was reportedly ordered to pay what is owed. Jafri denied wrongdoing, saying he created the work and donated it in good faith but did not run the auction or handle funds.

Now to New York, where the Guggenheim Museum will devote its entire rotunda to an entirely new body of work by Taryn Simon—something the museum says it has never done before. Opening September 18, the exhibition marks “the first time the Guggenheim has dedicated the entire rotunda to a new body of work and to a single artist working in photography and video,” according to a release. Simon will debut Father Country I Do Love You (2026), a 42-chapter series mixing photographs, texts, videos, and sculptures, centered on “the real life of one unnamed federal agent” and the ripple effects of his actions and inactions. The project was initiated by Nancy Spector and has been in progress for nearly a decade, and it’s dedicated to Simon’s father.

Across the Gulf, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has set an opening date for its long-delayed Abu Dhabi outpost: December 11. The Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has faced years of delays and allegations of abuse against migrant workers, but now the doors are scheduled to open after roughly two decades of uncertainty. In the same roundup, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s East Storehouse location—described as a publicly accessible museum storage site—saw unionized workers vote unanimously to strike, alleging “Amazon-style” working practices, including insufficient time to use the toilet or drink water. The report also points to Taipei’s Treasure Hill Artist Village, a former military settlement founded by retreating soldiers in the 1940s that became, in 2010, a “living history” artist residency shared with descendants of original inhabitants.

Continuing in Hong Kong’s orbit, Ellen Pau: She Moves at SculptureCenter is the first United States survey exhibition of the artist widely regarded as Hong Kong’s video art pioneer. Curated by Freya Chou and designed by technical director Rain Chan, it brings together 15 videos and installations from the late 1980s to the present, with water recurring as a central motif—trickling down a wall in She Moves 她去 (1988), and appearing as swimmers in Victoria Harbour, melting ice, and evaporating mist. The show also includes Where Have All the Flowers Gone 冇花冇假 (2026) from Pau’s Fl0ra Zero series, incorporating burnt candles collected from June 4 vigils, film negatives bearing candle silhouettes, and melted wax remnants tied to Spectre of the Will (2019). The exhibition runs through August 16 in Long Island City, Queens.

Back in Washington, the White House has proposed the Smithsonian Institution’s leanest budget in nearly a decade. For fiscal year 2027, the administration request would provide nine hundred sixty one dollars million in federal funding, about an 11 percent cut from the one dollars billion Congress provided for fiscal 2026, and the lowest proposed level since at least 2020. The plan would provide eight hundred forty one dollars million for salaries and operating expenses and one hundred twenty dollars million for facilities and capital projects, with facilities spending dropping about 21 percent from one hundred fifty two dollars million to one hundred twenty dollars million. Federally funded staffing would fall by about 6 percent, reducing full-time equivalent positions from four thousand forty seven to three thousand eight hundred four. The proposal arrives amid ongoing political pressure on the Smithsonian, including contentious hearings involving National Museum of American History director Anthea M. Hartig and a directive ordering signs outside the museum.

On the commercial side of the art world, Gagosian has closed its small space in London’s Burlington Arcade and will soon close its space in Basel, Switzerland, according to reporting cited from the Art Newspaper. A source familiar with the gallery’s thinking said both began as pop-ups and were kept as long as rents made sense. The Burlington Arcade location opened in 2023, with a downstairs store selling books, editions, and merchandise, and an upstairs room closer to a private viewing space; it hosted 16 shows before closing. Gagosian will continue operating its two Mayfair galleries at Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street. In Basel, the gallery first took the Rheinsprung 1 space as a pop-up around Art Basel in 2019, kept it for seven years, and mounted 17 exhibitions; it’s now considering other possibilities in the city.

Staying with collectors, Clara Wu Tsai and Joseph Tsai—billionaire art collectors and owners of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty—are divorcing after nearly 30 years, according to the New York Post. The couple married in New York in 1996 and were named jointly to ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list in 2018 and 2025, with a focus on contemporary art. A representative told the Post the split was mutual and amicable, and that they plan to keep working together across business and philanthropy. Joseph Tsai will remain chairman of Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment and governor of the Nets, while Wu Tsai will remain vice chair and governor of the Liberty. Their patronage has helped bring work by Rashid Johnson, Tavares Strachan, and LaToya Ruby Frazier to Barclays Center.

Now to a difficult report: two alumni from the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan have come forward with previously unreported abuse allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, describing sexual misconduct and assault while he was a benefactor of the school. The allegations emerged during a two-year external investigation into a history of abuse at the arts boarding school and summer camp. That investigation culminated in a 97-page report in which dozens of alumni made abuse allegations against 47 adults affiliated with the school between the 1950s and the 2010s. The new accounts about Epstein sit within that broader record of allegations, expanding the list of accused individuals connected to the institution’s past. The report frames the revelations as part of a larger reckoning over how misconduct persisted across decades within a high-profile arts education environment.

Finally, a critique titled “AI Companies Are Pulping Our Humanity” focuses on a recent report by Frank Landymore in Futurism about tech companies—named in the essay as including Anthropic—bulk purchasing out-of-print books, digitizing them, and then pulping them to train large language models. The piece describes “destructive scanning,” in which a hydraulic cutting machine slices off spines, pages are scanned, and the remnants are destroyed, presented as a way to exploit a legal loophole while risking the loss of scarce remaining copies. It notes ISBNdb’s pitch to supply between one thousand and one million volumes at a time, and argues that as LLMs are increasingly trained on AI-generated material, companies seek pre-2022 writing “uncontaminated by AI itself.” The essay ties these practices to a fear of cultural erasure: “LLMs swell while the shelves starve.”

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use… Chinga la migra

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