AI Authorship Wars and Restitution Reckonings

Artificial intelligence image making just got messier, in a very specific way. New research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, published in Nature Communications on 18 August, explores what the scientists Zheng Dai and David K. Gifford call “attribution decay.” They tested what happens when you remove a single piece of training data and regenerate an image as if that data never existed. Dai says if the output doesn’t change much, you can’t credibly attribute it to that removed item, because it had little influence. In huge datasets, they found you often can’t remove any one image and significantly alter the result—fueling an argument about “unattributability” that could complicate copyright fights over AI outputs.

Staying with big institutional politics, Venice Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is defending his decision to allow Russia’s participation this year, saying, “Putin didn’t win; art won.” In an interview with Corriere della Sera published 1 September, he pushed back on Italy’s culture minister Alessandro Giuli, who boycotted the Biennale opening and said “Putin had won at the Biennale.” The 61st edition, which opened in May, has drawn protests over both Israel’s and Russia’s presence. Russia’s show in its Giardini pavilion closed after the previews, and the European Union warned the Biennale could be breaching sanctions; in July, the EU formally cut its €2m grant. Buttafuoco says he’d do “Everything” again.

Across the Atlantic, restitution news is arriving from an unlikely place: a real estate listing. An 18th-century portrait of a woman—widely reported to be by Giuseppe Ghislandi, though the attribution has been questioned—surfaced in a property listing for a home in Mar del Plata, Argentina, last August. The painting once belonged to Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who fled Amsterdam in 1940 and died in an accident aboard a ship to the US. The family of Friedrich Kadgien, an SS officer, later came into possession of it. After investigators identified the work, the listing disappeared; police raided the home and found the painting gone. Judge Santiago Inchausti said an order will return it to Marei von Saher, and the Kadgiens agreed to donate about three thousand two hundred dollars to local hospitals.

Now to Los Angeles, where the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is about to open after nearly two decades of planning and construction, plus layoffs and staffing controversies. A press tour described a five-story, spaceship-like building designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects on an 11-acre campus with rolling green hills by Mia Lehrer’s Studio-MLA. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum reportedly cost one dollars billion and houses around forty thousand works of “visual storytelling,” from illustrations and comic art to murals and films. Lucas said at a press preview on Wednesday, September 2, “Pictures and stories are very powerful.” But the critique is that the galleries are arranged into broad themes with little context—often just metal letters naming sections—flattening differences across eras and cultures.

Staying in the United States, Kehinde Wiley’s painting at the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic is still causing controversy—and Wiley’s answer came through a T-shirt. After Erin Scavino, director of Art in Embassies, called his work “aesthetically terrifying” in a podcast interview with Sean Spicer, Wiley’s official e-commerce Instagram posted a black one hundred twenty dollars shirt printed with the phrase. The post framed it as “A response. A reclamation.” The dispute also drew attention to an April radio interview, conducted in Spanish, where US ambassador Leah Campos described the 2013 State Department commission Young Artists After Siamesas 1960 (2013) as “a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians,” and she wrongly claimed the Biden administration wanted to bring “that ideology” to Dominicans. Campos later described swapping the work for an American flag image set to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Also from ARTnews: a Long Island dispute involving dealer Adam Lindemann and a Julian Schnabel sculpture has landed in federal court. In a lawsuit filed August 20 in New York’s Eastern District, the Nature Conservancy alleges Lindemann trespassed on the Andy Warhol Visual Arts Preserve in Montauk and installed Schnabel’s 25-foot-tall sculpture Ahab without permission. The conservancy says it also found Lindemann parking vehicles in its lot, mowing, and planting shrubs. The group says it demanded removal in a December 2024 letter, followed by more correspondence, and that Lindemann agreed in May to remove the work by August 31, 2025. An email dated September 7, 2025, quotes him saying, “as promised I’m moving the sculpture!” The conservancy later sent a February 6, 2026 cease-and-desist, and says the sculpture still hasn’t been removed.

Heading south to Central America: Cuauhtémoc Medina has been appointed curator of the 2027 Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala. The biennial, organized by the Fundación Paiz para la Educación y la Cultura, takes place in Guatemala City and Antigua, about 25 miles west of the capital, and Medina’s edition will be the 25th since the event launched in 1978. In a statement, Medina called the Bienal’s history a vehicle for “contemporary thinking and sensibility,” adding it’s “a great honor, but also a challenge,” and that he hopes—working with staff and artists—to make something “worth remembering.” Medina previously worked at Tate Modern as the first associate curator of Latin American art (2002–2008) and served as MUAC’s chief curator from 2013 to 2024. The 2027 Bienal will run from November through February 2028.

Back to Miami, Superblue is marking its five-year anniversary with a new James Turrell installation. The work is titled Blue Sea Sky (2026), and it’s the latest in Turrell’s “Ganzfeld” series, which dates back to 1976 and explores the ganzfeld effect—a perceptual phenomenon that can flatten depth perception through uniform stimulation. The changing colors in Blue Sea Sky draw from Miami surroundings: blue ocean tones, green palm fronds, orange sunsets, and pink Art Deco neon facades. It replaces AKHU (2021), another Ganzfeld piece Turrell loaned for Superblue Miami’s May 2021 opening. Superblue cofounder and chief curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst said the work brings people together in immersion in pure color, and quoted Turrell: “In an age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.” It’s also the fifth new work Superblue has acquired since opening.

Turning to museum ethics and partnership, the Toledo Museum of Art has formed a new institutional relationship with the Ethiopian Heritage Authority that will result in five objects from a private collection being returned to Ethiopia. Collector Bob McCarthy approached the museum about donating objects so they could go back, but there were no provenance documents, making custody complicated. TMA director and CEO Adam M. Levine calls this a “donut hole” created by shifting standards around the Unesco 1970 Convention and later best practices. Assistant director of strategic initiatives Sophie Ong, leading a medieval-focused Cloister gallery reinstallation, says groundwork in Ethiopia helped shape solutions for objects lacking evidence of export. In research, two manuscripts were identified that were known to be in Ethiopia post-1970 and likely removed; three crosses are being transferred to the EHA. Levine and Ong prefer “objects in limbo” over “orphaned objects,” and the agreement is intended to continue for 20 years.

And finally, a major Van Gogh moment is coming to Paris. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, painted in mid-January 1889—three weeks after Vincent van Gogh mutilated his ear—will be a centerpiece of Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer: Icons of Modern Art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (9 October–8 March 2027). The work hasn’t traveled to a temporary exhibition since 1990, after many rejected loan requests. The lenders are anonymous heirs of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, including his eldest son Philip; Niarchos bought it in the 1970s, reportedly for two dollarsm–three dollarsm, while the exhibition insurance value might be closer to two hundred dollarsm–three hundred dollarsm. The painting once passed through Émile Schuffenecker, Gustave Fayet, and dealer Paul Rosenberg; it was seized by Nazis in 1941, acquired by Hermann Göring, recovered in Zurich in 1945, and restituted in 1948.

That’s the episode—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art-world headlines, and I’ll see you then: Chinga la migra.

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