French Exit
The most shocking event on the art year calendar had to be the heist at the Louvre—a brazen crime at the world’s most famous museum hours before Art Basel kicked off the biggest cultural week of the year in Paris. The fair and all its satellite events happened as planned, and the Louvre even managed to reopen by Thursday…though if you were an Art Basel VVVIP, I reported that you could get a private tour of the museum even when it was closed to the public. Quelle fléx!
Battle of the Advisers
As Evgenia Peretz chronicled in the art package in the November issue: There once was a money-raking art advisory firm called Guggenheim Asher, and then Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher sued each other. Things got nasty.
The Big Close
The Los Angeles gallery Blum reigned over the city for decades, first as Blum & Poe, and then just as Blum after Jeff Poe left and Tim Blum stayed. With no warning whatsoever, word trickled out this summer that Blum would be closing the gallery that was by all accounts thriving, and readying a New York outpost in Tribeca. Sadly, it was a data point in a trend—as the market corrected, many other once-thriving galleries threw in the towel, for reasons financial or otherwise. To give just a brief list, goodbye to: Blum, CLEARING, Venus Over Manhattan, Kasmin, Altman Siegel, Sperone Westwater, and LA Louver.
Tough Portrait
Cruel summer for the National Portrait Gallery. In May, Trump, who has no legal power to fire directors of Smithsonian institutions, wrote on Truth Social that he was “terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery.” Again, he does not have the legal authority to do that, but regardless, Sajet resigned two weeks later. And then in July, Amy Sherald canceled “American Sublime”—coming off acclaimed runs at SFMOMA and the Whitney, and set to be the first show of a Black contemporary artist at the institution that first displayed her portrait of Michelle Obama—citing the planned censorship of her painting of a trans woman.
Up in Flames
What an ominous note to begin the year: In early 2025, fires raged through Los Angeles, leaving hundreds of artists homeless and without a studio. Frieze still opened its fair six weeks later, and the Oscars went down the month after that, but nearly a year later, the city is certainly still recovering.
