It has been widely reported that New York–based collector Candace Carmel Barasch had taken legal action against Schiff, beginning in May, in two separate lawsuits, in which Barasch claimed that she had been defrauded by Schiff. In one of those suits, Barasch alleged that she had provided $6.6 million to Schiff for the purchases of artworks; those pieces never came in, Barasch claimed, because Schiff had diverted the funds. In the other, Barasch and collector Richard Grossman accused Schiff of still owing them $1.8 million in relation to the private sale of an Adrian Ghenie painting at Sotheby’s.

But a document filed on August 11 by Douglas J. Pick, the person Schiff appointed to liquidate her firm, shows that they are not the only ones who have pending claims against Schiff. The others include the director of sales at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery and Sotheby’s private sales department, both for amounts that were not disclosed. The artist Seffa Klein, who had an exhibition at Schiff’s SFA Art Advisory prior to its closure, has also filed a claim for $506,200.50.

Thomas Hagerty, the managing directory of the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, and his wife Jeanne filed a claim for “at least $990,000,” and Brian and Karen Conway, who have galleries named after them at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where Karen is a trustee, filed a claim for “not less than $611,500.00.”

Whereas the details of the Barasch claim are known because of the lawsuits she filed, the details of these claims are not known because they went unspecified.

Yet other documents filed this month did reveal other specifics related to Schiff that were previously unknown—including the many artworks that are allegedly still missing.

According to the Winston Art Group, the advisory firm selected by Pick to inventory Schiff’s company, there are 108 artworks whose whereabouts are still unknown by artists such as Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Virgil Abloh, Jana Euler, Alex Israel, Joel Mesler, Ugo Rondinone, Julie Mehretu, and Lisa Edelstein, an actress who has previously produced art and is a friend of Schiff.

It is worth noting that many of these works are works on paper or editioned objects, meaning that their individual values are likely far lower than unique artworks like the Ghenie painting in the Barasch lawsuit. However, the Winston Art Group pegged their collective value at $1.13 million.

The Winston Art Group also filed another document in which it said there was more than $3 million worth of artworks that were still being held by Schiff. Among the 894 works allegedly in her possession were ones by artists ranging from Jeffrey Gibson to DIS to Laura Owens to Wade Guyton.

The Baer Faxt newsletter first reported news of the newly filed documents on Thursday.

He died within months of his mother, the artist Françoise Gilot, who passed away in June at 101, and during the 50th anniversary commemorations of the death of his father, whose work is the subject of numerous museum exhibitions around the world right now. (Among their survivors are Gilot’s daughter, Paloma Picasso.)

In his capacity as the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, a position he held from 1989 to earlier this year, Claude worked alongside his father’s many descendants to steward the artist’s legacy. The business was not always smooth sailing, as conflicts between members of the Picasso family periodically arose in public-facing ways.

Before Pablo Picasso had even died, in 1970, Claude, then aged 22, sued in France to be recognized as the legitimate son of his father, which would officially make Claude an heir. A court eventually ruled in his and his sister Paloma’s favor, making them legal heirs to Picasso four years later, after the artist had died in 1973.

It was the first in a number of internal battles among the Picasso family that would unfold across the next few decades. Many of those conflicts pitted Claude against other of Picasso’s heirs, including his second wife Jacqueline Roque; his half-sister Maya Widmaier-Picasso, whose mother was Marie-Thérèse Walter; and Picasso’s grandchildren Marina Picasso and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the children of the artist’s eldest son, Paul Picasso, via his first wife Olga Khokhlova.

The most explosive standoff took place in 1999, when Claude sold the Picasso name and signature to PSA Peugeot-Citroen, which released car titled after the artist. Marina sued Claude, claiming that he had disrespected “one of the greatest painters, a genius.” Queried about the situation, Claude’s lawyer told the Guardian: “Claude Ruiz Picasso is recognised by a majority of the five surviving heirs as being perfectly entitled to exploit the Picasso brand name.”

In interviews, Claude said he never thought he would play such a role. “I never expected or desired to have any kind of role like this, or have any influence over my father’s legacy,” he once told Picasso biographer John Richardson. Speaking of his late brother, he added, “Paul also said, shortly before he died, ‘You know, if we’re in the shit we’re in, it’s all your fault.'”

Claude Picasso was born in 1947. He studied in England and France, and went on to live in New York between 1967 and 1974. He was briefly an assistant to the famed photographer Richard Avedon; he became a photojournalist himself.

In 1989, Claude became the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, Succession Picasso. Through the role, he controlled the use of Picasso’s copyright. He held the position until July, when his sister Paloma took over.

He could be ornery about his father’s legacy. In 2018, he once said that a good amount of Picasso shows are “not necessary” and that Paris’s Musée Picasso was doing too much lending. He said that many works in the collection were not in a position to travel as frequently as they did it and that the “tsunami” of exhibitions taking place include many which are “nondescript and do nothing more than surf on the magic of a great name.”

Among the exhibitions this year to have feature loans from that museum is the negatively reviewed “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Yet Claude also seemed to take great pride in his work for the estate. “There’s still a lot to learn from Picasso,” he told Richardson.

Dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, “He was a dedicated guardian and interpreter of his father’s legacy, leading the Picasso Administration since its founding and enthusiastically supporting international scholarship and exhibitions. He was an extraordinary man and a great friend. Our hearts go out to all of Claude’s family. He will be profoundly missed.”

In addition to serving prison time, Nathaniel Chastain, who previously served as a product manager for OpenSea, now must also pay a fine of $50,000 and give up 15.98 ETH, or roughly $26,500.

Chastain had already been charged with one count of money laundering and one count of wire fraud. He had been accused of purchasing NFTs with the knowledge that they would soon be featured on OpenSea’s homepage. He was convicted on both counts.

The charges had each come with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and according to Reuters, prosecutors had been asking for a greater amount of time behind bars than what Chastain ultimately received.

“I let down the company I was serving and lost sight of the person I aspired to be,” Chastain said during his sentencing.

His case had been closely watched because federal investigators said it was the first of its kind. Never before, authorities said, had there been a case revolving around insider trading, cryptocurrency, and NFTs.

Reuters reported that the judge overseeing the case, US District Judge Jesse Furman, had expressed skepticism over whether an insider trading case revolving around $50,000 worth of assets would have been brought to court were it not for the fact that that the deal occurred in the “slightly sexy” crypto world.

Yet authorities seized on the opportunity as a means to ward off any other future instances of insider trading. US Attorney Damian Williams said that Chastain’s case “should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated.”

Chastain’s sentencing comes amid widespread talk that the NFT bubble begun in 2021 has burst. Trading volume has declined significantly, and multiple lawsuits have targeted how certain NFTs are bought and sold.

The Vienna public prosecutor’s office is no longer looking into André Heller, who said he had faked the work’s sculpted frame as a “childish prank” last year. The office said that because Heller had taken measures to remove the frame from circulation before authorities found out about it, he had performed “active remorse” for the forgery.

“The extensive investigations revealed that the suspect bought back the frame before the law enforcement authorities received a related complaint, thereby completely making up for the damage caused,” read a statement by the prosecutor’s office.

In 2022, Heller told the Austrian magazine Falter that he had produced the frame for Basquiat’s Untitled (Frame), from 1987. To the work Heller appended Basquiat sketches; the work’s border also included wood, red paint, nails, and parts of a black broom’s handle. Heller had acquired the painting in 1990, and went on to market the work’s frame as a bona fide creation of Basquiat, who died in 1988.

Heller appears to have spoken of the frame as being authentically by Basquiat to some experts, including the art historian Dieter Buchhart, who curated a survey of the artist’s work for Vienna’s Albertina museum in 2022. Last year, Buchhart told ARTnews, “I did not authenticate the frame and never claimed to have done so.”

The work, including its faked frame, made its way to the TEFAF art fair in New York in 2017, when the Vienna gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher attempted to sell it for a price between $2 million and $3 million. No one bought it. But, according to Falter, the glued-on sketch ultimately sold to Amir Shariat for €800,000 the next year.

Viennese investigators had been exploring whether Heller had committed fraud. Now, their inquiry is ended.

Basquiat forgeries periodically surface, in part because the artist’s estate disbanded its authentication committee more than a decade ago. Just this year alone, a Miami dealer received a prison sentence for selling forged works by Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Banksy, and a Los Angeles auctioneer was handed five years of probation for aiding in efforts to create a faux provenance for inauthentic Basquiats.

The auctioneer’s case was related to a larger saga currently facing the Orlando Museum of Art, whose former director, Aaron De Groft, has been accused of knowingly exhibiting faked Basquiats that he marketed as newly rediscovered works. Those pieces appeared in a 2022 exhibition at the museum that was raided by the FBI, whose investigation into De Groft is ongoing.

The case was related to the saga surrounding a 2022 exhibition about Basquiat held at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida. That show touched off an FBI raid, the firing of the museum’s director, and legal action that is still ongoing.

Included in the show were a group of works that the museum’s director at the time, Aaron De Groft, claimed had been produced in 1982 while the artist lived in Los Angeles. He said that after that, they were left in a storage unit, then forgotten. De Groft claimed they were major rediscoveries.

But doubt started to emerge after the New York Times ran an investigation that questioned these works’ authenticity. One expert on branding seized on the FedEx typeface that appeared in one of these paintings. He said the shipping company hadn’t started to use that typeface until 1994, more than a decade after these works were allegedly produced.

After the FBI investigated the 25 paintings, seizing them in a dramatic raid that made headlines around the world, Michael Barzman, the auctioneer who today was sentenced to probation, was interviewed by federal agents. Speaking to them in 2022, he claimed he had no role in the production of the works.

Then, in 2023, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about this, further saying that he had built out a false provenance for the paintings. That provenance was intended to act as documentation for the storage unit narrative. De Groft, along with two co-owners of the paintings, has stated that Barzman is not telling the truth.

LA prosecutors had been seeking the sentence Barzman ultimately received. According to the New York Times, which first reported the news, Barzman “had a difficult life, physically and emotionally,” and suffered from “substance abuse and financial difficulties.”

His sentence involves three years of probation, 500 hours of community service, and a fine of $500. Barzman’s lawyer told the Times that the auctioneer is “never going to reoffend.”

Meanwhile, the investigation into the faked Basquiats continues—as does the legal intrigue. Earlier this week, the Orlando Museum of Art sued De Groft, whom it fired not long after the FBI raid in the summer of 2022. The museum alleges that De Groft had made efforts to profit from putting the Basquiats in the exhibition and that he was attempting to do something similar with paintings by Titian and Jackson Pollock that were not in the show. He has denied wrongdoing.

The legal action, first reported on Friday by the Daily Beast, began in January, when Lea Lee, the adviser, filed suit against French dealer and self-described “art detective” Elisabeth Royer-Grimblat, New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem, and others.

Lee is the granddaughter of the architect Oscar Nitzschké, whom she described as a “close friend” of Calder. Prior to her death in 2017, her mother had owned the Calder work in question, which Nahem’s gallery exhibited at its Art Basel booth in Switzerland in 2018.

The parties disagree on how Nahem obtained the work. (The work’s title changes over the many documents submitted: Lee labeled it Mobile de Bretagne, while the defendants sometimes called it La Roche jaune, or The Yellow Rock, and dated it to around 1950.) Lee said she was unaware that the work was removed from her mother’s estate, which her sisters, Rose and Julie Groen, both defendants in that lawsuit, had been “feasting on,” according to Lee.

Writing in the present tense in an affidavit, Lee claimed that Royer-Grimblat “smuggles” the work out of her mother’s estate in 2017, and that when she raised concerns about the work in 2021, the sisters and Royer-Grimblat “commenced a slander campaign against me, aimed at destroying my professional reputation as an art advisor that seriously and negatively impacted my business both in New York and elsewhere.”

In her own affidavit, Royer-Grimblat denied these allegations, submitting to the court a receipt dated March 9, 2015—before the death of Frédérique Nitszchké-Groen, Lee’s mother—that appears to state that Royer-Grimblat paid $2 million for the work. On November 20, 2017, Royer-Grimblat appears to have sold the work for the same price to Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, whose invoice now titled the work Mobile de Bretagne. The Groen sisters also denied Lee’s allegations.

Across the various documents submitted during the suit, the price for the work appears to fluctuate. Lee stated that Nahem was selling the work for $4.5 million, then alleged that he had undervalued the sculpture, submitting an email exchange with a Sotheby’s representative who pegged the piece’s value at $8 million, if it were to be sold privately.

In June, a judge said there was enough evidence that Royer-Grimblat had purchased the work prior to Nitszchké-Groen’s death and dismissed the case. But Lee appealed the judgment, and the case remains ongoing.

Meanwhile, this week, Nahem filed his own lawsuit against Lee. While the contents of the lawsuit have not yet been made available in the New York court’s online system, the Daily Beast reported that the suit surrounds Lee’s interactions with Nahem in the years since 2017.

Nahem’s lawsuit reportedly claims that Lee “began to stalk Mr. Nahem at art fairs and art auctions where he was surrounded by his staff, his spouse, his colleagues and, most damagingly, the Gallery’s clients,” and that she has filed a criminal complaint against him in France, where she is allegedly trying to keep him from entering the country.

In her lawsuit, Lee said she attempted to tell Nahem that the work was still part of her mother’s estate in 2018 after receiving the “shock of my life” upon seeing it at Art Basel. She claimed she tried to touch the work because she felt such an affinity for it, and was told by someone in the booth not to do so, which left her “feeling the broken heart of being scolded for standing too close to a wonderful piece of art that was always part of my childhood and represented everything that I treasured so much about the private and wildly creative world my grandmother and Calder had built together,” according to the suit.

The Daily Beast reported that in his lawsuit, Nahem said that when he received communication from Lee, Royer-Grimblat told him that Lee was “lying and unstable,” and so he declined to give the work over to her.

Lee and Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art did not respond to requests for comment.

This latest episode, which premiered on Thursday, features Charlotte at work, newly returned to the world of art dealing after a decades-long hiatus spent building a home. There she is at the fictional Kasabian Gallery, surrounded by Israel paintings when the pop star Sam Smith, playing themselves, walks in.

“This Alex Israel,” Charlotte says, motioning Smith over to an Israel self-portrait, “it has the Pop sensibility that we talked about. And, like you, he uses his identity in his art.”

“I really like it,” Smith says.

“Do you!” Charlotte exclaims, as fashion designer Jeffrey C. Williams, Smith’s real-life friend who is here also playing themselves, nods in endorsement. It’s a match, and Charlotte makes the sale for $100,000—which, all things considered, seems to be about average for a work by Israel, whose art once sold for more than $1 million at auction.

This is the latest turn in Charlotte’s arc as a dealer, which goes all the way back to the original Sex and the City. In the pilot episode, after a date, Charlotte goes back to a date’s apartment to appraise a 1989 Ross Bleckner painting, which she says “could easily go for a hundred grand—Ross is so hot right now.” (The same guy brings Samantha back to his place to see the work as well after Charlotte goes home for the evening.) In one episode from 1999, she was taken in by a group of Prada-wearing women gallerists who were termed the “power lesbians.” And, in another episode from the following year, her job at the gallery leads her to end up posing in drag for a photographer.

Israel himself posted footage of the And Just Like That … scene on Instagram, tagging the art collector Candace Carmel Barasch. The New York Times once reported that she owned an Israel self-portrait that had been executed by prop makers at Warner Bros. In that report, Barasch asked, “Is it a prop or a piece of art?” She also revealed that Israel had made her a work based on McLovin’s ID from Superbad.

On Wednesday, the museum said it would bring its general admission fees from $25 to $30, its senior tickets from $22 to $25, and its young adult tickets from $19 to $23. Visitors aged 18 or younger will still be allowed to enter SFMOMA for free.

Other museums, like the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, have recently taken similar measures, claiming that lagging pandemic-era attendance figures and rising operational costs have made the move necessary.

SFMOMA, in its announcement on Wednesday, said something similar, citing “decreased attendance figures, slow citywide recovery in the downtown core, inflation and other rising costs.”

The museum reported that general admission and membership revenue accounts for 22 percent of its operating budget, and that attendance in 2023 is down 35 percent compared to 2019. It was not clear, however, whether that figure accounted for the fact that there are still more than four months left in 2023.

SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford said in a statement, “In making these changes, as both SFMOMA and our city continue to emerge from the pandemic, we have also committed ourselves to maintaining our free and discounted programs and to exploring new opportunities that will encourage the full spectrum of our community to experience the museum.”

Pre-pandemic numbers suggested that, on average, admission fees contribute just 7 percent to institutions’ annual revenue, according to an Association of Art Museum Directors report. According to SFMOMA’s 2022 tax forms, admission fees accounted for roughly 11 percent of its annual revenue.

SFMOMA’s admission fees are still a cut below those of the Art Institute of Chicago, which charges $32 for a general admission ticket.

The campaign, which debuted in July, was teased with an image of shoes that were piled in a corner. This is a mode of presentation that recalls a common one for Gonzalez-Torres’s candy pieces, which have been exhibited in a variety of ways. While they have been frequently shown against walls or in corners, the candy pieces have also been spread out across floors in carpet-like formations.

“I cannot believe no one told me that KITH ripped off Félix González-Torres’s piece about his partner dying of AIDS for a drop celebrating ***the 60th anniversary of the X-Men franchise***,” wrote the designer and writer Elizabeth Goodspeed in a post on X/Twitter yesterday. Her post has now amassed more than 30,000 likes.

While she didn’t name which piece, Goodspeed may have been referring to “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), from 1991, which calls for an array of wrapped candies to be arranged in dimensions depending on its installation. This work, like other candy pieces, is a portrait of sorts, with its subject in this case being Gonzalez-Torres’s boyfriend Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related complications the year the work was made.

Like other candy pieces, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) has an “ideal weight”—in this case, 175 pounds, a number meant to correspond to the average male body weight. According to a list of materials supplied by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, the candies are exhibited in “endless supply,” meaning that they can be replenished as viewers take them away and consume them.

While the common interpretation of pieces like “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) has been that they are about the AIDS crisis, death, or both, Gonzalez-Torres discussed these works in a variety of ways. There are also other pieces that do not explicitly take up these topics, such as 1990’s “Untitled” (USA Today), featuring red, white, and blue sweets in allusion to a similarly named newspaper, and “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient), a grouping of candies in blue wrappers that alludes to a French collector who bought Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Both of those works have also been shown in corners.

The Kith campaign, released in July, was a collaboration with Marvel and ASICS, and featured seven new versions of the GEL-LYTE III shoe that are meant to pay homage to X-Men characters. The announcement for the collection did not mention Gonzalez-Torres’s work.

The photograph of the piled shoes appeared to only be a teaser image used to promote the new GEL-LYTE III shoes—it was not clear whether viewers could take away these sneakers, or if this mound had even been exhibited publicly. A Kith spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.

In a follow-up tweet, Goodspeed wrote, “I doubt this was intentional, but I don’t think that makes it any better—still a massive oversight that no one thought of / knew either visually similar reference, both of which have important context and intense emotional meaning. Inept moodboarding or media illiteracy at best!”

A representative for the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation could not be reached for comment.

Esra Sarıgedik Öktem released her statement via the Instagram of the Istanbul-based gallery she founded, BüroSarıgedik, on Monday. That gallery also represents the artist chosen to do the pavilion, Gülsün Karamustafa.

Öktem said there had been “major changes” at her gallery that would have precluded any conflict of interest while organizing the pavilion. “As the professional representative of Gülsün Karamustafa, and founding director of BüroSarigedik, I wanted to avoid any conflict of interest that my new role as curator might present,” she wrote. “As such, my team and I have reorganized the workflow of the office, and redefined my role in a way that would keep me separated from the day-to-day operations of the business side of representing Gülsün Karamustafa.”

But Öktem said that the appointment of Iwona Blazwick, currently chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel and previously director of Whitechapel Gallery in London, as curator of the 2024 Istanbul Biennial had moved her to reconsider curating the Venice Biennale pavilion.

According to the Art Newspaper, Defne Ayas had been unanimously endorsed by an international selection committee as curator for the Istanbul Biennial. But the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), which runs the biennial, went with a different curator, instead awarding the post to Blazwick, herself a member of that very organization’s advisory committee.

The Art Newspaper reported that critics believe Ayas was rejected because she organized the 2015 Venice Biennale’s Turkish Pavilion, which included work by the artist Sarkis, and came with a catalogue featuring a mention of the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government denies that the genocide happened, and the catalogues were taken out of circulation and Sarkis made them into an artwork.

Öktem said the situation surrounding Ayas “distressed me very deeply and it also highlighted the need for a more transparent selection process and the lack of mutual communication.”

What went unmentioned in Öktem’s Instagram was that the IKSV also organizes the Venice Biennale pavilion. The IKSV’s initial release for the Biennale pavilion made two mentions of Öktem’s role at BüroSarıgedik, but it did not state that her gallery represents Karamustafa.

Scrutiny has continued to follow the IKSV after its reported snub of Ayas. In an essay for ArtReview, Kaya Genç said that the controversy is emblematic of a larger problem affecting the Turkish art world, writing, “in Turkey, demands for institutional transparency are rooted in fears about a pervasive political silence that may soon take the country hostage, particularly as government pressure on the fields of arts and culture continues to grow. These demands and concerns are fundamental in public life; the artworld must commit to adopting them if artistic freedom of expression is to be protected for the future.”

In Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian wrote that the situation can be related to a history of genocide denial in Turkey. “When people say autocrats rot culture, this is what they mean,” he said.

When asked whether Blazwick would still curate the 2024 Istanbul Biennial, the IKSV continued to defend its choice for curator in a statement to ARTnews.

“The Istanbul Biennial Advisory Board, which contributes to the biennial in various ways, is tasked with recommending curator candidates,” a foundation spokesperson said. “As all members of the Advisory Board know, the final decision is always made by İKSV management. After carefully evaluating the Advisory Board’s list of highly qualified candidates, İKSV management decided to invite Iwona Blazwick, renowned for her knowledge, experience and achievements in the international art world, to be curator of the 18th Istanbul Biennial.”