“We are not working with Tom’s studio at this time and have no release dates planned,” a Nike representative told Complex. The comment signals that, at least for now, the brand is no longer working with Sachs, though it might not be the definitive end to their relationship.

The apparent decision by Nike followed a report by Curbed in March that alleged Sachs’s studio had a toxic work environment. Soon after the report was released, Nike representatives said the company was “deeply concerned” by reports of Sachs’s behavior, which allegedly included calling employees “autistic,” and “retarded,” throwing things at them, and other hazing behavior.

Nike and Sachs have long collaborated on sneaker design, in particular a project called Mars Yard, named after a rocky stretch of terrain in Pasadena, California, where engineers test out rovers that will explore the red planet. The Mars Yard 1.0 debuted in 2012, with features such as vectran fabric from the Mars Excursion Rover airbags, billed as a shoe for the modern rocket scientist. Mars Yard 2.0 came out in 2017 during an exhibition at Governor’s Island that, presciently enough, also showed a film that Sachs made with artist Van Neistat titled “The Hero’s Journey”. The film follows a Tom Sachs apprentice through an indoctrination process in his iconic SoHo studio.

At the time he told ARTnews of the film, “There is always humiliation and failure in the beginning, and we wanted The Hero’s Journey to accentuate that. No one who has had success hasn’t also had a humiliating beginning with lots of failure.”

Six years have passed since Mars Yard 2.0 was released and 3.0 was expected to debut sometime soon, with rumors swirling recently about a new release date. Sachs’s more accessible Nike collaboration, titled General Purpose, was due to come out in more colorways in April, yet this too has yet to happen.

Whereas fame and fortune in the art world come from restricting access to an elite few, making it as a digital creator is about giving away as much of yourself as possible. For free, all the time.

“My attitude’s always been, as soon as I post something on the internet, that’s out there,” Winkelmann said. “The internet is an organism. It just eats things and poops them out in new ways, and trying to police that is futile. People take my stuff and upload it and profit from it. They get all the engagements and clicks and whatnot. But whatever.”

Winkelmann leveraged his two million followers and became the face of NFTs. In the process, he became a blue-chip art star, with an eponymous art museum in South Carolina and pieces reportedly selling for close to $10 million to major museums elsewhere. That’s without an MFA, a gallery, or prior exhibitions.

“You can have [a contemporary] artist who is extremely well-selling and making a shitload of money, and the vast majority of people have never heard of this person,” he said. “Their artwork has no effect on the broader visual language of the time. And yet, because they’ve convinced the right few people, they can be successful. I think in the future, more people will come up like I did—by convincing a million normal people.”

In 2021 he might have been right, but more recently that path to art world fame is being threatened by a potent force: artificial intelligence. Last year, Midjourney and Stability AI turned the world of digital creators on its head when they released AI image generators to the public. Both now boast more than 10 million users. For digital artists, the technology represents lost jobs and stolen labor. The major image generators were trained by scraping billions of images from the internet, including countless works by digital artists who never gave their consent.

In the eyes of those artists, tech companies have unleashed a machine that scrambles human—and legal—definitions of forgery to such an extent that copyright may never be the same. And that has big implications for artists of all kinds.

In December, Canadian illustrator and content creator Sam Yang received a snide email from a stranger asking him to judge a sort of AI battle royale in which he could decide which custom artificial intelligence image generator best mimicked his own style. In the months since Stability AI released the Stable Diffusion generator, AI enthusiasts had rejiggered the tool to produce images in the style of specific artists; all they needed was a sample of a hundred or so images. Yang, who has more than three million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, was an obvious target.

Netizens took hundreds of his drawings posted online to train the AI to pump out images in his style: girls with Disney-wide eyes, strawberry mouths, and sharp anime-esque chins. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yang said. “I kept thinking, This is really happening … and it’s happening to me.”

Yang trawled Reddit forums in an effort to understand how anyone could think it was OK to do this, and kept finding the same assertion: there was no need to contact artists for permission. AI companies had already scraped the digital archives of thousands of artists to train the image generators, the Redditors reasoned. Why couldn’t they?

Like many digital artists, Yang has been wrestling with this question for months. He doesn’t earn a living selling works in rarefied galleries, auction houses, and fairs, but instead by attracting followers and subscribers to his drawing tutorials. He doesn’t sell to collectors, unless you count the netizens who buy his T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise. It’s a precarious environment that has gotten increasingly treacherous.

“AI art seemed like something far down the line,” he said, “and then it wasn’t.”

Yang never went to a lawyer, as the prospect of fighting an anonymous band of Redditors in court was overwhelming. But other digital artists aren’t standing down so easily. In January, several filed a class action lawsuit targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and the image-sharing platform DeviantArt.

Brooklyn-based illustrator Deb JJ Lee is one of those artists. By January, Lee was sick and tired of being overworked and undervalued. A month earlier, Lee had gone viral after posting a lowball offer from Epic Games to do illustration work for the company’s smash hit Fortnite, arguably the most popular video game in the world. Epic, which generated over $6 billion last year, offered $3,000 for an illustration and ownership of the copyright. For Lee, it was an all-too-familiar example of the indignities of working as a digital artist. Insult was added to injury when an AI enthusiast—who likely found out about Lee from the viral post—released a custom model based on Lee’s work.

“I’ve worked on developing my skills my whole life and they just took it and made it to zeros and ones,” Lee said. “Illustration rates haven’t kept up with inflation since the literal 1930s.”

Illustration rates have stagnated and, in some cases, shrunk since the ’80s, according to Tim O’Brien, a former president of the Society of Illustrators. The real money comes from selling usage rights, he said, especially to big clients in advertising. Lee continued, “I know freelancers who are at the top of their game that are broke, I’m talking [illustrators who do] New Yorker covers. And now this?”

Lee reached out to their community of artists and, together, they learned that the image generators, custom or not, were trained on the LAION dataset, a collection of 5.6 billion images scraped, without permission, from the internet. Almost every digital artist has images in LAION, given that DeviantArt and ArtStation were lifted wholesale, along with Getty Images and Pinterest.

The artists who filed suit claim that the use of these images is a brazen violation of intellectual property rights; Matthew Butterick, who specializes in AI and copyright, leads their legal team. (Getty Images is pursuing a similar lawsuit, having found 12 million of their images in LAION.) The outcome of the case could answer a legal question at the center of the internet: in a digital world built on sharing, are tech companies entitled to everything we post online?

The class action lawsuit is tricky. While it might seem obvious to claim copyright infringement, given that billions of copyrighted images were used to create the technology underlying image generators, the artists’ lawyers are attempting to apply existing legal standards made to protect and restrict human creators, not a borderline-science-fiction computing tool. To that end, the complaint describes a number of abuses: First, the AI training process, called diffusion, is suspect because it requires images to be copied and re-created as the model is tested. This alone, the lawyers argue, constitutes an unlicensed use of protected works.

From this understanding, the lawyers argue that image generators essentially call back to the dataset and mash together millions of bits of millions of images to create whatever image is requested, sometimes with the explicit instruction to recall the style of a particular artist. Butterick and his colleagues argue that the resulting product then is a derivative work, that is, a work not “significantly transformed” from its source material, a key standard in “fair use,” the legal doctrine underpinning much copyright law.

As of mid-April, when Art in America went to press, the courts had made no judgment in the case. But Butterick’s argument irks technologists who take issue with the suit’s description of image generators as complicated copy-paste tools.

“There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding of what machine learning is,” Ryan Murdock, a developer who has been working on the technology since 2017, including for Adobe, said. “It’s true that you want to be able to recover information from the images and the dataset, but the whole point of machine learning is not to memorize or compress images but to learn higher-level general information about what an image is.”

Diffusion, the technology undergirding image generators, works by adding random noise, or static, to an image in the dataset, Murdock explained. The model then attempts to fill in the missing parts of the image using hints from a text caption that describes the work, and those captions sometimes refer to an artist’s name. The model’s efforts are then scored based on how accurately the model was able to fill in the blanks, leading it to contain some information associating style and artist. AI enthusiasts working under the name Parrot Zone have completed more than 4,000 studies testing how many artist names the model recognizes. The count is close to 3,000, from art historical figures like Wassily Kandinsky to popular digital artists like Greg Rutkowski.

The class action suit aims to protect human artists by asserting that, because an artist’s name is invoked in the text prompt, an AI work can be considered “derivative” even if the work produced is the result of pulling content from billions of images. In effect, the artists and their lawyers are trying to establish copyright over style, something that has never before been legally protected.

The most analogous recent copyright case involves fine artists debating just that question. Last fall, well-known collage artist Deborah Roberts sued artist Lynthia Edwards and her gallerist, Richard Beavers, accusing Edwards of imitating her work and thus confusing potential collectors and harming her market. Attorney Luke Nikas, who represents Edwards, recently filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that Roberts’s claim veered into style as opposed to the forgery of specific elements of her work.

“You have to give the court a metric to judge against,” Nikas said. “That means identifying specific creative choices, which are protected, and measuring that against the supposedly derivative work.”

Ironically, Nikas’s argument is likely to be the one used by Stability AI and Midjourney against the digital artists. Additionally, the very nature of the artists’ work as content creators makes assessing damages a tough job. As Nikas described, a big part of arguing copyright cases entails convincing a judge that the derivative artwork has meaningfully impacted the plaintiff’s market, such as the targeting of a specific collecting class.

In the end, it could be the history of human-made art that empowers an advanced computing tool: copyright does not protect artistic style so that new generations of artists can learn from those who came before, or remix works to make something new. In 2012 a federal judge famously ruled that Richard Prince did not violate copyright in incorporating a French photographer’s images into his “Canal Zone” paintings, to say nothing of the long history of appropriation art practiced by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and others. If humans can’t get in trouble for that, why should AI?

In mid-March, the United States Copyright Office released a statement of policy on AI-generated works, ruling that components of a work made using AI were not eligible for copyright. This came as a relief to artists who feared that their most valuable asset—their usage rights—might be undermined by AI. But the decision also hinders the court’s ability to determine how artists are being hurt financially by AI image generators. Quantifying damages online is tricky.

Late last year, illustrator and graphic novelist Tomer Hanuka discovered that someone had created a custom model based on his work, and was selling an NFT collection titled “Punks by Hanuka” on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. But Hanuka had no idea whom to contact; such scenarios usually involve anonymous users who disappear as soon as trouble strikes.

“I can’t speak to what they did exactly because I don’t know how to reach them and I don’t know who they are,” Hanuka said. “They don’t have any contact or any leads on their page.” The hurt, he said, goes deeper than run-of-the-mill online theft. “You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.”

For those who benefited from that brief magical window when a creator could move more easily from internet to art world fame, new tools offer a certain convenience. With his new jet-setting life, visiting art fairs and museums around the world, Winkelmann has found a way to continue posting an online illustration a day, keeping his early fans happy by letting AI make the menial time-consuming imagery in the background.

This is exactly what big tech promised AI would do: ease the creative burden that, relatively speaking, a creator might see as not all that creative. Besides, he points out, thieving companies are nothing new. “The idea of, like, Oh my god, a tech company has found a way to scrape data from us and profit from it––what are we talking about? That’s literally been the last 20 years,” he said. His advice to up-and-coming digital artists is to do what he did: use the system as much as possible, and lean in.

That’s all well and good for Winkelmann: He no longer lives in the precarious world
of working digital artists. Beeple belongs to the art market now.  

The activists, both members of the Letze Generazione climate activist organization, glued themselves to the frame of The Bethlehemitische Kindermord (1638) by Peter Paul Rubens. The painting, which depicts children being stolen from the mothers was chosen for the action to represent a future being stolen due to climate change.

The adhesive left behind on the frame warranted attention by conservators. An initial estimate for the monetary damages was 11,000 Euros, but that price has now ballooned to 50,000, according to a report by Monopol. During court proceedings today, the general director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Bernhard Maaz, said that the trace amounts of adhesive left would only be visible to the trained eye.

The defendants’ lawyer attempted to argue that these trace amounts of damage might in fact increase the value of the frame one day, marked as it is now with potentially historical significance and further argued that the charges should be dropped all together. The judge did not agree and the trial will continue later this month to determine if a fine should be levied against the protestors and if so, what amount.

For their part, the protestors stand behind their actions, one of them saying, “I would agree to stick myself to the frame regularly if necessary.” Meanwhile, the younger protestor clarified his organizations actions in museums, “We don’t want to destroy art, we don’t want to be terrorists.”

In the fall of 2021, OpenSea users noticed that Chastain was using anonymous Ethereum wallets to buy up works of artists who were due to be featured on the marketplace’s welcome page. In the hot NFT market of 2021, a feature from OpenSea usually led to an overall spike in the valuation of an artist’s work. Users complained that Chastain was using privileged information to buy works that he knew were due to increase in value, and he subsequently resigned. Then in June 2022, Chastain was arrested by the FBI on insider trading charges. Now, a jury has found him guilty.

“Although this case involved trades in novel crypto assets, there was nothing particularly innovative about his conduct—it was fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “A jury has found that Chastain is guilty of using inside information for his own personal gain, and he now faces time in federal prison.”

Chastain’s lawyers used a variety of arguments to attempt to avoid the “insider trading” label, which carries with it serious jail time. One argument was that because NFTs are not yet considered securities, the particular crime of insider trading wasn’t applicable in this case. Yet a judge made it clear in an order that insider trading doesn’t, in fact, only relate to securities but rather any misconduct “in which someone with non-public information about an asset improperly uses that information to trade the asset or helps someone else trade it.”

The case has thus far hinged on whether the jury believed Chastain’s knowledge of upcoming featured artists amounted to confidential business information. This was initially unclear because the company was a young start-up dealing in novel assets. It took Chastain’s misconduct for OpenSea to implement clear policies prohibiting employees from trading in featured artists or from using confidential information in their trading, even outside the OpenSea marketplace.

Yet what constitutes confidential business information is not defined only by written policy but the way that employees treat certain information. In a letter to the jury, the judge outlined certain characteristics that define confidential business information beyond written policy, such as measures the employer has taken to guard the information’s secrecy, the extent to which the information is known outside the employer’s place of business, or whether the information had economic value to the employer.

Chastain’s use of anonymous wallets to cover his tracks was one piece of evidence that clarified that he was aware he was using confidential knowledge.

His sentencing for wire fraud and money laundering will be decided by August 22. OpenSea has not yet responded to a request for comment.

“The first phase of our launch has successfully proven that our traditional and digitally native collectors alike could coalesce around Sotheby’s to form a new community,” said Sebastian Fahey, an executive lead for Sotheby’s Metaverse, in a press release. “Now, we are continuing to advance and evolve our platform to offer new and more seamless ways for the community to discover and collect new forms of digital collectibles.”

The auction house is rejiggering Metaverse so that the platform operates entirely on-chain, allowing for peer-to-peer transactions on both Ethereum and Polygon. Yet it will operate quite differently from secondary NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, where any user can upload any NFTs they want.

In the initial phases of the new Metaverse, collectors will be able to list works from only 13 artists: Tyler Hobbs, Claire Silver, XCOPY, Diana Sinclair, IX Shells, Sarah Zucker, Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Sam Spratt, Pindar van Arman, Osinachi, Hackatao, and Sebastião Salgado. It’s a strategy that will allow Metaverse to skirt some of the issues that other secondary platforms faced.

OpenSea was constantly inundated with plagiarized, low-quality, or stolen NFT projects that left collectors feeling burned not just by scammers but by a marketplace that could offer little in the way of compensation for lost investments. By restricting the works that collectors can list, Metaverse will be better able to avoid dealing with bad actors while keeping the quality of works on offer high.

Metaverse has also made a commitment to enforcing artist royalties that used to be part and parcel of NFT sales but have become optional on all other major NFT marketplaces as the market took a downturn.

The auction house first launched Metaverse in the fall of 2021. The site hosted its first auction soon after with its second-ever “Natively Digital” sale (titled “Natively Digital 1.2”). Debuting in a still-hot market, the auction realized a smashing $18.6 million in sales with works by generative artists Dmitri Cherniak and IX Shells as well as profile-pic NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club.

But since that debut, Metaverse has only hosted the sale of individual NFT collections, like a series of NFTs of photographs by Sebastião Salgado that were sold for fundraising purposes or Erick Calderon’s Chromie Squiggles NFT project. Sotheby’s recurring “Natively Digital” sales, like the recent “Glitch: Beyond Binary,” were hosted on Sotheby’s main online bidding platform instead of Metaverse, as was expected when the marketplace launched. It’s unclear why.

“We will continue to host sales across Sothebys.com and Sotheby’s Metaverse, as utilizing both platforms allows us greater flexibility across primary and secondary market sales,” said Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby’s Head of Digital Art and NFTs, in a comment to ARTnews. “With both platforms we are better positioned to strategically bring sales to market and provide clients with a greater range of options.”

Update 5/4/23 5:48PM: This article was amended to include a comment from Sotheby’s.

Like the Academy Awards, the Met Gala is as famous for its star-studded red carpet, as for the event itself, a dinner held every year to raise funds for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Institute, in turn, offers a related exhibition.

At this year’s event, models, designers, actors, and entertainment moguls arrived swathed in Lagerfeld’s signature motifs from his more than six decades of work, from black-and-white color-ways and camellias to Chanel tweed and sumptuous satin bows.

As Vogue editor Anna Wintour told reality star Lala Anthony on the red carpet, Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, was “intrinsically the chicest designer.”

Jessica Chastain donned platinum locks and Wayfarers in honor of Lagerfeld’s almost comically consistent personal style. Meanwhile, Lil Nas X, Jared Leto, and Doja Cat took it furthest, wearing looks inspired by Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, who inherited a pretty penny from her late master.

Many of the stars at the event had close working relationships with the iconic designer, such as super-model Naomi Campbell, who started working with Lagerfeld when she was 16, and Nicole Kidman, who attended the Met Gala in a dress Lagerfeld designed for her 20 years ago for a Chanel No. 5 ad campaign.

The gala was cochaired by Penelope Cruz, who worked with Lagerfeld when he selected her as a house ambassador for Chanel, as well as actress Michaela Coel.

A central figure of haute couture, Lagerfeld built a complicated legacy between his prolific career and his controversial, nonstop commentary on “fat” models like Heidi Klum—whom he famously said was “simply too heavy,” along with any other model above a size zero.

Below, the best and worst looks at the Met Gala.

Commissioned by Warhol’s collector Richard Weisman, the portrait belonged to a series that depicted a growing class of athletes who were becoming more and more like the celebrities Warhol had always worshipped. At the time he made the portrait, Simpson was 30 years old and on the path to becoming one of the greatest running backs of all time. He played for the Buffalo Bills, but an injury in 1977, just a few weeks after his shoot with Warhol, cut his season short, and the next year he was traded to the San Francisco 49ers. That same year he met Nicole Brown. They were married from 1985 to 1992; two years following their divorce, Brown was murdered.

Simpson was acquitted of the murders of Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman, but was later held liable for both deaths by a California civil court jury.

Made nearly two decades before Simpson went on trial for the murders, Warhol’s portrait has become a more fitting tribute to the artist’s obsession with spectacle.

The silkscreen print features Simpson looking head-on at the viewer, and an extra flourish in acrylic shows Simpson holding a football. Warhol and Simpson both signed the back of the piece. The day Simpson showed up for the shoot in a motel room in Buffalo, he came without his jersey or a ball, and Warhol had to scramble to find them. Warhol took more than 45 Polaroids of the young football star before the pair parted ways.

The portrait was exhibited along with others from the series in the exhibition “Athletes by Andy Warhol” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond in 1978. Later, the portrait found its way into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. According to Bloomberg, a spokesperson claimed that the portrait was never put on view.

Last December, Finnish art workers and artists began protesting Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma for its ties to arms dealer heir Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, whose has long supported pro-Israel initiatives. The Finnish-British billionaire has long sat on the board of the institution’s support foundation and has lent many artworks to the museum over the years.

The strike came to an end yesterday when the Finnish National Gallery (of which Kiasma is a part) committed to new guidelines for ethical fundraising.

“The strike was begun out of solidarity with the Palestinians. It matters that our biggest art institution has taken human rights issues seriously,” said Finnish artist Terike Haapoja, who participated in a boycott of the Kiasma.

The boycott lasted five months and involved 220 art workers and four art organizations. Some 150 artists agreed to boycott Kiasma until ties to Zabludowicz were severed.

Newly adopted guidelines affirm that the Finnish National Gallery and the three museums it manages—the Ateneum, Kiasma, and Sinebrychoff Art Museum—will be much more selective about what organizations and individuals can donate to these institutions.

The museum will not accept donations from entities on the Finnish Government’s sanctions list or organizations with ties to oil and gas production, the tobacco industry, weapons manufacturing, or the production of environmentally hazardous chemicals. These guidelines also apply to “organizations or other bodies whose operations promote the oppression of minorities or human rights violations, authoritarian governance, gender inequality or criminal activities.”

A passage in the guidelines also refers indirectly to Zabludowicz, writing that if the museum has already received support from an individual whose “reputation or activities” have been called into question, the museum “must consider whether this will have a negative impact on the museum and its credibility” and determine if this support conflicts with these new ethical guidelines. If so, financial support may be returned to the donor or ties may be severed.

Accordingly, the Finnish National Gallery has severed ties with the Kiasma Support Foundation, which Zabludowicz founded, according to an Instagram post by the strikers. Kiasma’s director, Leevi Haapala, has also resigned from the board.

A representative for the Zabludowicz Collection, the London private art museum run by Poju and his wife Anita, shred the following comment from Zabludowicz,

“As a proud and founding member of the Kiasma Support Foundation, I believe in the importance of the museum as an independent and inclusive space. I am a proud Finnish citizen, a child of refugees from the holocaust who were given a home in a democratic Finland. I passionately support a Two-State Solution that guarantees the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live and work side by side in peace. I look forward to continuing my long-standing commitment to supporting contemporary art and culture in Finland and across the world, and I passionately believe in the power of culture and dialogue to build bridges between communities.”

Zabludowicz is the son of Shlomo Zabludowicz, who made his fortune by brokering arms deals between the Finnish weapons manufacturer Tampella and Israel. He then founded Soltam, an Israeli defense contractor which develops and manufactures artillery systems, mortars, ammunition, and more, and sells them to over 60 countries. Its main customers are the Israeli Defense Forces, the US army, and NATO countries.

Poju Zabludowicz is the director of Tamares, the family’s holding company, which makes investments in a variety of public and private sectors. He founded the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a pressure group, in 2001. BICOM once produced a report refuting Amnesty International’s findings that the oppression of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

Within the art world, Zabludowicz’s business dealings have repeatedly come under scrutiny. Artists have regularly protested his support for pro-Israel lobbying groups, although he did not publicly respond to the pushback until 2021, amid escalating violence between Israel and the militant group Hamas.

The couple reportedly own thousands of artworks. He and Anita appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2005 and 2019.

Update 5/1/2023 11:01 AM: This article has been amended to add a comment from Poju Zabludowicz.

Clearing’s move marks the end of an era, perhaps not just for the gallery but for the age of optimism that drove mustachioed hipsters and sound artists across the bridge throughout the 2010s, but ended in Whole Foods take-overs and rent price upticks. And, though Clearing has a space in Brussels and Los Angeles, this impressive global reach doesn’t quite align with their old locale.

For founder Olivier Babin, the move represent something simple: Clearing is molting into its next phase.

“Artists, collectors, audiences, expect us at some point to grow up,” Babin told ARTnews, standing on the sidewalk outside of the new gallery space, referencing the “glass ceiling of Bushwick” that could make stakeholders in the gallery restless. “Artists have two or three shows in Bushwick and are eager to get the next one in the city.”

Artists will no doubt be pleased by Clearing’s new exhibition space. Three floors of white walls encased in an impressive glass facade, the Hegel’s Tree of Clearing’s logo looms high over Bowery. On the third floor, a small room overlooks the street, providing a nighttime exhibition space currently displaying lamps designed by Koenraad Dedobbeleer, a fitting tribute to the lighting shops that attract drunken revelers to peer into the windows or take a moody photo. In total, Clearing’s new space spans a luxurious 6,600 square feet.

Currently on view at Clearing is an exhibition, titled “Maiden Voyage,” that includes at least one work of each of the artists on their roster, from Belgian-based Harold Ancart to LA-based Daisy Sheff.

The new space is undoubtedly a boon for LA-based Adam Alessi, who will have his first solo exhibition in New York at Clearing’s Bowery space.

“I’m grateful I’m gonna have a show in Manhattan,” said Alessi. “When I made trips to New York I’d make the time to get to Clearing because I loved their programming but Manhattan is really where I’d spend all my time. It’s going to be great to have all that foot traffic.”

Amid the controversy in March, artist Patrick Amadon quit the auction in solidarity with the female and trans artists who were left out of the original sale. However, Amadon was not invited to the new sale, and his work wasn’t among the lots available for sale. The reasons why aren’t clear.

Artist James Bloom, who was included in both sales, told ARTnews that Amadon was left out of the reorganized sale by “mutual agreement” between “the whole Sotheby’s team, all the male artists [except Amadon], and the female and nonbinary curators of the sale,” Dawnia Darkstone and Dina Chang.

Darkstone, who was a vocal critic of the original sale, disputed Bloom’s version of events. “I never agreed to or knew about that,” Darkstone told ARTnews in a Twitter direct message. “I figured it was some gripe between Sotheby’s and Patrick.”

Sotheby’s declined to respond to a list of queries sent by ARTnews but confirmed that Amadon’s withdrawal was decided by various stakeholders involved in the sale.

Bloom and another artist who asked to remain anonymous told ARTnews that the male artists included in the original auction were blindsided when Amadon suddenly pulled out of the auction without informing the others. Bloom said it put the artists in an awkward position, as they had been collectively considering options for how to ameliorate the situation. In a message to the male artists’ group chat, Amadon apologized to the other artists and said he had the “utmost respect” for all of them, regardless of how they decided to move forward.

Amadon told ARTnews he was not informed that he would not be invited to the new Sotheby’s sale until April 12th, the day the sale relaunched with newly announced exhibitions and panel discussions. (Bidding for works ran through yesterday.) He said Sotheby’s sent back his piece on April 14; an Ethereum transaction confirms as much. He recalled that he had heard that this might be the case beforehand, but that it was still a surprise, since the Sotheby’s team had called him in late March asking him to rejoin the sale.

In communications to Amadon after the reorganized sale began, Michael Bouhanna, head of digital art and NFTs at Sotheby’s, chalked up Amadon’s absence to a miscommunication, not a deliberate decision.

Amadon said he was aware that some of the male artists were unhappy with him.

“One artist actually told me they couldn’t drop out also because I’d already done it,” Amadon said in a direct message on Twitter. “I just did what I felt was the right thing to do. I don’t get a few artists’ obsession [that] I should have told them first. We’re supposed to be all about individual choice. They were free to make their own choices.”

Female and nonbinary artists included in the show said they hoped not to get in the middle of a feud between male artists. They had been insulted by their exclusion from the show to begin with, especially considering how pivotal female and trans artists have been to the development of Glitch art. At this point, some said, they wanted to focus on making sure that the newly involved artists found success in the sale.

“I’ve had to put in a lot of work to make sure my collectors were onboarded so they could bid, and I know I’m not the only one who has had to put in a lot of footwork to get collectors for the show,” Empress Trash, one of the artists in the sale, told ARTnews. Overall, though, she said she is appreciative that Sotheby’s made the changes that they made but “gives the flowers” to the female and trans artists who organized to make it happen, like Rosa Menkman and OONA.

As far as Amadon’s situation, Empress Trash said that there was a lack of transparency about why his work didn’t make the final cut.

“It wasn’t a publicity stunt—he really did want the show to be inclusive,” said Empress Trash. Referring to his choice not to be vocal about his exclusion from sale, she added, “It’s a testament to him that he’s been mindful to step aside from the narrative.”

She remained optimistic about the sale overall, saying, “There is no better way for us to get into an auction house than disrupting an auction, and that’s what glitch art is, disruption. I view everything that happened with this as art in itself.”