The painting, titled fuck abstraction !, appears in a Cahn show set to finish its controversial run on May 14. Cahn and the museum had made clear that the work was a response to human rights abuses in Ukraine, but conservative politicians and children’s rights groups had claimed it promoted pedophilia.

In the work, Cahn represents a smaller figure whose hands are bound performing a sex act on a taller one. She said she had painted it after seeing reports of mass graves in Bucha and rapes by Russian soldiers in 2022. Certain politicians and organizations attempted to sue for its removal, though the French Council of State found that the painting could be exhibited on the basis that it did not represent pedophilia and that it qualified as freedom of expression.

According to the Agence France-Presse, on Sunday afternoon, a visitor that the Palais de Tokyo described as an “elderly person” sprayed purple paint on fuck abstraction ! The man was “unhappy with the sexual staging of a child and an adult represented, according to him,” the museum told AFP.

Following the vandalism, two rooms of the exhibition were closed off to the public.

Rima Abdul Malak, France’s culture minister, told Franceinfo, “It’s a direct attack on freedom of expression, which is quite serious.”

Franceinfo, which first reported the news, published a picture of what appeared to be fuck abstraction ! in its vandalized state. The painting seems to have been splashed with purple that now runs down portions of it. According to the publication, the man who vandalized the work had hidden the paint in a medicine bottle.

Guillaume Désanges, president of the Palais de Tokyo, told AFP that fuck abstraction ! would remain on view through the end of the show’s run in agreement with the artist. So far, 80,000 people have seen the exhibition.

On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron even weighed in on the situation, tweeting, “To attack a work is to attack our values. In France, art is always free and respect for cultural creation is guaranteed.”

Update, 5/8/23, 9:45 a.m.: A statement from Emmanuel Macron has been added to this article.

It was previously known that there was a male figure in the painting; who he was and what he was doing in the scene has largely remained a mystery, however, and now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York institution that owns the work, has conducted further research on it.

The Art Newspaper first reported word of these new studies this week during a symposium held in tandem with Vermeer’s current retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Martin Bailey, author of the Art Newspaper report, stated the man in A Maid Asleep “probably represents a self-portrait of Vermeer,” referring to a painting by Nicolas Maes, a contemporary of Vermeer, as possible proof.

Queried about this, a Met spokesperson confirmed that a team of collaborators including conservator Dorothy Mahon and research scientist Silvia Centeno had been scanning A Maid Asleep, which is not included in the Rijksmuseum show. Their full findings were not available, however, and the Met is planning to release them at a later date.

“We are pleased that our ongoing investigation has revealed more information about the man painted out in the background of A Maid Asleep,” Mahon and Centeno said in a statement to ARTnews. “XRF mapping and technical imaging have proven a step forward in the study of works of art with the aim of bringing more understanding to the artist’s intentions and the meaning of the paintings. We look forward to continuing our study of this and the other paintings by Vermeer in The Met’s collection.”

A Maid Asleep is one of Vermeer’s acclaimed domestic tableaux featuring a lone woman, although it once featured more elements—a dog is also believed to have originally been painted into the background alongside the man. Because there was a man in this painting initially, some believe it might have been a seduction scene, a recurrent subject in Vermeer’s oeuvre.

As it stands now, A Maid Asleep is ambiguous, a composition that feels intentionally unresolved owing to the significant negative space around the subject. It came in at #11 on an ARTnews ranking of Vermeer’s paintings.

News of Mahon’s studies on the painting coincides with a wealth of research now being conducted on well-known Vermeer paintings. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds a painting that was long thought to be a copy and is now being revisited as a bona-fide Vermeer; the National Gallery of Art owns another that recently had its attribution downgraded.

The work, titled Secondary, is set to be unveiled to the public at his studio in Long Island City on May 12. The show is likely to be Barney’s biggest in New York in years, and the work itself is his first moving-image piece since Redoubt, which played theatrically and in galleries starting in 2019.

Redoubt was minor-key Barney—it was quiet, somber, and slow, although his fascination with Americana and the carnage intertwined with the histories related to it remained. Secondary, however, sounds like a return to some of the material mined in his most famous work, The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), an epic, five-part group of films that explored sexual development and featured prosthetics, fantastical beings, the artist Richard Serra, the writer Norman Mailer, and much more.

Per a description on its website, Secondary knits together two elements. One “describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture,” paying homage to Barney’s own experience as an athlete and to a 1978 incident that left Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots, paralyzed. The other is “a material-based choreography” in which Barney’s cast members were made to mold the materials he commonly uses to make his sculptures.

This plot seems to align the film with past works by Barney, who was even recruited by Yale University to play football when he was an undergraduate. His early sculptures even incorporated uniforms and other objects related to the sport; often, they were intended as critiques of machismo and masculinity inherent in American culture.

Barney himself appears in Secondary, and as usual for his films, the composer Jonathan Bepler has provided the score.

Perhaps the most intriguing element, however, is what is described as a trench that has been set in the floor of Barney’s studio. “As the tide rises, the trench floods with river water, keeping time for the narrative; the evolution of the characters becomes tethered to the slow exposition of this broken structure,” the synopsis reads. Well, then!

Secondary’s premiere is one of the top art events taking place in New York this May, a particularly busy time when fairs like Frieze, Independent, and NADA take place alongside marquee sales held by the top auction houses.

The report, which was based on thousands of emails and documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, said that Epstein had scheduled visits with artist Jeff Koons and the auction house Sotheby’s, as well as meetings with mega-collector Leon Black, a financier whose ties to Epstein were already known.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein had been particularly close with Woody Allen, the acclaimed filmmaker who has been accused of sexually abusing his daughter. Allen and Epstein had planned to visit Koons’s studio in 2013, the documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal reveal.

Those documents also show that Epstein and Allen had planned a visit to Sotheby’s in 2017.

It’s not the first time that Epstein and Sotheby’s have been reported to have had a relationship. In 2020, prosecutors in the US Virgin Islands ordered Christie’s and Sotheby’s to turn over any documents related to their alleged dealings with Epstein.

Black, a former chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and a recurring figure on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, has been widely accused of ties to Epstein. In 2021, Black resigned from the firm Apollo Global Management Inc. amid investigations into his donations to Epstein’s charity. He was subpoenaed as part of the investigation in the US Virgin Islands, and his art-collecting company is believed to have also paid millions of dollars to Epstein.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Epstein had planned more than 100 meetings with Black between 2013 and 2017, when he was still with Apollo.

Representatives for Koons’s studio and Sotheby’s did not respond to requests for comment. An Apollo spokesperson forwarded ARTnews to a representative for Black, who has not responded to a request for comment.

Spoiler alert: the source of all this noise is nothing quite so dramatic. Rather than an explosive weapon or an apocalyptic countdown, the ticking comes from a set of jerry-rigged devices that have been cut in two, then reassembled, courtesy of Josh Kline, who is currently the subject of his first US museum survey at the Whitney.

One of these works, titled Alternative Facts (2017), features a Samsung flip phone and an iPhone attached to each other by red duct tape. Primly shown on a chintzy display, the piece evokes gadgetry repurposed for warfare. The sculpture’s title implies that the conflict in question has been necessitated, and possibly even exacerbated, by the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.

There’s a tendency in mainstream media to catastrophize recent events, like that election or the current pandemic, and claim that they signal a grand finale to life as we know it. But the world already ended a long time ago for the many who face climate change, racism, and economic freefall daily. Kline seems to agree with that line of thinking. For him, the apocalypse is now.

His Whitney survey, “Project for a New American Century,” attests to his foreboding vision, filled as it is with dismembered limbs and late-capitalist junk. It’s dark stuff—you don’t exactly leave a Kline exhibition feeling good about the state of things. But oh, how intoxicating it all is. This terrific show is further proof that Kline is one of our great living artists, a true master at spinning nightmarish visions of worlds to come.

Ugly as it may be from a conceptual standpoint, Kline’s art is quite beautiful to look at, which is no small part due to the way he installs it. Kline treats art spaces the way film directors approach sets, stylizing every imaginable element so that his fictions feel real and lived-in. Accordingly, there are no white cubes in this exhibition, which is arranged non-chronologically and into environments related to an ongoing saga about where we’re headed.

In this exhibition, in lieu of the Whitney’s smooth floorboards, there are now flattened Amazon boxes and raw balsa wood. One gallery is lit gleaming white like an Apple Store, while most others are cast in varying degrees of darkness. It’s all immersive, creepy, and totally unlike the traditional mid-career survey.

The most notable intervention in the Whitney’s architecture is The look, the feel, of Patagonia Nano Puff® (2012/23), which covers a pristine wall facing the Hudson River. It’s a long stretch of black polyester fabric and insulation that was originally produced by Kline in collaboration with the titular outerwear company. With its rows of black rectangles and its recurring Patagonia logos, the piece offers a curious breed of Minimalism and luxury fetishism.

Familiar logos proliferate in Kline’s art. Walking through the show, I amassed a long list of the products invoked: Lays, Jarritos, FedEx, Eastsport, Barbour, Lysol, Walmart, Purina, Levi’s, Gold Medal, Rubbermaid, Advil, Amazon Prime, and many more. There’s a seductive comfort in discovering each label—and an ambient fear in knowing that the act of brand recognition is now a condition of life as we know it.

The earliest pieces in the show, from the late 2000s and early 2010s, attest to this. A looped animation from 2013, titled Forever 21, features digital pills raining down on text spelling out the retail chain’s name. The capsules are red, white, and blue: the colors of the American flag. It is presented alongside refrigerated coolers containing pouches of blood doped with drugs like Wellbutrin and IV bags filled with cocktails of Vitamin C, Red Bull, Ritalin, and more—creepy reminders of how we pump ourselves with trademarked substances in order to work harder, better, faster, stronger.

Nearby, there are two videos whose titles, Forever 27 and Forever 48 (both 2013), imply a bond with that animation. They depict actors playing the musicians Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston, respectively, as though they had never died young. These stars’ faces are crudely superimposed via open-source AI technology, and periodically, their eyes, mouths, and noses stutter, offering glimpses at the real people beneath the computer-generated masks. Underneath, there are living, breathing beings who are getting squeezed out under the weight of a celebrity’s identity—a brand of a different sort.

When humans do show up in Kline’s sculptures, they are made to seem like refuse. Six brutally effective sculptures from 2016 feature people in business casual garb. These office workers look oddly organic as they lie in a permanent slumber, but their 3D-printed plaster forms, with their waxy, pallid coating, betray any signs of life. Curled up in the fetal position, they have been spat out by the capitalistic companies that once employed them and returned to their embryonic state. Now, their amniotic sacs have been replaced with knotted plastic bags, causing them to appear like yesterday’s trash.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say like last week’s recycling, since Kline’s sculpted bodies are often exhibited in parts intended for reuse. Some assembly may be required.

Severed heads, arms, and hands can be found in the janitor’s cart enlisted for Cost of Living (Aleyda), 2014. They’ve been 3D-printed based on the likeness of a real housekeeper who worked at a Manhattan hotel; she allowed herself to be scanned by Kline’s team. After Aleyda was turned into a data file, she became an object whose pieces now lie alongside plaster renditions of her toilet brushes and spray bottles. She has been literally objectified—she is turned into the tools of her labor, perhaps to represent the perspective of her employer—but Kline does not entirely deprive her of personhood. Nearby, the real-life housekeeper can be seen in a confessional-style video in which she discusses her ambitions and the conditions of her work.

Kline’s freakish surrealism is unsubtle in a way that can be jarring. It is unsparing; it cuts through the politesse that typically abounds in conceptual art. It seems directed less at the art-world elite, who may regard its lack of subtlety with a circumspect eye, than it does at the general public, which will find much to gawk at in this show.

Its curator, Christopher Y. Lew, has created an experience that likewise feels accessible. He isn’t keen to position Kline with respect to recent art-historical developments, skirting entirely the issue of post-internet art, a movement of the 2010s whose purveyors glibly ported the look of Web 2.0 into galleries, as Kline did in early works that assume the guise of stock photography. And, unless you read the catalogue, you wouldn’t know that works like Cost of Living (Aleyda) are intentionally paying homage to the tapes of video art collectives like TVTV and Videofreex. Instead, Lew mainly connects Kline’s art not to his peers but to ChatGPT, DALL-E, and deepfakes, which he claims Kline foresaw.

These are sloppy comparisons—Kline’s art doesn’t really have much in common with any of them. It is true, though, that Kline has pointed the way forward for many who came up after him. A case in point: a recent sculpture by Andrew Roberts from 2022’s Whitney Biennial that featured a lopped-off silicone arm with the Amazon logo on it. This isn’t all that dissimilar to Kline’s 15% Service (Applebee’s Waitress’s Head), 2018, in which a server’s 3D-printed neck contains, on its hollow inside, the eatery chain’s apple icon.

If Kline’s art has proven predictive, we probably ought to expect a lot of tech-minded artists to go analog soon. The most recent works in the show, a new group of installations from the series “Personal Responsibility,” list 3D-printed elements among their materials, though I must admit I had trouble spotting them. They mainly consist of freestanding cloistered spaces—a vehicle redolent of the #vanlife trend, a bunker-like cell—that each contain a screen. These screens play videos of fictional characters offering testimonials about leaving society and starting anew; they’re interspersed with hypnotic shorts showing reversed footage of denim, sugar, and more going up in flames.

The “Personal Responsibility” pieces, which lure in issues related to land rights and systemic racism, are unusually knotty for Kline—perhaps too much so for an artist who is best when diagnosing one symptom of societal collapse at a time. But there is something compelling about how stridently un-digital they are, at least compared to the early works on view not far away.

I much preferred the three-channel video installation Another America Is Possible (2017), which envisions a July 4 celebration held in 2043, the year that the US is slated to become a minority-majority country. Across the three screens, Black men and women are shown ceremonially burning a Confederate flag as children run freely. Shot on 16mm film, it reclaims the aesthetic of Levi’s commercials, peddling leftist politics instead of straight-cut jeans.

Kline’s sour worldview and any notion of optimism seem opposed, but this work suggests that the two can be squared. So too does Adaptation (2019–22), in which a group of climate-change seafarers navigate waterlogged Manhattan by boat. The Doomsday clock has already struck midnight; disaster arrived a while ago. But the tone is not all so dour. As the actors in it look out at the deluged landscape they traverse, their gazes seem to express something unexpected: hope.

William Leung, a dealer who cofounded New York’s ATM Gallery with Brady in 2020, confirmed Brady’s passing.

“Sudden passing is never easy. He was a very good friend and an amazing human being, he had a long career of championing young emerging artists, which I intend to keep going,” Leung said in an email to ARTnews. “He taught me a lot and was one of the first dealers I met in the art world. I was scared to open a gallery, but he really let me run it with my own touch and supported me fully on everything I decided.

Leung continued, “Since we opened the space, I have been pushing forward to make it the space everyone can be proud to show at and collectors come to buy from. He was a big statue of a person, both physically and spiritually. His presence will be dearly missed by those that knew him and have met him.” 

When he and Leung launched their gallery three years ago, it was actually the second space under that name that Brady had run. Back in 2001, Brady had opened ATM Gallery in the East Village, on Avenue B. Its name was borrowed from the operational ATM that Brady had installed before the gallery in an attempt to help defray rent costs.

ATM Gallery built up a cult reputation among artists and other members of the New York scene. Tomoo Gokita, a Japanese painter who’s now well-known for his black-and-white images of people with blurred faces, had his first New York solo shows with ATM. Huma Bhabha had her first US solo show at ATM in 2004; she went on to do the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop commission in 2018 and to have a mid-career survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston the following year.

Brady made himself known for nurturing artists who had not yet staked a claim for themselves in New York. Christine Sun Kim once recalled, “One day, I went to ATM Gallery in the East Village and chatted with Bill Brady, the owner. He eventually helped me get into the School of Visual Arts by writing a letter of recommendation for me.”

Prior to launching ATM, Brady, who was born in Kansas City, attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where he focused on painting and printmaking. He then went to the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and in 1993, he came to New York, studying at the School of Visual Arts, where he received a master’s degree. He would go on to manage the JPMorgan Chase Manhattan Art Collection before becoming a dealer.

“Bill Brady was a gallerist for over 25 years, and during that time, he made a profound impact on the art world with his ability to bring new artists to the forefront of the art scene,” Bill Brady Gallery said in a statement. “He believed in young talent and devoted much of his career to identifying and nurturing that talent. Whether he was working with emerging artists or established masters, Bill had a knack for identifying work that was fresh, exciting, and thought-provoking. His support and guidance helped many of them to achieve great success.”

ATM later moved to Chelsea, where, for a period, it shared a space with Freight + Volume gallery.

In 2012, Brady opened an eponymous gallery in Kansas City; that enterprise currently operates locations in Miami and Los Angeles. Of the decision to open in Florida, he once told Cultured, “Miami is somewhere between New York and Kansas City. It’s very international, has people coming and going, but you can sit in your backyard and do a whole lotta’ nothin’.”

Korakrit Arunanondchai, John Houck, Lucien Smith, and Wendy Park had some of their first solo shows through Bill Brady Gallery. Bhabha, Gokita, Eddie Martinez, Javier Calleja, and Dan McCarthy also showed there.

“The art world can be a special place and community and Bill was an important part of creating that,” Michael Kagan, an artist who showed at Bill Brady Gallery, wrote on Instagram. “He loved art, artists, and learning their process . His energy was contagious. His eye for talent and his reputation for discovering young painters and helping them launch their careers is legendary.”

Update, May 1, 2023: This article was updated after publication to include a statement from Bill Brady Gallery.

Comedian (2019) had been on view at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, which is currently having a show devoted to Cattelan, who’s widely known for his jokey sculptures. Four years ago, when it first debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach, the sculpture drew a good deal of controversy, and it seems that it continues to do so.

The Korea Herald reports that, on Sunday, an art major at Seoul National University had visited the museum, eaten the banana, and taped the peel back to the wall. The student, who was not named in the article but was later identified as Noh Huyn-soo by the Guardian, claimed to have skipped breakfast. He was hungry, he said.

But the eating of the banana, in Noh’s view, also constituted something of a performance unto itself. The “damaging a work of modern art could also be (interpreted as a kind of) artwork,” he told the Korea Herald.

Noh’s action closely recalls one done by the artist David Datuna, who visited Perrotin’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth, where Comedian premiered in 2019, and ingested the banana as a performance. Shortly afterward, Comedian was removed from the booth amid safety concerns.

When that work appeared at Art Basel, the general public puzzled over how such an object could be considered art, in no small part due to its hefty price tag of $120,000. Still, the piece found some defenders. Andrew Russeth wrote in ARTnews, “The wise and sane thing to do would probably be to ignore this, but I will admit it: I love the banana, even as it fills me with dread.”

In the years since, the piece has continued to face scrutiny for entirely different reasons. In 2022, the artist Joe Morford sued Cattelan, claiming that Comedian had plagiarized a piece Morford had made 13 years earlier.

Regarding the Noh incident, a Leeum Museum spokesperson told CNN that no measures have been taken against Noh.

“It happened suddenly, so no special action was taken,” the representative said. “The artist (Cattelan) was informed of the incident but he didn’t have any reaction to it.”

Hindsbo succeeds Frances Morris, who became the first woman to lead Tate Modern in 2016. Morris’s term at Tate Modern ends this month.

Under Hindsbo, the National Museum launched an epic project to bring together several disparate institutions run by the Norwegian state under its aegis. Along with that came an effort to significantly expand the museum, making it the largest art institution in the Nordic region.

Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate museum network, said in a statement, “The success of the new National Museum in Oslo—delivered in the midst of a global pandemic—is a testament to her skill as a leader. Her nuanced and diverse approach to expressing national and transnational artistic ecologies chimes with Tate Modern’s ethos brilliantly.”

That new building, which opened last June, added more than 580,000 square feet and cost more than $700 million. Upon its opening, the building was well-received in the international press, but the run-up to its inauguration was contentious in Norway, where issues with contractors working on the expansion were widely reported in the press.

Even before that, Hindsbo had faced scrutiny in some corners after the critic Lars Elton, writing in the publication Dagsavisen, claimed she had gotten her job through her husband, a politician who was formerly active with the country’s Conservative Party. He also criticized her management style. Hindsbo would later describe Elton’s criticisms as misognyistic.

Although the National Museum does not only show modern and contemporary art, Hindsbo did have experience in that area before coming there in 2017. She had led several museums in Denmark previously, including the Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, the Kunsthal Aarhus, the Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, and Kode in Bergen. She had also been the editor of the Danish journal Øjeblikket.

Hindsbo, who will join Tate Modern in September, said in a statement, “I am beyond excited to join the skilled staff and to be a part of the whole Tate organisation. Tate Modern has always been a special place for me and I have had some of my greatest experiences encountering art there. I am eager to continue the magnificent work being done, creating a unique and inspiring museum for a wide and diverse audience.”

The AAM, as the industry group is abbreviated, is one of the top organizations of its kind for museums in the US. It offers recommendations, standards, ethical considerations, and more to thousands of museum leaders in the country.

Lott first joined the AAM in 2010 as COO and CFO. When she took on her current titles in 2015, she became the first woman to lead the organization. Prior to the AAM, she had been chief operating officer for National Geographic Society’s JASON Project.

Lott’s new role is one of the top ones at the NGA, and will involve her leading around 50 percent of the museum’s staff, according to a spokesperson. She will also manage a $100 million budget for renovations and operational costs.

“This opportunity to continue serving the museum field—and to serve our nation—is an incredible honor,” Lott said in a statement. “My career so far has fueled my passion for lifelong learning, inspirational spaces and experiences, taking care of our planet, and the power of museums. I am inspired by the National Gallery’s mission and values, and I look forward to working with the talented team at the National Gallery to welcome all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.”

Kaywin Feldman, director of the NGA, said in a statement, “While leading the American Alliance of Museums, she has demonstrated her commitment to excellence in museums, championing diversity and inclusion, and advancing initiatives in environmental sustainability. Laura is an authentic leader, and I am confident that National Gallery staff will appreciate her warmth, energy, and good humor.”

Darling makes sculptures that consider the fragility of the human body, often with a focus on issues related to gender and disability. He was nominated for recent solo shows at the Camden Art Centre and Modern Art Oxford.

Leung’s art is often highly conceptual and frequently deals with the notion of labor. A recent solo exhibition at New York’s Essex Street gallery focused on what she called a “resistive choice as a mother and artist,” with the sculptures formed from child safety gates, baby monitors, and more that were only viewable to the public during hours when she was in her studio. She was nominated for an exhibition at Simian in Copenhagen.

While best known for his paintings, Pilgrim was nominated for RAFTS, a performance, sound, and film work that was commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and Barking Hall, both in London. The piece was a meditation on togetherness and mental health during the time of Covid. He is set to have a solo exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery later this year.

Walker is currently showing her work at the Sharjah Biennial, which earned her this nomination. There, she is exhibiting oversized portraits of members of the UK’s Windrush generation. Many of her works are likewise grand images of Black British people.

The Turner Prize is Britain’s top art award—and one of its most controversial. Because it tended to recognize conceptual art early on, it built up a reputation for polarizing the general public.

Past winners have included Wolfgang Tillmans, Chris Ofili, Anish Kapoor, Mark Leckey, Lubaina Himid, and Veronica Ryan.

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the prize’s jury, said in a statement, “The Turner Prize always offers the public a snapshot of British artistic talent today. These artists each explore the contrasts and contradictions of life, combining conceptual and political concerns with warmth, playfulness, sincerity and tenderness, and often celebrating individual identity and community strength.”

A winner of this year’s edition will be announced on December 5.