On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

“But we don’t want this to just become about the fence and who owns it. This conversation is about who owns the air, who has permission or the right to [impact it],” LP told ARTnews. “Though we’ll definitely push the property aspect of this when it comes down to it, they massively overreached.”

Fencelines was designed to call attention to the environmental and health impact that the refinery has on the Richmond community, where asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at University of California, San Francisco. Slats painted with wishes for clean air and water from the community were attached to the fence and topped with ribbons that were activated by the wind, showing that the residents of Richmond live perpetually downwind from the refinery. The piece was installed April 22, on Earth Day.

As of publication, the company has not confirmed whether the piece has been destroyed or is in storage somewhere. Up until Wednesday evening, the artists and organizers associated with Fencelines thought the piece had been stolen as Chevron never reached out to them following the deinstallation or warned them of their impending action. But there were suspicions.

“As soon as it happened I was like, ‘That was Chevron, they’re trying to erase us,'” Katt Ramos, the managing director of Richmond Our Power Coalition, told ARTnews. The coalition brings together local organizations fighting for housing and a just transition away from the oil based industries that surround the area.

“[I thought] that was Chevron because we were three or four days away from Anti-Chevron Day and four or five days away from their stakeholder meeting, they don’t want any bad press.”

The Coalition and Anti-Chevron Day began as a response to the 2012 Chevron Richmond Refinery Fire, the resulting chemical release incident, and the general health issues that residents of Richmond tie to their proximity to the refinery, which has been operating in the city for 120 years. Ramos pointed out that earlier this year unionized steelworkers at the Chevron refinery struck for safer working conditions, which led, the union alleged, to at least five workers being let go.

“But there’s some signs on the fence and now they’re worried about safety?” said Ramos.

Robinson, LP, and Khandagle partnered with numerous organizations and with the Richmond Arts Center to make the installation as well as an accompanying exhibition at RAC that was made possible with a grant from the California Arts Council.

“We invited people to come and make some of these wooden slats, to paint messages of hope, messages of vision for a future where we have clean air, a healthy environment,” Roberto Martinez, a curator at RAC, told ARTnews. “We wanted to bring in people for dialogue about the lived experience of of the Richmond community, which has a very rich and complex history with environmental justice.”

Though there were a few references to Chevron in the signs, for the most part Martinez recalled that messages were generally calls for clean air and water, for love, and for resilience, and that the project was not particularly confrontational. Over 200 wooden slats were painted for the project, which was slated to be de-installed on June 3.

Princess Robinson, who works with Urban Tilth, never saw the project as antagonistic. “I’m a cooperative education and facilitator, I really believe in the cooperative model, to work amongst each other and for everyone to be at the table,” Robinson told ARTnews. Since finding out Chevron took down the piece, Robinson has been trying to see the positive side to this unfortunate situation, but it hasn’t been easy.

“Being a human, at first I was mad, I felt discouraged. I felt disrespected. I felt like well, dang, I don’t matter, all that work that I did doesn’t matter, bringing my community out doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “But my intentions are now a reality, right, I wanted to have a conversation.”

Now Chevron is reaching out to the organizers as they try to backtrack from what has become a much larger story than could have been anticipated. The next steps are to find out if the work was destroyed and how to respond to the events with another art piece.

Luckily, for Chevron, Robinson is magnanimous.

“Me personally, there’s no bad blood,” said Robinson. “I want Chevron to know, let’s cooperate together and be more compassionate, more respectful, because there’s a better way that we could have done this.”

Earlier this week, Brookfield, by most measures the largest real estate company in the world, unveiled its latest project, Manhattan West, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony that lacked ribbon. What it did have were two major works of public art, a sculpture by Charles Ray and a mosaic piece by Christopher Wool. After all, it’s easier to clap for art than property.

No one is much in the mood to celebrate office buildings these days, in the midst of a seemingly never-ending housing crisis and return-to-office mandates, the continued resistance to which has been rough for commercial real estate, Brookfield being no exception.

In April, the company defaulted on mortgage payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars on their office buildings around the metro areas of Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, approximately 0.07 percent of its real estate holdings, according to the company. A study from security company Kastle estimated last September that, since the start of the pandemic, office occupancy has tanked from 95 percent to 48 percent (though notably, Brookfield’s properties were not included in that measure). And then, in December, some economists suggested as much as $453 billion in real estate value could be lost if there isn’t a bounce-back.

In New York, at least, Brookfield appears to have been more fortunate. In December, the New York Post reported that the One and Two Manhattan West buildings were nearly 100 and 76 percent occupied, respectively. And, on Tuesday, the company announced that it was raising $15 billion for a new real estate fund. But the company is betting that it can entice workers back to the office, not just with amenities like a landscaped terrace and a wellness center, but also with art. 

Sabrina Kanner, the company’s executive vice president of development, design and construction, told ARTnews that putting aside space and resources for art was a key part of the Manhattan West plan, especially in the context of return-to-office.

“Art is an important component to the public space, which is an important component to the recipe of getting employees to come back to work,” Kanner said. “Pulling people into public space is an important ingredient because the more people you have there, the more successful it is, the better it feels to be there.”

Art, Kanner said, belongs in a category of attractions that real estate companies predict will persuade people to visit commercial areas, along with sustainable design and amenities. When Kanner first began working on the project in the 1980s—when the land on which it and the neighboring Hudson Yards now stand was just a sprawling network of train tracks—she was in her twenties. At the time, she wondered, “Who’s going to want to come here?” But now, even with the train tracks utterly transformed, office towers can feel just as inhospitable.

Fortunately for Brookfield Properties, the head of Brookfield Asset Management, its parent company, is Bruce Flatt, the husband of ARTnews Top 200 collector Lonti Ebers. It was Ebers who suggested that art adviser Jacob King come in to select the artists from whom to commission public art pieces for the Manhattan West project. King’s first choices were Charles Ray and Christopher Wool, neither of whom have any public works on display in New York City and who both accepted the offer.

“At the time, we thought it was a real long shot that either of them would be interested in making work for commercial real estate development,” King said during the unveiling. To his surprise, neither artist expressed any hesitancy. “It was an opportunity to give them a platform and to give something to the city of New York.”

At the unveiling, Ray discussed his sculpture Adam and Eve (2023), a stainless steel work depicting an older couple, a man in suspenders and Toms shoes, and a woman sitting on a log, wearing a pantsuit that signals she is “three or four social hierarchies above” her husband, according to Ray, who said he dislikes Hudson Yards. “So freaking corporate,” he said, “but I do like this, though it wasn’t built then.”

Manhattan West sits just across from the Moynihan Train Hall and, for that reason, the area seems to hold on to some of the aura and gravitas associated with 1950s modes of commuting and essential infrastructure, as opposed to the pure tourist honeypot of malls and Instagrammable architecture that defines major new projects in New York like the Oculus, the Highline, and, of course, Hudson Yards. Beautiful, classic, and unexpected works by artists like Ray and Wool further this sense of dignity and vitality that is missing in those other projects.

But if the commercial real estate crash doesn’t reverse, well, we know a good bit of public art isn’t going to halt market forces in their tracks.

Update, 6/7/2023, 4:40 p.m.: This piece was updated to include additional context around Brookfield’s default, as well RTO figures.

Protesters with groups like Climate Organizing Hub, New York Communities for Change, and Reclaim Our Tomorrow came to call on MoMA to drop its board chair, Marie-Josée Kravis.

Kravis is married to Henry Kravis, cofounder and co-executive chairman of KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, and a major stakeholder in the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis are major MoMA donors whose names appear on the walls of the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, where performance- and time-based art is shown.

The protesters handed out fliers with a QR code leading to an open letter that demands that the museum sever all ties with the Kravises. MoMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“MoMA can’t claim to be a sustainable organization that wants to fight climate change but at the same time have a fossil fuel investor as the chair of the board, with their names on the walls,” said Jonathan Westin, an activist with the Climate Organizing Hub, as nervous looking partygoers passed by the small crowd of protesters stationed outside the MoMA entrance. “This is directly inspired by what Nan Goldin and other activists did to get to get rid of the Sackler name at the Met.”

Activist Roni Zahavi-Brunner explained that unlike publicly traded investment groups such as BlackRock, KKR is a private equity group, meaning it is not always beholden to public pressure or regulations. “There’s no one to keep them accountable,” Zahavi-Brunner said.

KKR’s involvement in the controversial Coastal GasLink Pipeline is another reason. Amnesty International reported that the Coastal GasLink Pipeline is in danger of violating human rights laws as they intimidate and harass peaceful protesters on and near the construction site of the pipeline, which has not yet been completed. Indigenous land defenders with the Wet’suwet’en tribe have attempted to block construction of the pipeline for years, claiming that the project violates their sovereign rights and threatens to pollute the land they live on.

One of the protesters rallied his fellow activists, making a connection between the state of the sky and the cause of their protest, saying, “we literally can’t breathe our air because people like Kravis are keeping the fossil fuel industry alive.”

Little more than a dozen protesters eventually marched around the block, where they set up outside the MoMA garden’s gate. MoMA security and police followed them, and by the end of the protest, nearly outnumbered them.

Once the protesters reached the garden gate, through which they could see the partygoers and hear the music, they began their chants again, shouting, “KKR, we see you, we deserve a future too,” “We need clean air, not another billionaire,” and “Henry Kravis you can’t hide, we charge you with ecocide.” Guests milled around, ignoring the protesters until MoMA staffers set up a screen on the other side of the gate.

Police asked protesters to stop using microphones and told them to move their DIY oil rig. They advised that “if you flip that over the gate, that’s attempted murder.” Westin responded, “We weren’t planning on doing that,” before shifting the rig over a few feet. Eventually, police told protesters they had one more warning before arrests would begin, which prompted them to quiet down and begin dispersing.

Activist Alice Hu noted that while police have been more aggressive in attempting to curb protests in the past few weeks, protesting at the museum felt safer than doing so in the lobby of KKR, where activists were quickly arrested.

According to the activists, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis were at the party, which this year honored artists Barbara Chase-Riboud, Marlene Hess, Ed Ruscha, and Darren Walker, and featured a performance by the band MUNA.

“Look, I personally love the MoMA, but with the climate crisis threatening the future of our planet, this important institution shouldn’t be giving them the license to operate socially,” said Hu. “If I was at a party with friends and a bunch of people I was trying to impress, and people outside started heckling me, I’d leave!”

FTX has been making efforts to recover as much money as possible under its new CEO John Ray III in order to get creditors at least some portion of their money back. Ray III is an expert in asset recovery from failed corporations; he handled Enron in its final moments. This has meant hunting down the many donations FTX’s former CEO and founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, made while he was at the helm.

“The Met wishes to return the Donations to the FTX Debtors, and the FTX Debtors and the Met have engaged in good faith, arm’s length negotiations concerning the return of the Donations,” read a motion filed by FTX Trading Ltd. on Friday.

The Met received donations in two lump sums, $300,000 in March of 2022 and then $250,000 in November. The money was sent by West Realm Shires Services which operated FTX.US.

Bankman-Fried became famous for his commitment to “effective altruism,” a philosophical and social movement that aimed to find a research-aided way to make philanthropic decisions. The movement became popular with Silicon Valley types, with Bankman-Fried introduced to the idea that he should make as much money as possible so he could give a lot of it away (“earning to give”) by Will MacAskill, a philosopher who was teaching at MIT while Bankman-Fried was an undergraduate there.

In 2022, Bankman-Fried’s Future Fund, helmed by MacAskill, gave out $160 million in donations. At the same time, Bankman-Fried was allegedly using FTX funds to buy real estate, make political contributions, and support his Alameda Research hedge fund. Then, when the FTX token, FTT, suddenly dropped in value, prompting a sell-out, FTX did not have the money to process withdrawals for their customers.

Once FTX went through its crisis, he told Vox journalist Kelsey Piper, speaking of effective altruism, “I feel bad for those who get fucked by it, by this dumb woke game westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

According to Decrypt, a variety of institutions and politicians have agreed to send back FTX donated funds, with $6.2 million recovered since late April.

A spokesperson for the Met did not respond to request for comment.

The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross is an early work of Fra Angelico’s, thought to be painted sometime between 1419 and 1424 by the six scholars who have analyzed the work. It is the middle panel in a commissioned work for an unknown patron.

“It was a thrilling moment when I realized I was in the presence of an early masterpiece by Fra Angelico,” said Francis Russell, Christie’s UK Deputy Chairman, in a press release. “This panel exemplifies his deep religious conviction. Intensely personal, it also expresses his understanding of the revolutionary achievement of the great Florentine sculptors of his time.”

Russell refers to Fra Angelico’s use of perspective in his depiction of Christ on the cross. Previously, depictions of this scene with a straight on point of view often included a view of the right hand side of the post, which, if rendered correctly, should not be visible. This false perspective was common even among the masters of that time, including Cimabue, Ugolino di Nerio, and Giotto. Fra Angelico’s correct modeling of perspective is said to be the result of his studying the works of Tuscan sculptors like Ghiberti and Brunelleschi who had advanced the art’s understanding of 3D figures, from perspective to the rendering of folds in cloth.

The work is also an example of Fra Angelico’s use of color. In some aspects, Fra Angelico was limited by convention, the Virgin Mary’s dress must be blue and Mary Magdalene’s dress pink, but he found other ways to impose his own sense of color composition, such as painting the blood of Christ in the same tones as the pelican’s pierced breast and Magdalene’s robe.

“With Fra Angelico nothing was accidental,” concluded Russell.

At first glance, such a distinction might seem a little precious, like any arts degree, only more abstract. But this program is meant to push back exactly on the thinking that access to art and scholarship is only for people with excess capital lying around.

“The idea was to create a space in which both the artists and activists could be together and co-create,” said Tania El Khoury, a performance artist and the Director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts. “It was important to create an institution that really practices its politics. How can we build a space that puts people’s well-being first? How can we be in solidarity with people from around the world and understand inequality together?”

The answer was simple: money and willpower. By teaching political theory, aesthetic theory, filmmaking, and performance, and by hosting workshops and exhibitions, any institution can do this. Some can even do it well. Making this education accessible is the hard part.

The center’s graduating class includes students who faced a variety of precarious situations: gang violence in Mexico, LGBTQ persecution in Kyrgyzstan, political oppression in Palestine. All but two members of this year’s graduating class are immigrants, and many of them arrived weeks after the beginning of the school year due to visa issues. That the students came in late was a reflection of how hard the team at the center had to work to extract students. Each student interviewed by ARTnews said that the center was exceptional in aiding students with navigating the United States’s stringent and often confusing visa process.

To be equitable in their search for students, the Center sometimes waived a requirement for a bachelor’s degree and looked at professional and artistic activity as a substitute, as some other master’s programs at Bard do. Getting these students to the United States meant not only working hard to arrange the bureaucracy of borders but ensuring students tuition, a living stipend, and housing based on need, barriers to entry that El Khoury once hurdled as an immigrant from Lebanon. Support for this program came from the Open Society University Network (OSUN), an organization founded by the Central European University and Bard College in 2020 that supports research, fellowships, and the creation of ambitious new programs at Bard and beyond.

“I was applying to programs in Europe because I knew I couldn’t afford an expensive program [in the States],” said Carol Montealgre, who just graduated from the program. “I had a friend who recommended the Center but I wasn’t applying because of the money, but he told me, ‘They got funding from OSUN, they have scholarships, stipends.’ Those were the magic words.”

At the time she had applied, she was residing in Colombia after being deported from the United States and separated from her partner. Montealgre hadn’t spent much time in her native country. She mostly lived abroad, away from the violence that had haunted her family of activists, including her grandmother, who had been a political prisoner. However, once she got in the program at Bard and had her family reunification visa granted (she and her partner had a child while she waited to return to the States), she went back to Colombia to make her thesis project, which combined her activist ethic and artistic filmmaking practice.

Using grant money she had won, she reconnected with a union of mostly Indigenous women who had fought in the civil war in Colombia and survived it. “I asked them what they needed, and they said they needed healing,” she recounted.

Montealgre set up a wellness retreat for the women that focused on Indigenous healing practices that the women were pushing for. But to ensure that the ten women she was working with could actually attend, Montealgre had to find support for the many people those women took care of, from their small children to their elders. “We started out bringing ten women to the retreat and ended up taking care of 42 people.”

This meant hustling to find funding, sorting out complicated logistics, and dealing with a murder attempt on one of the women she was working with. In the end, she not only accomplished her activist work—she also made a film about the process. The film, Howls in the Mountains, was on view at Bard during the center’s thesis exhibition.

“I ran the extra mile, and it had a personal cost, but it was absolutely worth it,” said Montealgre. “I told [the center’s leadership] if it wasn’t because of you, your network and your support, I wouldn’t been able to achieve this project.”

For recently graduated Adam HajYahia, the program was a rare opportunity to receive higher education.

“I grew up and lived in Palestine before coming to this program. I didn’t have an undergraduate education because I didn’t want to study in Israeli universities and didn’t quite have the funds to leave,” said HajYahia. His family members have long been both activists and practitioners of the arts, and so HajYahia participated in these activities from a young age, curating exhibitions as well as music and film festivals alongside his political work.

“I found ways to engage with the arts and cultural movements around Jerusalem, Jaffa, and most importantly, Haifa. I read independently, went to conferences, and applied for funding, but it wasn’t until I came to this program that I was able to engage with these ideas in a more structured, focused way,” said HajYahia.

HajYahia ended up developing a visual thesis based on the archival work he had done investigating gender and sexuality in Palestine prior to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. In legal records, he found documentation of individuals who lived beyond the traditional boundaries of the gender binary and the patriarchy, focusing on sex workers, same sex relationships, and other activities and behavior that were found to be deviant by English colonizers.

For his thesis exhibition, he recorded narratives that he had unearthed in the archive. He also included stories of his own telling, each associated with visual documentation of both these real and imagined characters. Doing so allowed him to push back on the assumption that just because something didn’t occur in the colonial archive, it didn’t happen at all.

El Khoury is proud of her students and the program and excited to see what they all do next.

“I think so far, we’re managing to practice what we preach,” said El Khoury. “Sometimes I feel like this is too good to be true, like someone is going to find out and stop it. But so far, it’s happening.”

At a press conference today, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona was announced that Tuan Andrew Nguyen had won its Joan Miró Prize, a prestigious award that has previously gone to artists like Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist, and Mona Hatoum. With the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Nguyen will receive a money award of €50,000 (around $53,000) and will also have a solo show at the Fundació Joan Miró in 2024. Nguyen makes video and sculpture works that delve into memory, colonialism, and religion, often focusing on monuments and architecture as the visual anchor to the past.

Last week, at the annual Guggenheim’s Young Collector’s Council party, the winner of the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award was announced: Stephanie Dinkins. Dinkins will receive an unrestricted prize of $100,000, honoring her cutting edge work in technology-based art. Currently the Yayoi Kusama Professor of Art at Stony Brook University, Dinkins has established herself as a leading figure in the utilization of AI in art, with projects like Bina48, a robotic-bust that communicates using AI-enabled speech.

Guggenheim isn’t the only institution spotlighting artists working with tech. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship fellows earlier this May, which awards artists with $50,000 in unrestricted funding. The winners this year are: American Artist, Kara Güt, Leo Castañeda, Marlena Myles, and The Institute of Queer Ecology.

South Arts in Atlanta has awarded nine fellowships to artists from each of the US’s nine southern states. As part of its flagship Southern Prize & State Fellowship, each artist will receive $5,000 and an opportunity to win the Southern Prize, which comes with a $25,000 prize. The inaugural fellows are Kelly Bryant (based in Alabama), Chris Friday (Florida), Victoria Dugger (Georgia), Rachel Moser (Kentucky), Carlie Trosclair (Louisiana), Alexis McGrigg (Mississippi), Nadia Meadows (North Carolina), Michael Webster (South Carolina), and Beizar Aradini (Tennessee).

Meanwhile, the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation announced its second round of winners of Awards in Crafts. The awardees this year are the multimedia artist Adebunmi Gbadebo; furniture maker, artist, and educator Aspen Golann; multidisciplinary artist Shane R. Hendren; timber framer Blain Snipstal; and glassblower Leo Tecosky. Each artists will receive an unrestricted prize of $100,000, which is being administered by United States Artists, a national organization based in Chicago.

Another United States Artists–administered award is the 2023 Berresford Prize, which sees $50,000 going to a cultural practitioner who has dedicated themselves to the well-being of artists. This year’s recipient is Maori Karmael Holmes, founder and chief executive and artistic officer of BlackStar Projects, which focuses on supporting the work of Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists in film and media.

In more crafts news, fashion brand Loewe named the winner of its annual Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, which comes with a €50,000 prize. Out of 30 finalists, all of whose work is currently being exhibited at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, ceramicist Eriko Inazaki came out on top. The jury also named two special mentions: sculptor Dominique Zinkpè and basket maker Moe Watanabe.

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, a multidisciplinary artist who was born in Chihuahua Mexico, grew up in the El Paso–Juárez–Southern New Mexico region, and now lives nomadically, is the winner of the third edition of Toby’s Prize, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The prize comes with $25,000 unrestricted cash award, a $25,000 to fund the production of new artwork, a solo exhibition at the museum along with a catalogue. The past recipient of this prize was Sondra Perry.

Haitian photographer Daveed Baptiste recently won the 2023 Ashley Longshore Excellence in the Arts Award, which is given out by Miami-based foundation YoungArts. Awarded in memory of photographer Alix Edmonson Martinez, Baptiste will receive a $25,000 unrestricted prize.

In more regional prizes, the arts nonprofit Artadia has announced the winners of its prize for New York–based artists: Simon Benjamin, Lizania Cruz, and Diane Severin Nguyen. Each artist, as with all Artadia awards, will receive $15,000. The organization also partners with the Louisville-based 21c Museum Hotels for the 21c Artadia Award, which goes to one artist living and working in the communities where 21c Museum Hotels are located. This year, the winner will be an artist located in what is referred to as the “Research Triangle,” a metropolitan region in North Carolina that includes the cities of Raleigh and Durham. Applications are open June 15–July 15, and the winner will be announced in August.

In the class action lawsuit, Virginia resident Daniel Harper, who invested in Astrals NFTs and later suffered losses after the crypto market tanked, has accused O’Neal of violating Section 15 of the Securities Act of 1933, which requires brokers to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and for offering and selling unregistered securities.

O’Neal and his son Myles founded Astrals in 2022. They brought on freelance creature artist Damien Guimoneau to create the look of the project, which features 10,000 NFTs of humanoid animals and creatures brandishing weapons and other accessories. The NFTs were sold on Solana, a popular blockchain similar in function to Ethereum.

O’Neal promoted the project to his millions of fans on social media, offering giveaways, access to private Discord channels, and promising a return on investment, the complaint alleges. In one video posted to social media, O’Neal told his followers, “we’re not stopping until 30 SOL floor,” in other words, O’Neal believed that the least valuable NFT in the Astrals collection would be worth 30 SOL, which at the time was around $2,400.

Harper, the plaintiff, bought 96 Astrals over the course of a year. According to a chart Harper provided, the most he spent on one of these NFTs was 13.5 SOL.

As crypto markets have tumbled over the past year and NFT collectors have found themselves with little to show for their investment, class action lawsuits have been filed around the country, alleging that companies like Yuga Labs and Dapper Labs shilled unregistered securities to a public that did not have the knowledge to accurately assess the novel assets they were buying.

In each of these cases, courts have been applying the Howey test—a common legal test established in 1946 by the United States Supreme Court in SEC v. W.J. Howey Co.—to ascertain whether or not the NFT projects in question are securities. Under the Howey test, something is a security if it meets following four conditions: It is an investment of money; there is an expectation of profits from the investment; the investment of money is in a common enterprise and; any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party.

In Friel v. Dapper Labs, a judge ruled this past February that Dapper Labs’ product, NBA Top Shot NFTs, are securities. The case will now head to trial unless Dapper Labs decides to settle. While no court has ruled that all NFTs should be considered securities, the Dapper Labs ruling gives some insight into how judges are interpreting novel assets and the novel ways in which they have been promoted. For example, while Dapper Labs never used the word “profit” in the promotion of their NFTs, the case judge found that Dapper Labs found other ways to signal a promise of profits.

“Although the literal word ‘profit’ is not included in any of the Tweets, the ‘rocket ship’ emoji, ‘stock chart’ emoji, and ‘money bags’ emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment,” read the judge’s decision.

If the case is not dismissed, the assigned judge will likely apply the Howey test to the Astrals.

O’Neal is far from the only celebrity to find himself in legal trouble over NFTs. Madonna, Justin Bieber, and Jimmy Fallon were recently named in a class action lawsuit that alleges they promoted the sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs without disclosing that they were being compensated.

Modrok also admitted to vandalized another piece of art, a popsicle statue by Craig Berube-Gray at nearby Rachel Richardson Park, earlier this month. Police arrested Modrok after surveillance footage depicted him in the act.

Slonem, for his part, first heard about the act of vandalism when NBC Miami reached out to him for a quote, and since then he’s been processing the attack. It’s not the first time he’s lost a piece of public art.

“9/11 was worse, I lost an 80-foot mural,” Slonem told ARTnews, somewhat mystified that this kind of violence once again found its way to his work. “I was just shocked. It’s just such a strange thing, the fact that it’s happened before and the fact that it happened again.”

Thunderbunny, at 13 feet-7 inches and made of 6,500 pieces of blue glass, took a year to make and was installed in the park in May 2022 after local gallery Art Gallery 21 worked with the city to loan the sculpture from New River Fine Art in Fort Lauderdale. The sculpture was due to travel to a botanical garden, but those plans have now been stalled. Slonem and the commissioners are reviewing the work to see if repairs are even possible as the work sustained heavy structural damage. Slonem said it would take a couple more days to ascertain what can be done.

Despite the state of censorship of the arts being undertaken in Florida, it seems that Modrok was not motivated by the current political climate. NBC Miami reported that Modrok told local police that he had targeted the work because the park it resided in was named after Justin Flippen, a former mayor of Wilton Manors who Modrok blamed “for the birds that we hear.” The park was named after Flippen following his sudden death at 41 due to an aneurysm.

“This is really bizarre, because I’m a bird freak,” said Slonem. “I have a lot of pet birds, up to a hundred, and this guy didn’t like the mayor because of all the birds?” It’s unclear if Modrok knew about Slonem’s love of birds or if this was a coincidence.

Modrok has a previous criminal record, having served three years in Broward County for the sale of cocaine. Modrok was charged with three counts of criminal mischief in relation to his recent spate of vandalism.

LVMH, a luxury conglomerate whose assets include Moët, Hennessy, and Louis Vuitton, was hit with the stock rout after concerns over a flagging luxury market in the United States and China saw a general stock sell-off across the board, with brands like Hermes and Gucci also taking a blow.

However, luxury goods have been on an astounding run since last year, so while these markets have fallen, stock in LVMH is 23 percent higher than it was this time last year. It’s a comparative blip for a man like Arnault, whose fortune ballooned $29.5 billion this year alone, an accumulation that, once again, pushed him over the line to be the richest man in the world, as was confirmed just earlier this April.

Arnault has been a long time force in the art world, both facilitating collaborations between his brands and artists (such as a recent collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Yayoi Kusama) and as a renowned collector himself, along with his wife Hélène. He and his wife are the richest ARTnews Top 200 Collectors and is followed closely behind on the list by his fellow luxury market rival François Pinault.

Yet, Arnault’s most significant contribution to the art world would be Fondation Louis Vuitton, which he founded in in 2014. A now renowned Frank Gehry–designed museum in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, the museum has hosted blockbuster shows that often center two artists, such as the recent “Monet-Mitchell” show and their current exhibition Basquiat X Warhol.

Arnault’s ties to the art world are so enmeshed that, last fall rumors, swirled that the next LVMH acquisition would be Gagosian gallery—which Gagosian has since denied.