Marcia Resnick, a photographer known for documenting Manhattan’s downtown art scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s, died at age 74. Her cause of death was lung cancer, according to her sister Janice Hahn, her sole surviving relative.

Resnick started out making conceptual photography and later moving toward portraiture. The shift came as she became increasingly entwined with a faction of ascendant artists and musicians who frequented New York nightclubs like Mudd Club and CBGB. That included a subset people associated with the era’s punk movement.

Born in Brooklyn in 1950 to a mother and father working in publishing and art, Resnick spent her undergraduate years at New York University and Cooper Union, later pursing photography at California Institute of the Arts. She would go on to teach at both her New York alma maters.

Some of her most famous subjects were male musicians, some widely known in the mainstream and others more niche. She shot Mick Jagger and Klaus Nomi; the latter passed away in 1983, making him one of the first notable figures of the downtown scene to die of AIDS-related complications.

Resnick was briefly married to Wayne Kramer, a guitarist for the Detroit-based punk band MC5.

Artists Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared in Resnick’s photographs, as did Ed Koch and comedian John Belushi, who posed for her in 1982 during a spontaneous visit to her Canal Street studio. Her picture of him is thought to be the last photograph of him before his death of an overdose.

In interviews, Resnick said she wanted to reconsider gender norms using her photography. Her pictures of famous men defied convention, often catching her subjects in intimate moments that went against the buttoned-up aesthetic associated with male celebrities. Pictures such as these can be found her series “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977–1982.”

Some of Resnick’s photographs were published by the SoHo Weekly News, where she was a columnist. But though her work received a good deal of public attention, privately she struggled: Resnick battled an addiction to alcohol, and then eventually to heroin, for over two decades.

She is today considered one of the foremost documentarians of the ’80s punk scene. In 2022, a retrospective of her photography opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine before traveling to two other institutions.

Lynda and Stewart Resnick have donated a monumental Jeff Koons Split-Rocker sculpture to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which will exhibit the 37-foot-tall work near a newly created group of galleries endowed by trustee David Geffen.

Split-Rocker contains a metal skeleton and resembles the head of a children’s toy, with one half recalling rocking horse and the other a dinosaur. Planted in its surface are 50,000 flowers. Another comparably sized edition is housed at Glenstone, the Maryland private museum of Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales.

The version gifted by the Resnicks to LACMA has been in Versailles and Rockefeller Center in New York. LACMA did not specify the value of the sculpture, as is common when museums announce gifts of artworks, but the Resnicks listed an unnamed piece given to LACMA on their 2023 tax filings and valued it at $9.6 million.

The Resnicks have a history of patronizing LACMA, which named a pavilion after them after they agreed to give $45 million toward its endowment. They also gave LACMA $16 million in the fiscal year ending in 2023, according to public filings for the Resnicks’ charitable foundation. Between 2019 and 2023, they provided more than $750 million went to Caltech for climate research.

Much of their funding has been focused around the environment, even amid scrutiny from climate activists over their business practices. A series of lawsuits have also centered around Stewart Resnick’s farming and food holding company, which has reported $4 billion in revenue in recent years.

The criticism over the reach of Resnicks in California reached LACMA in November 2023, when protesters gathered outside of the museum’s annual gala, targeting the philanthropists because they have lobbied for water-supply privatization.

The acquisition is part of LACMA director Michael Govan’s long-term aim to install another major sculpture on the museum’s campus, one that can compete in scale with others already there, among them Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Tony Smith’s Smoke. 

It’s not the first time LACMA has tried to show a monumental Koons on its campus. In 2007, the museum’s plans to install a different large-scale work by Koons, a 70-foot steam train model from 1943 suspended from an industrial-sized crane, fell through, despite gaining some support while Govan was overseeing the proposal. Reported estimates put the cost of the project at roughly $25 million.

Spain’s Supreme Court has ordered the heirs of former dictator Francisco Franco to return two religious statues to the city of Santiago, concluding a years-long legal dispute over their ownership.

The two pieces, depicting biblical figures Isaac and Abraham, date back to the 12th century and were originally produced as decorative elements for the Portico of Glory, an entrance to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The decision stated that the sculptures were removed sometime in the mid-20th century under Franco’s administration and acquired by the city in 1948. Sometime in the early 1950s, city officials arranged for the statues to be relocated to Meirás Palace, the politician’s summer residence, at the request of Franco’s wife.

According to the ruling, the transfer was facilitated by the city’s mayor at the time, but the maneuver wasn’t done legally, the court said. After Franco’s death in 1975, his descendants inherited the statues and then held on to them private for decades.

The court determined the statues remain the legal property of the city. The family disputed the city’s ownership, claiming the works had been purchased by their relatives through an antique dealer in 1954. Legal representatives for the family maintain the sale’s detail were never documented.

Before the dispute began, the Spanish newspaper El País reported in 2018 that the statues were, at that time, held by Pristina SL, a real estate company owned by Franco’s grandson, Francis Franco.

UOVO, a collector-founded art storage facility in the U.S., is seeking approval in New York to build a second location in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The proposed seven-story, 240,000 sq. ft building would be located at 74 Bogart Street, currently a parking lot, and would expand the company’s footprint near its existing 150,000 sq. ft Bushwick facility, which the company opened before the pandemic in 2020.

Founded in 2013 by Steven Guttman, a Miami-based real estate developer, UOVO operates 30 locations across the U.S., with a large-scale headquarters facility in Queens.

The company, which stores and manages collections for museums, galleries, and high-net-worth individuals, is aiming to convert the Bushwick lot into a storage space for private and corporate owners of artworks, collections of wine, and fashion archives.

The developer, who built an adjacent CubeSmart facility, acquired the undeveloped site for $45.5 million in 2019, according to local records. Architecture firm S9 will oversee the design if the plan is approved by the city.

There are signs of community pushback online to UOVO’s proposed plan, with a circulating open letter addressed to a Brooklyn zoning board raising concern over the affects of developing such a large commercial area that isn’t being used for residents there.

The lot is located in the District 34, an area that city officials have said has experienced some of the most extensive residential displacement in New York City. 

Scrutiny over the company’s expansion has in the past been heightened by issues with its labor record. During the pandemic, when many art handler jobs lost employment due to the temporary shuttering of public and commercial art institutions, UOVO was accused of retaliating against employees attempting to unionize. The company has denied the allegations.

In prior statements, UOVO has maintained that is it committed to the public benefit in New York, citing a $25,000 annual artist prize it distributes in tandem with the Brooklyn Museum and forthcoming plans to help renovate Bushwick’s Maria Hernandez Park.

Back in 1970, when Art Basel was founded, there were just a handful of major fairs. Today, however, by some estimates, there are more than 300 art fairs. But even still, Art Basel remains the main fair for many of the dealers showing in Switzerland this week.

David Fleiss, the cofounder of Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000, participated in the 1970 and 1971 editions of the fair, before taking a long hiatus until the ’90s. He’s been going ever since. “The fair is the fair for us. We meet the best collectors and the best museum curators we can meet in any fair,” he said. “It is still the fair where you can see the best works galleries have to offer.”

Art Basel was founded in 1970 by Swiss art dealers Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner, and Balz Hilt, and has now turned into a global behemoth, with editions also held in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, Paris, and soon even Qatar. Yet the Swiss edition is the one people cannot miss, and dealers told ARTnews that it seems poised to remain that way.

Technically, Art Basel was not the first fair in the city: the Basel Gallery Association staged a fair in 1968, though it only featured local galleries. Bruckner pushed for a larger fair with international representation, eventually bringing on Beyeler and Hilt, who then partnered with the local trade fair Mustermesse.

The first Art Basel had 110 exhibitors—90 galleries and 20 publishers—hailing from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the US. There were both primary market and secondary market dealers at the fair, which cost 5 Swiss Francs (about $20 in 2025 US dollars) to attend.

Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac saw the fair in its early days, visiting for the first time in 1981 and making his debut as an exhibitor in 1985. As Ropac recalled to ARTnews, while Basel had already become the most important art fair at that point, it still faced strong competition from the Cologne Art Fair, due to Germany’s then-booming art market. He recalled Art Basel as a more “Eurocentric” gathering of “a small familiar group of people.”

Things used to be a bit more improvisational at Art Basel, according to Ropac, who remembered one year when he spotlit the work of Sturtevant, an artist known for copying others’ pieces. When Ropac was late with the transport for her work, Sturtevant insisted on bringing the work herself and found herself stuck at Swiss customs, which doubted that she was the maker of these objects.

“I had to rush over with catalogs and documentation to prove her identity and that she was the creator of the work,” Ropac said. “Only then did the customs officials become more forgiving. It was chaotic but very memorable.”

Art Basel has become intertwined with the lives of many dealers. Iwan Wirth, cofounder of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, first attended the fair in 1987 at just 17 years old—one year after he opened his first gallery. He visited the fair with Swiss painter Bruno Gasser, the first artist he ever showed, and Andy Jillien, his first collector. The gallery made its Art Basel debut a decade later, in the first year it was eligible.

For Wirth, one of his most cherished memories is watching his eldest son, Elias, then a young boy, playing in the gallery’s booth. “He was climbing and hiding inside aluminum barrels that were part of an artwork by Jason Rhoades,” he told ARTnews. “We have pictures of Elias sitting inside there and smiling like the happiest Art Basel visitor ever.”

Dominique Lévy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan was, like Elias, introduced to Basel as a child. She first attended Basel at around four years old, in the early ’70s, with her mother, who was close friends with Beyeler and lived in Lausanne. She did not attend the event as a professional until several decades later, when she was the director of Anthony D’Offay in London, managing American artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns. She has been a longtime exhibitor through the many iterations of her eponymous gallery and, in her estimation, has not missed a single edition.

“Off and on, I’ve been attending for most of my life,” she told ARTnews, saying that to show at the fair in the early days was to be “part of the inner circle. It was essential.”

As Art Basel has become a global brand, with many iterations, the calculus has grown more complicated for galleries, Lévy said, as dealers have to increasingly weigh which edition is the best fit for their program. Still, she sees one major dividing line between pre- and post-Covid Basel.

Before the pandemic, she said, “I couldn’t imagine selling art unless I was wearing high heels. We kept ice packs in the back of the booth for our feet. Now? I live in sneakers. That little change says a lot about how the world—and the fair—has shifted.”

Basel has retained its allure over the decades arguably because so many dealers and artists have watched it change their careers. Such was the case for New York dealer David Nolan, who told ARTnews that he first exhibited at Basel in 1993 with works by American painter William N. Copley, who died three years later. On opening day, Nolan sold six paintings by Copley and called the artist in Key West. Copley told the dealer to get some champagne and they popped bottles simultaneously to celebrate. From that point on, the two repeated the ritual each night of the fair. From the jump, Nolan saw the influence a successful Basel could have, with Copley invited shortly after to mount a retrospective at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, with more museum exhibitions following.

For Mathieu Paris, a longtime director at White Cube and a participant of Art Basel for nearly 20 years, what has always stood out about the Basel fair is that influence, which told ARTnews stems from the cultural ecosystem in the Swiss city, from the Kunstmuseum and Fondation Beyeler to, especially, the Kunsthalle.

“When you look back at its exhibition history, it’s striking how many now-renowned artists had early, formative shows there,” Paris said of Kunsthalle Basel.

And there’s no doubt that Basel’s success over the years has meant a lot of change. To the eye of Marianne Boesky, who first participated in 2000 with a presentation of sculptor Rachel Feinstein in the Statements sector, the fair has become more global and diverse, particularly in recent years, in both its participants and exhibitors.

Paris, of White Cube, did have one gripe about the new Basel, however: “If I had to note one regret over the years, it would be a nostalgic one: I still miss the days when the old-town butcher was the only official supplier of the iconic Art Basel bratwurst.”

Two entertainment giants, Walt Disney Co. and NBC Universal, filed a joint copyright infringement lawsuit on Wednesday against Midjourney, a widely used AI image generator.

The suit marks the first time major Hollywood studios have waded into the escalating conflict between legacy media and generative AI firms, whose use of open-source imagery on the internet to train their AI models has been heavily scrutinized.

Filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the 110-page complaint accuses the San Francisco-based company Midjourney Inc. of misappropriating copyrighted visuals from popular fictionalized characters from major franchises like the “Star Wars” movies and Marvel comic books in order to develop its AI tools.

The complaint accuses Midjourney of illegally culling images copyrighted under Disney and Universal-owned brands and describes the company’s methods as “bootlegging.” The studios further claimed that such a practice helped Midjourney to become profitable in short period of time.

Midjourney reported $300 million in revenue last year, six times more than what it gained in 2022, the year the company was founded by its CEO David Holz. Midjourney claims it has amassed around 21 million users in three years.

In a statement to the New York Times, Disney’s general counsel said that AI companies aren’t exempt from legal standards protecting intellectual property. NBC Universal’s legal chief added that the studios are obligated to protect creative labor they invested in.

Midjourney claims that it is independently funded and that it receives no backing from outside investors. The company has said it generates its revenue from subscription plans at monthly fees that go up to $120.

The lawsuit is in line with a larger industry crackdown. Other image generation platforms like Open AI and StabilityAI have been targeted in lawsuits by major media brands, including the the New York Times and Getty Images.

The two studios are seeking undisclosed amounts in damages and court-ordered restrictions on Midjourney’s generation tools. Midjourney has not publicly responded to the suit’s claims.

Frieze is expanding its footprint in Asia with the launch of Frieze House Seoul, a new exhibition space that will open alongside the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul in early September.

The space, located in Yaksu-dong in central Seoul, will host exhibitions and events organized by leading galleries during the four-day fair, scheduled to take place from September 3 to September 6.

The venue, renovated by Seoul-based architecture studio Samuso Hyoja, features two main galleries spread over four floors, spanning 210 square meters, along with a landscaped garden. Galleries interested in programming the inaugural season can apply via the Frieze website.

A spokesperson for Frieze said the new Seoul space will follow a similar model to London’s No. 9 Cork Street, a gallery space in Mayfair that rotates pop-up shows. The fair franchise launched it in 2021.

Kristell Chade, Frieze’s executive director said in a statement that the Korean city has increasingly become a “focal point” for collectors and dealers internationally. The fair’s directors have said that expanding the Seoul brand has been a primary goal after the pandemic.

Coinciding with the announcement, Korean artist Im Young-zoo was recently named recipient of the 2025 Frieze Seoul Artist Award, which the fair launched last year as part of a partnership with Bvlgari. The brand funds the prize, the amount of which is not disclosed. Last year’s winner was Woo Hannah.

The main fair will take place at a convention center in Gangnam, bringing in more than 120 galleries from 30 countries.

The Texas Historical Commission (THC), a group that oversees preserved sites in the state, announced that a series of buildings repurposed by minimalist artist Donald Judd and overseen by two artist foundations, has been added to a national register that gives protected status to long-standing cultural sites.

The listing makes the artist’s compound in the West Texas town entitled to preservation efforts in the future.

The designation, approved by the U.S. National Park Service in May 2025, was part of an application sent in by the Texas commission this fall that aimed to expand a pre-existing military district to include the Judd Foundation, which share a location.

Now, what was previously the town’s Fort D.A. Russell Historic District will include the Judd Foundaiton’s name and will also span 15 buildings and a single large-scale installation, all rehabbed or produced by Judd between 1973 up until his death in 1994.

The revamped compound brought widespread attention to Marfa, home to a former military base that closed in the 1960s. Judd arrived in the early 1970s, where he spent the next two decades converting the defunct complex into a site for his outdoor installations and studio spaces that would eventually become home to the Chinati and Judd Foundations, which operate as separate entities.

Judd made careful alterations to elements of the structures that were left behind after the base closed and had freedom to expand how he wished with funding coming from New York’s Dia Foundation starting in 1978. At the time, Dia was newly established and had a board that was set on helping artists set up ambitious one-man museums with extravagant budgets.

When Judd came to Presidio County in 1971, he wanted to take over a segment of land to build works on a larger scale, a practice that wasn’t viable in New York City, were he was located before. Nine of the buildings and the monumental artwork are managed by the Chinati Foundation, which Judd founded in 1986 to exhibit larger works.

Another six buildings are operated by the Judd Foundation, which preserves the artist’s former residential and working spaces.

This is the second Judd-linked historic district in the town, following the Central Marfa Historic District’s designation in 2022.

A former director of museums devoted to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico City has accused the trust that oversees those two institutions of years of mismanagement.

In a statement to the Art Newspaper, which first reported news of Soto’s claims, the trust said the former director never officially reported concerns about the status of the collections during her tenure.

Hilda Trujillo Soto, who led the two museums between 2009 and 2020, made her allegations public in an extensive blog post published in early April. She alleged that the trustees failed to properly address a discrepancy in their records centering around Kahlo and Rivera works that may have gone missing. Soto claimed that these works later appeared, without explanation, in private collections in the United States.

The museums’ collections operate with a protected status under Mexican national heritage law and are governed by a trust that was established in 1955 by Rivera, Kahlo’s husband. That trust is now administered by Mexico’s central bank, Banxico.

Soto claims that Mexican officials have not responded to several written and in-person requests she’s made since 2020 for audits of financial and historical records related to the museums’ collections.

She further alleged that materials related to Kahlo’s personal diary have been misplaced, as have artworks catalogued as part of an inventory list from 1957, including paintings titled Frida in Flames and The Abortion. Soto speculated that these works were sold privately and illegally.

She asserted that Mexico’s central bank had violated legal standards around how Rivera’s estate is governed. “Sixty-nine years after Diego Rivera’s donation to the ‘People of Mexico,’ Banxico has failed to fulfill the mandate it accepted to safeguard the museum collections that house part of the national heritage, which is crucial to understanding the history, identity, and memory of our country,” she wrote.

Banxico officials could not be immediately reached for comment on Trujillo’s claims.

The trust is currently preparing a major traveling exhibition on Kahlo alongside the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tate Modern. It’s unclear whether Soto’s claims will impact that exhibition.