Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund takes stake in Sotheby’s

Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund ADQ is taking a minority stake in Sotheby’s as part of a $1bn cash injection, reports Bloomberg. ADQ and Sotheby’s owner, the French-Israeli telecoms magnate Patrick Drahi, are making a joint investment in the company, with most of the cash coming from ADQ. Though art is not one of the priority sectors of the fund, which largely has holdings in energy, agriculture, healthcare and logistics, a source close to the fund said that the investment could lead to a Sotheby’s outpost opening in Abu Dhabi, reports the Financial Times. Drahi, who acquired Sotheby’s for $3.7bn including debt in 2019, will remain the majority stakeholder. He is known to have racked up a large amount of debt to finance his acquisitions; the FT reported in December that bankers had approached several potential buyers of a stake in Sotheby’s, including the Qatar Investment Authority. The ADQ transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.

Harvard University has said that it will not remove the Sackler name from two of its buildings, reports the Harvard Crimson. In October 2022, a group of students submitted a 23-page proposal to rename the Arthur M. Sackler Building and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which is one of the university’s three art museums. The proposal argued that ‘the ethos of the Sackler family and of Purdue Pharma’ – the company that manufactured and marketed OxyContin, one of the main drugs responsible for the US opioid epidemic – ‘can be traced back directly to Arthur Sackler’. In July this year, the committee responsible for overseeing requests to dename buildings rejected the students’ proposal on the grounds that Sackler died in 1987, nine years before OxyContin was introduced, and that the students’ argument that Sackler was responsible for developing ‘unethical marketing practices’ for pharmaceuticals was too ‘nuanced’ for the committee to form a ‘definitive judgement’ on it.

The Slovakian culture minister has dismissed the director of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG). Martina Šimkovičová, part of the right-wing government formed by the Slovak National Party, removed Alexandra Kusá from office on Wednesday. This came a day after the minister had dismissed Matej Drlička, the head of Slovakia’s National Theatre – a decision Kusá had criticised, reports the Slovak Spectator. On the messaging app Telegram, Šimkovičová stated: ‘Political commentary on the decisions of your supervising authority and the misuse of official institutional websites for personal political opinions could be grounds for dismissal.’ Kusá began working at the SNG as a curator in 2000, before becoming its director in 2010. During her tenure she oversaw a €79m renovation – the largest investment in a public building project in Slovakia’s history. A petition calling for Šimkovičová’s dismissal has garnered more than 164,000 signatures.

Two people have been arrested and charged with hate crimes against the director and other leaders of the Brooklyn Museum, reports the New York Times. In June, pro-Palestinian activists smeared red paint on the homes of Anne Pasternak, director of the museum, who is Jewish; Kimberly Panicek Trueblood, the museum’s president and chief operating officer; and two of the museum’s trustees. The activists also hung a banner outside Pasternak’s home that read ‘Anne Pasternak Brooklyn Museum White-supremacist Zionist’. Last week, Taylor Pelton was arrested for her role in the crime; earlier this week, the freelance video journalist Samuel Seligson turned himself in. Both face charges of criminal mischief. Pelton faces additional charges of driving Seligson and four other activists, who have not yet been caught. The incidents occurred around a week after hundreds of demonstrators entered the Brooklyn Museum and called for it to divest from entities profiting from Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. The protests resulted in dozens of arrests.

The Courtauld Institute has announced that it will establish a centre for British art after receiving a $12m donation from the Manton Foundation in the United States. In a press release, the Institute said that the planned Manton Centre for British Art ‘will serve as an intellectual hub for art historians, curators, critics, artists and students nationally and internationally’. Mark Hallett, director of the Courtauld (and previously director for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art), told the Times that the new centre will promote study of ‘not only […] British artists but also artists that produce art in Britain and across the world in its former territories’. It will initially be based in the Institute’s current campus on Vernon Square before moving to purpose-built premises at Somerset House. The Manton Foundation was co-founded by Edwin Manton (1909–2005), a British executive who helped set up the insurance company AIG. As a collector, he was known for his collection of works by Turner, Gainsborough and Constable, much of which he gifted to the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, and for his donations to the Tate in London, which were the second-largest in the institution’s history after the donations of Henry Tate.

The Austrian branch of the climate activism group Last Generation is disbanding, reports Politico. Best known for throwing black paint at the protective glass that covers Gustav Klimt’s painting Death and Life (1910–15) at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2022, the group announced in a statement on Tuesday that it ‘no longer sees any prospect of success’ in its attempts to put pressure on the Austrian government to meet its own climate targets. Austria has not yet submitted a draft of its National Energy and Climate Plan to EU officials, making the country liable for an ‘infringement procedure’ from the European Commission. Last Generation also said in its statement that it would use its existing reserves ‘to cover the costs of criminalisation and investigations’, and that it was still open to new donations towards this.