[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/GettyImages-2248583750.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
To receive\u00a0Morning Links\u00a0in your inbox every weekday,\u00a0sign\u00a0up\u00a0for our\u00a0<\/em>Breakfast with ARTnews\u00a0newsletter<\/em>.<\/p>\n LESS THAN GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Christie\u2019s<\/strong>\u00a0New York brought in $162.7 million for a trio of postwar and contemporary art auctions yesterday evening, led by a $35.1 million\u00a0Gerhard Richter<\/strong>\u00a0Kerze<\/em>\u00a0(Candle<\/em>) painting from the late\u00a0Marian Goodman<\/strong>\u00a0estate. Yet these results, an improvement from last year, \u201cbarely meet expectations,\u201d and \u201ctepid\u201d sales regularly closed on lower estimates, writes\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>\u2019 Brian Boucher. Wednesday\u2019s auction, with nearly a week left in the May auction season, was expected to bring between $129 million and $191 million from 42 lots. The hammer total before the house\u2019s fees came to $133.6 million. Dealer Marian Goodman\u2019s collection was also estimated to bring in about $65 million, and it fetched $66 million without fees. With the house\u2019s fees, the sale totaled $78.8 million. But experts interviewed for Boucher\u2019s story struck a positive note: \u201cThere wasn\u2019t much speculative capital in the room tonight. A sign of a healthy, rational art market,\u201d said New York dealer\u00a0Evan Beard<\/strong>.<\/p>\n CLEAN UP OR CLEAR OUT<\/strong>. The Spanish parliament has formally taken Madrid\u2019s\u00a0Reina Sof\u00eda<\/strong>\u00a0museum to task over the mismanagement of its collections and, surprisingly, threatened to oust its director,\u00a0Manuel Segade<\/strong>, if it doesn\u2019t shape up, reports the\u00a0Journal des Arts<\/em>. Lawmakers, led by right-leaning politicians, adopted a resolution ordering the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda to complete a \u201ctotal and absolute\u201d audit of its collections, including updating its inventory and monetary value, by December 31, 2026, or else. Gaps in the museum\u2019s tracking of artworks, such as a reportedly lost donation in 2021, have been a known problem for some time, but they predate Segade\u2019s term, which began in 2023. Indeed, the museum doesn\u2019t deny it needs a thorough clean-up. A representative told\u00a0Le Journal des Arts<\/em>\u00a0the Reina Sof\u00eda \u201cis engaged in a process of internal regularization concerning the inventory, the valuation of its holdings, the monitoring of artworks, and the security of the collection.\u201d This is also being done with a new computerized tracking program called Artis. The museum nevertheless argued that \u201cthe main anomalies detected correspond to periods prior to the creation of the current museum\u201d in 1990. In 1988, the collections of the former Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (MEAC) were combined with the new museum, leading to a tangle of inconsistencies, they explained. It\u2019s just taken years for alarms to go off.<\/p>\n Reikado Hall<\/strong>, Japan\u2019s Buddhist temple that houses an \u201ceternal flame,\u201d which spiritual leaders say has been continuously lit for over 1,200 years, burned down yesterday. [The New York Times<\/strong>]<\/p>\n \n\tThe\u00a0Trump<\/strong>\u00a0administration says it doesn\u2019t need congressional approval to build its 250-foot triumphal arch on Washington, D.C.\u2019s Memorial Circle, because another, never-built project was already granted a century ago. [The Washington Post<\/strong>]<\/p>\n Chanel<\/strong>\u00a0is partnering with the\u00a0Centre Pompidou<\/strong>\u00a0for five years and will support the Paris museum\u2019s current $535 million renovation. [press release<\/strong>]<\/p>\n \n\tThe artist\u00a0JR<\/strong>\u00a0talks about his monumental trompe-l\u2019\u0153il installation that is transforming the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris into a mountainous landscape, in homage to\u00a0Christo<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Jeanne-Claude,<\/strong>\u00a0who wrapped the same bridge in 1985. [Le Figaro<\/strong>]<\/p>\n California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) President Ravi S.<\/strong>\u00a0Rajan<\/strong>\u00a0was booed during his commencement speech at a graduation ceremony where students held signs protesting staff layoffs at the art school, which is facing a multi-million-dollar budget deficit. [Hyperallergic<\/strong>]<\/p>\n NOT ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL<\/strong>. Brooklyn artist\u00a0Dustin Yellin<\/strong>\u00a0is better known for his glass sculptures and\u00a0Pioneer Works<\/strong>, the nonprofit art space he opened in Red Hook in 2012. But now he\u2019s showing his first film,\u00a0Goodnight Lamby<\/em>, a short, animated love letter to his four-year-old daughter Zia, produced by\u00a0Darren Aronofsky<\/strong>\u2019s AI studio Primordial Soup, which just premiered at Cannes. It stars his daughter and Yellin\u2019s friend, the actor\u00a0Paul Rudd<\/strong>, who plays the father. For\u00a0Cultured Magazine<\/em>, the two discuss a project made with the help of AI tools that takes readers on an adventure through one of Yellin\u2019s sculptures. \u201cI don\u2019t have a lot of walls between ideas that come into being,\u201d Yellin tells Rudd, who asked about venturing into film from the visual arts. \u201cWhether I\u2019m working on a sculpture where I\u2019m painting on layers of glass, or on a canvas, or I\u2019m building stuff out of rocks, or in this case, with animation, I always feel like it\u2019s about how ideas are born.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/jr-talks-his-homage-to-christo-christies-sells-162-7-m-in-tepid-postwar-and-contemporary-auction-and-more-morning-links-for-may-21-2026-1234786595\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/GettyImages-2248583750.jpg?w=1024″] To receive\u00a0Morning Links\u00a0in your inbox every weekday,\u00a0sign\u00a0up\u00a0for our\u00a0Breakfast with ARTnews\u00a0newsletter. Christie\u2019s sold $162.7 million in postwar and contemporary art across three auctions yesterday, barely meeting expectations. Spain\u2019s parliament has threatened to fire the director of the Reina Sofia museum if the institution doesn\u2019t straighten out its fragmented inventory and the question of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1950314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1950314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1950314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1950314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1950314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n\t\tTHE HEADLINES\t<\/h2>\n
\n\t\tTHE DIGEST\t<\/h2>\n
\n\t\tTHE KICKER\t<\/h2>\n