This week in art news: artists condemn AI scraping, fair price for Frieze, Maurizio Cattelan’s banana for sale and more…

Creatives fire back against AI content scraping. Nearly 30,000 creatives and organisations, including artists Amoako Bozfo, Deborah Butterfield, Hans Haacke, Cecilia Vicuna and Kennedy Yanko signed a statement aimed against “AI” tech firms accused to scraping copyrighted content for their training data, putting jobs in the arts and culture at risk. “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” says the statement. This comes barely a week after the UK gov floated the idea of allowing AI firms to scrape data based on an ‘opt out’ system.

Want to buy an art fair? Why not Frieze? Artnews reports that private equity firm Silver Lake will be taking Endeavour, the parent company of the international art fair, magazine, and exhibition space on London’s Cork Street, private, after three years of being traded on the NYSE. Silver Lake is reportedly looking to flog off the Frieze brand as well as two tennis tournaments (the Miami Open and the Madrid Open) as it refocuses Endeavour on representing celebrity talent.

How about a banana? Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous gaffa taped banana is up for auction. It’ll go on sale at Sotheby’s NYC on 20th November and is estimated between $1-1.5M. The artwork caught the attention of the world in 2019 when Cattelan slapped the yellow fruit on the walls of Perrotin’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach for all the right reasons – it’s stupid and funny. It was later the subject of a lawsuit. What will the buyer actually get, other than a banana? According to Hyperallergic, the buyer will receive a certificate of authenticity, installation instructions, a roll of tape and a banana. But how long until it goes off? We set up a livestream experiment to find out.

Julie Mehretu donates $2.25M to the Whitney Museum to fund free-entry for under 25s. A lot of artists like yapping about expanding access to the arts, few follow through, so, fair play to Mehretu. The artist said she knew from her own experience how tough access was for young people: “If you’re waiting tables like I was, you can’t afford to go to museums all the time, but young artists need access to art.”

Whose Warhol is it anyway? Collector Libbie Mugrabi accuses lenders of stealing her Warhol, the lenders say they’re owed $100,000. It all started when fashion designer Libbie Mugrabi applied for an art-backed loan from the Art Capital Group (ACG). These kinds of deals are pretty common, you get money in return for artworks as collateral, only Mugrabi says she never got the money, and now ACG have her Warhol. ACG says Mugrabi owes admin fees and hasn’t paid. Mugrabi reported the work as stolen, and even put up wanted signs. Apparently, she has a flair for the dramatic, once turning up to divorce proceedings in a bulletproof vest. This Warhol sitch is simply the latest in a series of hot messes.

Billionaire collector Dmitry Rybolovlev, the man who tried to sue Sotheby’s over art advisor fees, has been cleared of allegations that he worked with Monaco police to arrange the arrest of Swiss dealer and personal nemesis, Yves Bouvier. The two have been locked in legal battles across several jurisdictions ever since Rybolovlev found out that he’d been paying through the nose (he reckons around $1B) for Bouvier’s ‘advice’. Bouvier was arrested in 2015 while travelling to Rybolovlev’s penthouse in Monaco, but the case collapsed in 2019 after a judge found irregularities in his arrest. With this latest chapter in the Bouvier Affair inconclusive, we can’t wait to hear what happens next.

Kanye “Ye” West calls in Daidō Moriyama for new album cover. The rapper and producer really dropped off after praising Hitler and turning out to be a bit of a dickhead, but he still seems to attract star artists. The cover for his new album ‘BULLY’ is a new work by the Japanese photographer Moriyama – you might know him from his black dog ‘self portrait’ and his recent show at The Photographers’ Gallery. The picture – pure Moriyama, black and white with high contrast and heavy grain – shows a grinning face with blacked out front teeth, a style of Japanese makeup called ohaguro, traditionally worn by young adult women. It’s a great image, but did Moriyama really have to work with that anti-semitic sad act?

Students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago walk out in support of Palestine. The protest was called over trustee Steven Crown’s family connections to General Dynamics (the Crown family owns 10% of the company), one of the country’s largest weapons manufacturers and a major exporter to Israel. This is the second major pro-Palestine protest to take place at the university. In May, 68 protesters were arrested for setting up camp on the university’s lawn, however no charges were filed.

200 artists to donate artworks for Palestine charity fundraiser. An online auction running between 18th November and 1st December, will see works by Fiona Banner, Rana Begum, Sonia Boyce, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Goshka Macuga, Prem Sahib, Tai Shani, Alison Wilding and Sin Wai Kin among others sold to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières UK. “It’s time for the art world to put our ideas and theories around care into practice by supporting people in need in a real and material way,” said Faramawy.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced the launch of the David Bowie Center at its new V&A East Storehouse in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The centre will house the David Bowie Archive, a collection of 90,000 items of fashion, merch, clothes, records, letters, props and memorabilia covering Bowie’s 60-year-long career. The V&A East Storehouse is a major expansion of the London museum, due to open on 31st May, 2025. The David Bowie Centre will open on the 13th September 2025.

💩🫡 A sculpture of a turd on Nancy Pelosi’s desk has appeared on the National Mall in Washington DC. The artists are unknown, but a plaque mounted on the artwork notes that, “This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, to loot, urinate, and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election. President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as ‘unbelievable patriots’ and ‘warriors.’ This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.”

We read it, so you don’t have to: the latest Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting has mixed news for anyone in the art biz’. Sales volume is on the rise, but figures are down: the wealthy spent 32% less on art and luxuries in 2023 compared to annual average. This is largely down to wealthy millennials (28-43 years old) cutting back, however, the report notes that ‘the great wealth transfer’ will shift trends: over the next 20 years, $84.4T (that’s T for trillions) will pass from older to younger generations. Are we seeing a bust before a boom?

Gary Indiana, the art critic of New York’s Village Voice, dies 74. Indiana was a real hero at Plaster HQ. For just two and a half years, between 1985 and ‘88 his acerbic, authentic writing gripped the New York art world. This was the era of Reagan and the AIDS crisis, Indiana used his column to lash back against the greed-is-good attitude and of-the-era homophobia. In the end, he quit art criticism. His last column was an article on the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. “I’ve had my fun,” Indiana wrote, “and now it’s time to do something else.”