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Good Morning!
- Pace CEO Marc Glimcher responded to ARTnews about reports of financial losses and the gallery’s direction.
- Brady Lum, former COO of the High Museum of Art has been sentenced to one year in federal prison.
- For the first time, lawmakers in Italy are examining a new bill to facilitate the restitution of art and cultural items looted between 1933 and 1945.
The Headlines
KEEP UP THE PACE. Pace CEO Marc Glimcher responded to ARTnews about reports of financial losses and the gallery’s direction. “Everything is turning,” Glimcher said over the phone, noting a “record” Art Basel Paris last month, “sellout shows” helping business get back in the black and a new location expansion in Europe coming “fairly soon.” Last week, Pace published its accounts with Companies House, showing significant losses in turnover for 2024 and 2025. Glimcher said: “We did a balance sheet shift, which appears to be a loss because we’re changing around the way we invest money and take money from other units and let the money flow through each unit independently.” He added that the 50 artists dropped by the gallery in June “were not artists that we had a super active engagement with,” and “it wasn’t benefiting them or us.” He is also working on moving into a new space in London, to be decided. “When we have the space and announce it, it’s going to make a lot of sense to everybody,” he said.
DOING TIME. The High Museum of Art’s former COO, Brady Lum, has been sentenced to one year in federal prison, followed by one year of supervised release, for embezzling over $600,000 from the museum by tampering with invoices and approving personal purchases, announced Georgia’s United States Attorney’s Office. “Lum brazenly pilfered hundreds of thousands of dollars from a beloved civic institution to pay for his high-end guitars and other personal items,” said US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. “His appalling breach of trust damaged not only the High Museum but also the larger art community,” he added. Lum served as Atlanta’s High Museum of Art COO from January 2, 2019, to December 9, 2025. He has paid back the full, stolen $607,688 to the museum, plus another $500,000 to cover costs the museum spent to uncover his own crime.
The Digest
Lawmakers in Italy are examining a new bill to create a committee that will research provenance and facilitate the restitution of art and cultural items pillaged by Nazis and Italian police between 1933 and 1945. [The Art Newspaper]
A city council in New South Wales will not exhibit Phil Buehler’s “Wall of Tears” installation memorializing the names of children killed in Gaza, due to cited safety concerns. [The Guardian]
In an interview pegged to a new limited-edition collaboration with watchmaker Hublot, Jeff Koons said: “I never think about price. I know I’m associated with very valuable things, but it’s not something I think about. I believe in the value that things have for humanity, in a conceptual way. In the knowledge and care they reflect.” [El País]
Despite turmoil at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, its prestigious annual Kennedy Center Honors celebration for lifetime achievement is pressing forward, awarding the likes of pop singer Paul Anka, playwright David Mamet, actor Andy Garcia, and country singer Barbara Mandrell. [The New York Times]
An unknown, intimate drawing by Duncan Grant of Vanessa Bell, the English artist and sister of Virginia Woolf, was discovered amid research for Tate Britain’s forthcoming show on Bell and Grant. [FAD Magazine]
The Kicker
ART WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. Thanks to an inventive “WANTED” campaignby the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans in France, aimed at tracking down hundreds of WWII-era looted artworks, one painting has just been found, reports Le Journal des Arts. The stolen painting by Dutch artist Willem Cornelisz Duyster, titled Le Buveur, was located at an auction house in Switzerland and is expected to be restituted to the museum shortly. Its owner purchased the painting in the 1990s, agreed to hand over the artwork, and said they had not known of its problematic provenance. In June 1940, Nazis attacked the city of Orléans, burning an annex of its fine arts museum, known as the Musée Paul Fourché, which was subsequently almost entirely ransacked, likely by people on both sides of the conflict. Some 350 paintings from Europe, dating back to the 16th century, were lost.
