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The Headlines
A SURPRISE IN THE SALESROOM.  Last week brought news that an Aboriginal heritage council in Australia had set up a  GoFundMe  in an attempt to raise funds  to compete for two works  by the 19th-century Wurundjeri artist  William Barak  that were coming up for auction at  Sotheby’s  in New York this week. That effort  brought in about $118,000  (US$83,600), the  Guardian  reports—short of the works’ combined estimates. But right before the sale yesterday, the  government of Victoria agreed to provide some AU$500,000 more (about US$354,000), which was enough to win the lots. “I feel pumped, I tell you,” a descendent of Barak, Ron Jones , told the paper. “We brought an ancestor’s relic back to Australia where it belongs.” An  1897 painting  went for US$378,000, and a  shield  from the same year went for US$52,920.
HUMAN RESOURCES.  The  Smithsonian American Art Museum  in Washington, D.C., has tapped  Randall Griffey  to be its  head curator ,  ARTnews  reports. Griffey is coming from the  Metropolitan Museum of Art , where he is a curator in the contemporary and modern art department. His credits include co-organizing its  Alice Neel  show last year. The  Palm Springs Art Museum  in California has hired  Luisa Heredia  to be its  chief education and community engagement officer ; she currently holds a chair in public policy at  Sarah Lawrence College  in Bronxville, New York. And the  Museum of Contemporary Art  in Los Angeles will soon have a  chief curator  for the first time since 2018: It just named  Clara Kim , senior curator of international art at  Tate Modern  in London, to the post,  Maximilíano Durón  reports in  ARTnews  . She starts September 1.
The Digest
“We need a National Memorial to Gun Violence, now,” art and architecture critic  Philip Kennicott  writes in a new column. One excerpt from his piece: “Our poets will say it better, so let them dress up words to this effect and chisel them on the frieze: Here we grieve those who died because we were impotent to help ourselves .”  [The Washington Post]
Ouka Leele , who won acclaim in post-Franco Spain with photos that she overpainted with watercolors, died on Tuesday, after a long illness, at the age of 64.  [The Guardian]
The Gallery Climate Coalition  and  Lloyds Market Association  are collaborating to make it cheaper to insure art shipped by sea, which has a fraction of the environmental side effects of air transport.  [Financial Times]
Thomas Heatherwick —the architect behind the  Vessel   in New York and the  Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa  in Cape Town—has created a 70-foot-tall sculpture outside London’s  Buckingham Palace  to honor  Queen Elizabeth II ’s Platinum Jubilee. It is called (in somewhat self-explanatory fashion)  Tree of Trees . [Architectural Digest  and Dezeen]
A plan is being considered to expand the cemetery in Buckinghamshire, England, that is the final resting place of author  Roald Dahl . However, one report has stated that the effort “may harm” a medieval and Roman archaeological site located nearby. [BBC News]
This is not really an art item, admittedly, but if you ever see novelist and wine writer  Jay McInerney  at a gala, consider making friends with him. It turns out that he likes to bring beverages—and caviar!—to such affairs. “I often bring my own wine to these events,” he said. “Always enough for the whole table.” Very thoughtful.  [Page Six]
The Kicker
THE NFT MARKET IS NOT EXACTLY ROARING RIGHT NOW,  and so the  Washington Post  spoke with some  people who have forked over huge sums  for those beguiling tokens. One gentleman spent a cool $600,000 on an image from a series called  CryptoKitties . For now, he is holding, rather than potentially selling it for less. “It’s more wait-and-see,”  he told  the  Post . “If it becomes a historical artifact, then it’s going to be extremely valuable. If that doesn’t happen, then maybe it just fades away into where nobody knows or ever cares about it.” Only time will tell.  [WP]