Actor and comedian Will Ferrell was front and center at the fair with wife Viveca Paulin, who is a known collector and a trustee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The couple attended a breakfast hosted by the fair before checking out the art.

Actors and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson were also spotted laughing as they strolled together through the fair. Actress Sara Gilbert, who currently stars in the TV series The Conners, was seen clutching a map as she roamed the aisles.

Sources tell us a number of actors were in attendance, including the Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who was listed on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list in 2016 and 2017. Additionally in attendance were Robert Downey Jr. (nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer), Rob Lowe (currently staring in 9-1-1: Lone Star), Tobey Maguire (known for portraying Spider-Man), and Jeremy Pope. We also hear that writer and director Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Glee) and tennis player Aryna Sabalenka made appearances at the fair.

Prominent art collectors in attendance at Frieze this time include ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Komal Shah, Pamela Joyner, Ric Whitney and Tina Perry-Whitney, and Steve and Jamie Tisch.

This post will be updated as more celebrity sightings are made.

Felix L.A. is unusual for a fair because it doesn’t take place at a convention center: much of the art can be seen on floors of this hotel, with rooms converted into makeshift gallery spaces. The experience harkens back to art fairs of the ’90s and earlier, but its format is the most exciting thing about the fair.

Much of the work was mediocre, and many dealers opted for group shows of artists on their roster rather than solo presentations. Perhaps these gallerists were trying to clear inventory in a shaky market. But amid the hodgepodge, there was some compelling art. Below is a selection of highlights from the fair.

While many works explored a variety of interesting concepts, many booths fell flat and seemed relatively unimpressive; there were, however, a few standouts.

Later published on the Met website, the letter read: “The emergence of new and additional information, along with the changing climate on cultural property, demands that we dedicate additional resources to this work.”

This action followed six such seizures conducted in 2022 alone, the Manhattan DA’s office taking antiquities from Greece, Italy, and Egypt totaling $1.1 million, and a $25 million statue of a Roman emperor removed illegally from a Turkish archaeological site. Meanwhile, an investigation published last March by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in collaboration with the UK-based nonprofit Finance Uncovered, found more than 1,000 relics in the Met’s collection with links to traffickers, 309 of which were on display.

For the Met, proactive provenance research has long been part of its history, employing full-time provenance researchers who have worked quietly in the background for decades, investigating the histories of its 1.5 million holdings. A Met spokesperson told ARTnews that the museum plans to announce the hiring of the new head of provenance and other members of the team in the next month—about 10 months after publicizing the team’s creation.

The Met isn’t alone in creating an in-house department dedicated to this research. Since 2020, the Art Institute of Chicago has maintained three roles solely dedicated to provenance research, but that team’s top position has been vacant since last June. What will come of a dedicated provenance team remains to be seen.

As with other museums, whose holdings extend back to centuries of artistic production, these researchers have worked within specific curatorial departments, reporting directly to the department head or chief curator. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, itself having been the subject of several court-ordered and self-initiated restitutions over the years, is committed to keeping that approach. One staff specialist, Judith Barr, began working on the Getty’s provenance project, which constitutes a particularly sizable online catalog and an editorial platform that publishes on related topics regularly, via its antiquities department.

“Provenance doesn’t have to look the same [in] every museum. Every museum has a different structure. Every museum has different needs. We have different resources,” Barr told ARTnews.

While the provenance research may be housed in a curatorial team, the Getty has a dedicated collections information and access team that maintains, among other resources, an in-house provenance syntax guide, an orderly system for tracking an object’s history. “When you go online and … see our provenance,” Barr said, “you see it all looks the same … because we have the resources of this team that’s able to have built out their structure, and is able to help monitor and make sure that what we’re putting into [the collections management database] is standardized. That’s a really important resource that a lot of museums don’t necessarily have the … staffing for.”

Though there is now “more support and more awareness,” according to Barr, “provenance really requires long-term investment in a collection. You need to be familiar with the objects.”

Collection seizures and repatriation ceremonies have grabbed headlines over the past five years, but that wasn’t always the case. While provenance has long been an essential—albeit long-neglected—component of art historical research, it has been several years since it last made news, as it did in the 1980s and ’90s, when ARTnews ran several articles about Nazi-looted paintings in multiple public collections.

But, as Met director Hollein wrote last year, we are currently witnessing a changing climate—specifically when it comes to objects taken from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous peoples—that has led to a job boom when it comes to provenance research–related positions at top museums in the United States.

Victoria Reed has been a provenance researcher at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA Boston) for the last 20 years. When first starting out, she was told by older museum colleagues there was no future in provenance research; her commitment to the field has proven those naysayers wrong. “As the field has grown, staffing needs have increased at museums. We’re seeing many museums in the United States hiring more provenance researchers,” she told ARTnews.

But how much of this is just PR buzz? In researching this article, ARTnews reached out to nearly 20 US institutions actively investigating the provenance of their holdings. A little more than half responded to multiple queries for further details on their ongoing provenance research and the structure of the museum’s research staff. Only a handful agreed to speak on the record. Though many museums have been dedicated to quietly doing this kind of research behind the scenes, it’s alarming that so few are willing to discuss the work being done.

Provenance research within a museum’s collection is complicated: the objects under scrutiny span wide-ranging eras, cultures, and areas of study, including Greco-Roman antiquities and art and artifacts taken from Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The provenance of those from the World War II era can be especially fraught. Further complicating the research is the Mexican government’s recent call for the repatriation of artifacts it considers essential to the national patrimony, and the Biden administration’s recently updated guidelines to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring museums to inventory their collections of Indigenous artifacts in full within the next five years.

The MFA Boston is expanding its efforts, with provenance becoming centralized among the curatorial team. When Reed began, she explained, “museums were primarily looking at Nazi-era provenance. They were assessing their collections and seeing where they might have gaps or questions about works of art that may have been looted as a result of the Holocaust or World War II.”

Since then, however, the scope of that work has changed. “In the first decade of the century, museums began to scrutinize the provenance of their antiquities, particularly classical antiquities and other archaeological materials. The museum guidelines changed in 2008, requiring any new acquisitions of ancient archaeological materials to have a documented provenance back to 1970,” Reed said. “There was an increased expectation for museums to do provenance research on their incoming acquisitions, as well as [objects already in the] permanent collection.”

Now within the field, she added, “are calls to examine works of art that may have been acquired, traded, or looted under periods of colonial occupation, whether that is European occupation of countries in Africa or settler colonialism here in North America.”

Another veteran in the field, Cathy Herbert, with 22 years’ experience at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as coordinator of collections research and documentation, spoke similarly of these developments. “It’s been interesting to see [provenance research] expand,” she said. “I think that’s partly due to the Washington principles [first introduced in 1998], which talk about reaching just and fair solutions with claimants. I’ve seen that sort of principle starting to be applied to cultural property.”

She continued, “We are making progress. And a big part of that is looking at the question of repatriation claims, not just from the point of view of what’s strictly legal and therefore should be returned. But now looking at things through an ethical lens.”

Emphasis on the questions of ethics, Herbert said, has been integral to the field’s recent growth. This, along with “transparency—being upfront about how objects came into the museum, and also being much more careful about making acquisitions going forward” are crucial “so that we don’t fall into the same mistakes,” she added.

Herbert cited such notable moments as the Met’s return of the Euphronios krater to Italy in 2008 as a “big wake up call for museums” and “a signal that old collecting practices were not going to be countenanced anymore.” The latest “watershed moment,” she continued, came with the Sarr-Savoy restitution report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron in 2018, which sought to address the return of African art objects acquired during French colonization, and “unleashed a flood of interest.”

Though the field of provenance research is expanding, growing pains remain. Noticeably absent in the discipline is a codified format for cataloging information; there are general guidelines and primers on the subject from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), but the most current of any of these is dated 2017 (the oldest is from 2001). The International Council of Museums is currently revising its code of ethics, the revision expected to be ready for approval by the triennial meeting in 2025. Still to come are a centralized database for sharing research (however, singular projects like Digital Benin are emerging) and an organization to bring professionals together.

The digitization of records and databases alone has already been helpful for researchers. Herbert cited, for example, the use of a Jewish genealogy website to confirm personal details of a family that had sold an artwork to the PMA. Barr, of the Getty, described another such instance wherein she searched sports periodicals recently digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and found the sale of a famous statue in the Getty’s collection known as the Mazarin Venus. It was surprising to learn that it had been sold at auction by someone with a connection to the statue of whom they had previously been unaware.

Aside from training workshops offered through the AAM and the AAMD, two of the country’s top museum organizations, and a few museum studies degrees and certificate programs such as the Siena Program through Tulane and the Nazi-Era Art Provenance Research training program through the University of Denver, there are no educational programs or training specifically for provenance research, which has the net effect of significant on-the-job learning for anyone entering the field today.

Take for instance, Lynley McAlpine, who started working with the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) a couple years ago, through a series of grants and fellowships, before being hired full-time last year as associate curator of provenance research. Over the course of McAlpine’s research efforts, SAMA, with holdings in ancient Mediterranean, African, Asian, and Oceanic art, accorded her role sufficient import to create a position for her, working with the curatorial team to identify objects from the permanent collection in need of further research.

Since securing a permanent position, McAlpine serves as an example among a younger generation of researchers at smaller institutions who are also pursuing this work. She said she hopes that museums will continue to be responsible in addressing issues of provenance by “show[ing] the value of [the research] so that their trustees and leadership feel that this is really something that they need to commit to.”

The provenance researchers who spoke with ARTnews said they have found that their colleagues are eager to share resources and findings with each other. And, lacking a professional organization, there’s a small yet engaged group of committed professionals who have taken matters into their own hands: enter Provenance Connects, established in March 2023 by MacKenzie Mallon, a provenance specialist at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and Jacques Schuhmacher, a provenance research curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

“I think it benefits all of us when we work together as a team,” Mallon told ARTnews. “In provenance research, we can’t be an island. We work better as a group where we’re all tackling the same things. And not just working as a team within our own institutions, but also working collaboratively outside of our institutions with other researchers and people who are doing this work.”

Together, Mallon and Schuhmacher have so far created a broader network within provenance research between those working in the US and the UK, as well as a few in the Netherlands who speak English, to share information and research questions. The group meets quarterly on Zoom and is open to professionals in the field. In just under a year, it has grown from about 25 to more than 80 participants.

“It’s such a testament to the need for collaboration and cooperation in the field of provenance research,” Mallon said. “Provenance research has to be a collaborative field. And historically, that’s been difficult,” owing primarily to collection-related confidentiality restrictions.

She added, “We move the field forward faster when we move it forward together. Provenance Connects is all about those connections.”

While this spotlight on provenance research may dim in the coming years, it seems more likely that its importance as an integral part of institutional holdings will only grow. It may come at a price for museums, though, as funding these positions and possible repatriations can be costly. The LinkedIn listing for the Met’s head of provenance, for example, showed a salary range of $140,000 to $160,000 per year, while the NAGPRA coordinator and community liaison listing on the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries website cited an annual salary between $95,000 and $120,000.

This upward trajectory, however, stems from a shift in collecting ethics and a broader understanding of the geopolitical impact of provenance research. Ultimately, this kind of information can be used to illustrate historical narratives, including the history of colonization, the biography and tastes of former owners, trends within the art market, and the context of institutional collections. As it stands, institutions worldwide have two options: to be proactive in doing the necessary provenance research or to be reactive in addressing issues among their collections, regardless of the bottom line.

As this year’s editions of Frieze Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Airport and Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel approach, ARTnews catches up with 10 art dealers to know in Los Angeles, who are actively crafting the scene in the City of Angels.

Across three panels, the painting depicts the Adoration of the Magi, wherein the three wise men recognize Jesus as the son of God and bring him gifts, with Saint Joseph shown on the right and Balthazar on the left.

Jonathan Voak, a painting specialist at the auction house, told the BBC that the discovery was “exceptional and unique”. Adding, “No signed and very few documented paintings by Pieter Coecke van Aelst have survived”.

Coecke van Aelst was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1502 and worked as a painter, sculptor, architect, designer, and translator. He joined the Guild of Saint Luke in 1527 in Antwerp, where he received a number of commissions including the design of the stained glass windows at Antwerp Cathedral.

Coecke van Aelst operated a large workshop with numerous assistants working under his tutelage. It is unclear if this work would have been produced by the artist, his assistants, or both.

Voak notes, however, the piece “bears a close resemblance to others ascribed to him” and ” is unique with its own peculiarities, not a copy or replica.” His incorporation of the wings into the central composition is one such example.

The piece is estimated to fetch between £150,000 and £200,000 ($190,230 and $253,640) at Martel Maids auction on March 7, which will also include four early 17th century old master drawings attributed to the circle of Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.

The discovery of a lost Constable in Guernsey, which sold for £200,000 in 2023, has led to an uptick in private collection sales on the island.

Harvey began her foray into digital art as the internet was developing in the early ’90s, right before it boomed. Though she studied sculpture at the Parsons School of Design in New York, she was drawn to all things digital, a self-described “obsession” that drove Harvey to experiment with a number of digital formats that span photography, sculpture, drawing, and video. Yet, her works are hardly static.

In the digital world, Harvey is known for artistic experimentations on the website entropy8.com as well as the independent game studio Tale of Tales, which produced such video games as The Endless Forest. With both endeavors, she was driven by the ability to craft narratives and have personal interaction in the digital realm—a through line that continues in her practice even today. In fact, Harvey met her collaborator and partner Michaël Samyn online.

With digital art, “there’s nothing to fear here,” Harvey said from her studio in Rome, where she’s been living with Samyn since the start of the pandemic. The lockdown, she said, “had a lot to do with where I am today.”

Her breakthrough in the mainstream art world came only in 2021, with a solo show at bitforms gallery in New York, but lockdown restrictions prevented her from attending. For the exhibition, Harvey created physical sculptures, like Fauna (2018) and Minoriea (2021), busts which bear a resemblance to both the mythical creatures they represent and the artist herself; she also created these objects as virtual versions that were available online and in augmented reality (AR) so that anyone around the world could experience her work. She additionally gave virtual tours of the show to people in-person and online. “I felt like it was something I had been training for my entire life,” she said.

While the hype surrounding NFTs has been declining, the history of digital art has become fertile terrain for the art world, wherein pathbreaking artists like Harvey are finding the spotlight. Harvey’s first institutional survey is now on view at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 7. Titled “My Veins are the Wires, Your Body Is the Keyboard,” the exhibition showcases more than 40 works from the past nearly four decades, including her net-based interactives, video games, and AR sculptures.

Harvey’s earliest experiments with digital processes began with photography, as she moved between darkroom manipulations and hand embellishments. JV, a 1995 print from a suite of three related works, shows sections of a floating head mashed together among an imagined psychedelic landscape, overlaid with doodle-like digital marks. Mike Szabo, from that same series, is split into three sections showing part of the titular singer-songwriter’s head, in one panel, as he looks at a vast landscape with an astronaut floating in space, in a second panel; below Szabo’s head is a repeated digital houndstooth pattern of a face, parts of which have been filled in. While they may seem stylistically different from one another as well as current works, these photographs demonstrate Harvey’s early processes and fascination with the digital. But Harvey soon followed later that same year with entropy8.com, which has been reconstructed for the exhibition.

Many of Harvey’s key works dating to the ’90s are relatively inaccessible today, as advancements in technology have spurred their obsolescence. Digital art nonprofit Rhizome helped bring a number of them back to life through an “emulation system that is showing these old works in the exhibition in their original context” as well as with their original hardware and wiring, according to Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s preservation director.

In organizing the show, Regina Harsanyi, MoMI’s associate curator of media arts, said she wanted to present the breadth of Harvey’s oeuvre in a way that is “brazenly interactive and primarily shown on historical hardware.” She added, “The process of creating these local emulations, where[in] the work was initially made to be in a Netscape 4 browser on a Windows 98 operating system, [and] having to emulate that environment on a CRT monitor from 1999 takes a certain kind of knowledge, skill set, and labor.”

More broadly, Espenschied said Harvey’s “uncompromising artistic vision—expressed on media and technology that at the time was probably not ready [for it]—is really striking.”

Coming from a background in conservation herself, Harsanyi said, “It was really important for me to show all the video games and majority of the web-based art in an interactive way and the way that it was meant to be experienced.”

She continued, “I did that not only to educate younger generations on the sculptural and aesthetic specificities of, say, ’90s web, but also in doing that I feel it stays true to the integrity of the artworks.” Games like The Endless Forest, for example, can be played both online and in the museum gallery.

Though Harvey’s interest in digital experimentation has been and continues to be an important aspect of her practice, she was never interested it in for the sake of simply using digital tools. From the beginning, Harvey was instead using these digital tools to explore more complicated topics like intimacy. “I wasn’t creating work that was about technology or about the internet or about computers, but about the humans using the computers, myself using computers, my body in front of the computer,” she said.

This line of inquiry continued as she made video games to explore personal narratives, not unlike a book, wherein users “are thrown into this body virtually and have to feel their way through this story” that is also “tightly melding [them] with a virtual character.”

Her drawings and sketchbook, also on display in a vitrine, offer another level of intimacy by showing not only the process but the artist’s hand. One is filled with seemingly random text and numerical doodles, while another shows more architectural or sculptural studies.

Harvey’s sculptures take this a step further, following a similar ideology that starts with bodily forms, often her own, and continually transforms them. Her ongoing piece Echo (2018—), a holographic monitor based on a scan of herself, explores her slow transformation into a cave-like copy, with the story of Echo, the mountain nymph from ancient Greek mythology who is doomed to repeat others, serving as a backdrop. While Echo exists as a digital work, Harvey also 3D prints these renderings in various materials and iterations—a back and forth process between the artist and the computer. “It’s a constant circularity between putting myself in and taking something out, like finding this organic way inside and outside of the screen,” Harvey said. In this transmutation between formats and forms, new characters are also born.

At the heart of each iteration, digital or otherwise, is the question of humanity. Despite decades of contemporary society’s own back and forth between self and technology, the digital, no matter how fundamental to our lives today, still remains elusive to many at best. In taking up digital media as a medium in its own right, Harvey said she hopes to “show people that this is not so strange, that this is all perfectly compatible.”

The Cueva Huenul 1 site contains almost 900 paintings of human figures, animals, and abstract designs. One mysterious comblike pattern, a study recently published in Science Advances found, was made roughly 8,200 years ago.

Cave artists recreated the same design in black pigment for thousands of years thereafter. This design may have been used to communicate during shifts in the climate change, according to the New York Times.

Early inhabitants of Patagonia, a region located at the southern tip of South America, arrived roughly 12,000 years ago. Around 10,000 years ago, Patagonia became increasingly arid, making it more difficult to live there. The archaeological record in the cave suggests that the site was abandoned during this time.

The age of the paintings was confirmed using radiocarbon dating. Archaeologists also discovered that the black painting was made from charred wood sourced from burned bushes or cacti.

With a span of 3,000 years, the comb motif may have preserved collective memories and oral traditions of the inhabitants. While it now serves as a record of how people have tackled the previous challenges of climate change, the meaning and purpose of the motif remains unclear.

The activists were from the group Last Generation, a national student-led alliance that selected its name because they consider themselves to be the last generation before reaching a tipping point in the earth’s climate system. The photos they overlaid on The Birth of Venus depicted a flooded Tuscan town.

“The government continues to pretend that fields did not burn in January, that water will not be a problem this summer, that houses destroyed by floods are accidental events and not caused by human choices,” one of the protestors stated. “And instead of dealing with these real problems, it makes absurd laws”.

They were subsequently removed from the gallery and taken to a police station, reported France 24.

In November, a judge in Florence ruled that two activists who glued their hands to the glass protecting another Boticelli canvas in the Uffizi in 2022 were not guilty of committing a felony.

In January, a law increasing penalties for those who damage monuments and cultural sites was approved by the Italian parliament. This comes after a wave of ongoing climate protests has gripped Europe.

Last Generation began its peaceful protests in Italy in 2022, prior to the country’s general election. During these protests, activists often pleaded politicians to prioritize climate change.

Italy is expected to produce significantly higher emissions that those slated for its 2030 target, the European Commission said recently.

Throughout Europe, there have been a number of climate–related protests, including most recently the Mona Lisa being splashed with soup, as well as Monet’s Le Printemps.

The show explores the last few month’s of van Gogh’s life in a small town near Paris before his death by suicide at 37 years old in 1890. Leading up to his untimely death, van Gogh painted 74 canvases in just 70 days including Doctor Paul Gachet, The Church of Auvers-sur-Oise, and The Cornfield with Ravens.

Along with these iconic paintings, the museum took the opportunity to create an immersive experience via a virtual reality headset that placed viewers among the works. An interactive section animated through artificial intelligence created a dialogue with van Gogh.

This is a milestone for the museum, with the largest attendance since it opened its doors in 1986. The attendance for the van Gogh exhibition comes ahead of the 2022 show “Edvard Munch. A poem of life, love and death”, which brought 724,414 visitors, as well as the 2018 show “Picasso. Blue and Pink” with 670,667 visitors.

Given the success of the van Gogh exhibition, the Musée d’Orsay plans to create an immersive experience around its upcoming show “Paris 1874. Inventing Impressionism”, which opens on March 26.