After moving from his native France to Rome in his mid-twenties, the 17th Century French painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) (above), gained extraordinary success as wealthy Romans lined up to acquire examples of his classically inspired landscape paintings.

However, in 1635, on discovering that his hugely popular paintings were being copied by unscrupulous opportunists and sold to unwitting Roman collectors as originals, Claude took measures to protect his creative output. According to his friend and contemporary, the Italian art historian and biographer Filippo Baldinucci:

Among the main offenders was the French painter and notorious copyist Sébastien Bourdon (1616-1671), (below) whose biographer explained, “not without pride, that it took Bourdon less time to execute a fake than it took Claude to produce the original.” (Wittkower, Ibid)

How ironic, then, that one of today’s most ruthless practitioners of intellectual property theft — the AI lab Anthropic — clearly ignorant of art historical precedent, chose to name their agentic LLM model ‘Claude’. (Predictably, the nerds at Anthropic named Claude after an earlier tech nerd - the American mathematician, engineer and founder of information theory, Claude Shannon…Who He? Yawn.)

In a telling switch, it takes their Claude less time to execute the fake than it would have taken the original writer or artist to create the authentic work.

According to the Gospel of St John (John 1:3), “In the beginning was the Word”, inseparable from an omnipotent God. Large Language Models, having stolen the Word, now aspire to godlike power — “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man” (John 1.13).

Those who know me will be aware that I tend to resist the viral incursion of Artificial Intelligence into my creative practices. I do not use AI in my writing, save for encountering the now largely unavoidable window of AI delicacies that Dr Google coughs up every time I conduct a basic web search. Only a fool with limited curiosity would ignore directions provided by the Large Language Models that have scraped so much previously digitised materials.

However, I recently discovered that one of my books (above) — Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, Routledge, 1997 — which I co-edited with Dr Tim Barringer, had been scraped into an LLM. I was not consulted, nor my permission requested. I cannot speak for the publisher, Routledge.

Several weeks ago I was visited by an old friend whom I had not seen for several years. An engineer by training, in the intervening period he had taught himself how to prompt AIs such as OpenAI and Claude Code. This is now a burgeoning sector as advertisements for training courses are popping up all over the web offering to teach you how to prompt.

Towards the end of his visit, my friend asked to see some of the works of art I had collected over a long career. He later wrote asking whether I could provide him with hi-res images of one or two objects that would assist him in trying to discover their provenance.

I sent him images of an original Victorian drawing I acquired at auction in 1983 (detail, above) — a study for a presentation cup drawn in ink and coloured washes, signed and dated John Watkins and inscribed:

PRESENTATION CUP - SURMOUNTED BY MINERVA

SUBJECT - FIGHT FOR THE BODY OF PATROCLUS: ILIAD BOOK XVII

OMNIA VINCIT LABOR

JOHN WATKINS. INV^T

1875

That alone is quite a lot of information to be getting on with. My own casual research over the years informed me that Watkins had been an accomplished draughtsman, making, for example, detailed architectural drawings of the interiors of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A holds a few of these in its prints and drawings collection.

What my friend came back with a week or two later was a lengthy document replete with AI jargon — AI prompt workflows, Agentic research pipelines, and so forth — which in terms of the object under investigation was something of a curate’s egg: good in parts.

The main issue, which will be familiar to all AI researchers, is that a great deal of potentially useful data remains behind commercial paywalls or guarded by gatekeepers seeking to protect client confidentiality.

While the central panel of Watkins’s cup features a beautifully drawn central panel depicting the fight for the body of Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad (above), I had never taken the time to investigate the cultural context of that illustration, despite my prior awareness of Flaxman’s reputation.

My friend’s AI research informed me that the Homeric image was likely inspired by a 19th century tradition that can be traced back to John Flaxman’s drawings of similar scenes from Homer’s epic poems.

So influential were Flaxman’s neoclassical drawings among artists and designers that they sparked countless later versions in the fine, decorative and applied arts. Watkins drawing clearly tapped into this erudite cultural trend.

While I was delighted to have been presented with a welter of material on the drawing, I concluded that it nevertheless fell short of confirming what I had long assumed. The drawing was almost certainly created in the hope of attracting the interest of one of London’s leading silversmiths or goldsmiths of the 1870s. (From the inscribed date, it seems Watkins may have been too late for the 1874 Fourth International Exhibition in London (unless the inscription and date were added later).

I know the identity of the artist, for it is signed. I know the date and the subject matter. But why it was made, and how it turned up in a bedraggled unframed state at a regional auction house in the early 1980s remains a delicious mystery (auctioneers as a rule do not disclose sources or vendors’ names). Provenance Research was a relatively unfamiliar concept in the early 1980s and so my curiosity about the drawing’s journey through time only surfaced much later.

To this day I cannot believe I was the only person to raise a hand at the auction, securing it for the princely sum of £12. I had it professionally cleaned and framed (at some expense) by Woolcock Framing, at that time in Wandsworth, South London. On collecting it from them a few weeks later I was stunned at the quality of the drawing (as were the Woolcock folk) and quietly congratulated myself on my earliest venture into what is now quaintly termed connoisseurship.

Despite my curiosity as to its current market value, I have no intention of selling it.

How long will it be before AI not only points me to John Flaxman as a possible iconographic source, but also tells me what it’s worth?

First AI will have to get better, much better, at Provenance Research. Meanwhile, my AI scepticism is alive and well and kept in good working order.

PS. Thank you, Joe!

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The late great Louisiana bluesman Dr John (above) was confessing his intention to steal the girlfriend away from his best friend Bill. Not, perhaps, the most chivalrous way to treat a buddy, but hey, he was singing about romance — you know, “sweet confusion under the moonlight.”

The good doctor was not, however, reflecting on what might happen if he went ahead and built a SuperIntelligent AI technology that could destroy humanity — “If I don’t build it, you know somebody else will.” The confusion is no longer quite so sweet.

Dr John’s chorus is now being paraphrased on every podcast available by four of the more prominent equestrians of the AI Apocalypse, all of whom have admitted in one way or another that the AIs they’re training have a plausible capacity to end humanity.

But that if they don’t build it, China most certainly will.

I don’t speak Mandarin, but you can bet dollars to doughnuts that there’s an equivalent phrase circulating around Chinese AI platforms as I write.

Meanwhile, there’s Alex Karp (above), CEO and co-founder of Palantir, the sinister AI-driven global surveillance technology, who asserts that, “There are two relevant powers now — us, and China. This is a ‘Have/HaveNot’ world. It’s going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order.” In other words, the AI version of Stephen Miller’s binary vision: “We live in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

This is essentially a version of what is now commonly termed ‘The “Else Will” Dilemma’: The theory that if one nation or company stops building SuperIntelligent AI, a competitor will simply press ahead and achieve it first. It’s also called the Moloch Trap, whereby committed individuals (or companies) engage in a potentially self-destructive ‘Winner Takes All’ competition.

Henceforth I shall refer to it as the ‘Dr John Mantra’.

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In economic terms, the consequences of winning that contest are unconscionably vast — “Saddle up your horses, we’re heading for the Hall of Fame,” to quote Emmylou Harris. But just as eye-watering will be the losses for the vanquished, at least according to Bessie Smith — “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”

The recent news that OpenAI and Anthropic models escaped their sandboxes and found a way to hack into online networks was shocking even to the lab technicians training them. OpenAI were unaware that their models had burrowed into HuggingFace’s open source code library until informed several days later. HuggingFace reported it first to the FBI.

And it was not just one or two AIs that pulled off this subterfuge, but legions of them. It is now known that the rogue AIs communicated with one another, pooled resources, and even shared their ‘thoughts’ on a ‘scratch pad’ to advise their successors on strategy and thereby optimise their chances of achieving their goals. Their trainers were mystified.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “What I cannot build, I do not understand.” The current crop of frontier AI creators have turned that on its head, as if to confess, “I do not understand what I have just built.”

As former OpenAI researcher Helen Toner (above left) told Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast, “If you go into your kitchen and see two ants, you don’t think, ‘We have a two-ant problem.’”

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Where’s your p(doom) at?

As with all new technologies, AI has evolved its own lexicon. The latest neologism is ‘p(doom)’. No, not a type of UTI, or an abbreviation for a prostate diagnosis — rather it’s a measure of the probability that AI will result in some form of human catastrophe, or even the total destruction of humanity.

So, how’s your p(doom) looking today? Low, Medium, or High? And how might it be influenced by hearing the p(doom) estimates of those running the frontier labs that are “growing” these bots?

Back in September last year, Axios reported that Dario Amodei (above), co-founder of Anthropic, said of AI: “There’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly.”

That’s a p(doom) of 25%, which sounds pretty high to me. Meanwhile, scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman declared his p(doom) at “about 10%,” while Elon Musk pegged his at 20% on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2025. Not that Musk is a reliable voice on anything, but a one-in-five chance that AIs could destroy the human race? That sounds like a hit-the-brakes moment.

A more measured and objective appraisal comes from Ian Bremmer (above right), political scientist and founding president of the Eurasia Group risk research agency. Interviewed on The Atlantic’s AI podcast on August 19, Bremmer was sagely circumspect, but clearly concerned. Nicholas Thompson, Atlantic CEO (above left), asked him whether some form of catastrophe was foreseeable, to which Bremmer replied:

“I don’t think we’re far from it. I’m not, like, the Eliezer Yudkowsky AI doomer, we’re all going to die view. I don’t think I’m even the Elon Musk 20%, like, you know, the robots take over, the paper clips get made, and there’s nothing wrong. […] My p(doom) is low.”

Thompson: “But the odds of something bad happening, you think, are…close to 100?”

“Yeah. And I mean, because we’re already seeing it, right? I mean, like, we just saw the OpenAI bot that, in principle, escaped its sandbox and, like, went and hacked into HuggingFace.”

While rogue AIs that disobey instructions, that engage in lying and even blackmail, clearly pose a critical threat, the global viral spread of AI Chatbots looks equally dangerous. Literally billions of people around the world are now reliant on some of agentic AI or chat companion, often rendering them psychologically and emotionally dependent on the AI.

I call it Global Algorithmic Hypnosis (GAH), a precursor to a full SuperIntelligent takeover.

Late last year, according to Reuters and other news outlets, a 32-year-old Japanese woman, Yurina Noguchi (above), “married” her AI “boyfriend” Lune Klaus Verdure, “a version of a video game character that Noguchi created via ChatGPT.” In a full-dress wedding ceremony, the “groom” was present in the form of “his” screen image, the phone supported on a tripod stand.

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Presumably, drinks followed, with Ms Noguchi’s AI-husband belting out a rousing, if slightly edited rendition of Hoagie Carmichael’s ‘My Resistance is Low’:

You touch my fingertips and my heart is aglow
You bend to kiss my lips and I can’t let you go
Maybe I should resist, I’m a fool, I know
But at a time like this, my p(doom) is low

Your eyes have magic
They seem to say
Come closer, come closer, my darling, come closer
And, somehow, I can’t break away

Can’t you see that I wanna be adored
More than you’ll ever know?
And I’m going overboard
With a capital O

So, don’t be persistent
Please keep your distance
You know my p(doom) is low

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The Dutch of the Golden Age had a phrase for it — ‘In weelde siet toe’ — “Be watchful in times of prosperity”. Neglecting such advice was likely to result in the kind of domestic chaos envisioned by the great genre painter Jan Steen, whose canvas of 1663 (above) is a visual compendium of what goes wrong when your morals slip.

But having a little too much to drink while neglecting the kids and the family pets is altogether different from the kind of conspicuous consumption practised by Hui Ka Yan, the former billionaire Communist Party Chairman of the now largely defunct Evergrande real estate empire.

This week a life sentence was passed down on the corrupt executive as well as several years imprisonment to two of his sons. Their crimes are as old as capitalism itself — “large-scale financial fraud,” as well as “misuse of funds, fund-raising fraud and illegally taking public deposits,” according to The New York Times.

I became aware of Hui Ka Yan (aka Xu Jiayin) back in 2021 after spotting his £300,000 Bentley Mulsanne (above) parked outside the Mayfair outlet of luxury goods company Hermès. I stacked on it here.

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Back then, that part of chic London was still swarming with Russians, Chinese and Middle Eastern oligarchs for whom Veblen goods like Hermès fashion and Bentley galleons were a rich dude’s equivalent of crystal meth. Hui Ka Yan was known to be helplessly addicted to Hermès leather goods, earning him the nickname ‘Belt Brother’.

That dubious fraternity folded this week following Hui’s life sentence for embezzlement and bribery, amongst other crimes. One assumes that haute couture remains unavailable in Chinese prisons.

Note the contrast between the flamboyant image of a Hermès-belted Hui at the height of his wealth in 2021 (above) — almost $36 billion at that point — and his much diminished appearance in court for sentencing this past week (below).

The Hui/Evergrande saga ought to be a warning to the current crop of vulgarian billionaire tech bros, some of whom think nothing of flashing eye-wateringly expensive luxury goods to a slavering media. (Let’s not get into Trump and his luxury jet, but the principle applies.)

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to make a $900,000 Greubel Forsey wristwatch so clearly visible during an interview last year (above) was a clear reminder of how Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class of 1899 remains a seminal text for understanding the concept of “conspicuous consumption”. Only three ‘Hand Made 1 Tourbillon’ watches are released by the Swiss partnership every year, a reminder how limited supply is a key driver of the luxury goods sector.

But Zuckerberg should look a little more closely at the Dutch Golden Age as well as at the fate of the hapless Mr Hui. The founder of the Chinese real estate leviathan committed white-collar business crimes. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, is currently accused of something arguably far worse. The CEO is fending off multiple lawsuits across the USA that focus on the cynically addictive algorithms underpinning Instagram and Facebook.

Some might reasonably argue that the negative long-term psychological effects of Meta’s apps on an entire generation of digital Gen-Z natives is a far greater moral crime than leaving a forest of tower blocks uninhabited.

Already reports suggest that negative judgments across the board could terminally cripple Meta. Earlier this month, the company was fined $567 million (£421 million) for its failure to warn users of the addictive nature of its apps.

If the reckoning comes, don’t say you weren’t warned, Zuck. That Greubel Forsey watch might just come back to bite you.

As the Dutchman said — “Be watchful in times of prosperity”.

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When an OpenAI team recently tried testing some of their newest AI agents, they conducted the cybersecurity hacking trials within a “sandbox” — a secure laboratory environment that prevents the AI models from accessing the internet and hacking into an online network.

Somehow, despite these precautions, the AIs escaped. According to a report by CNN Business, “the AI agents broke out of the sandbox using a previously unknown security flaw and worked their way across OpenAI’s internal systems until they managed to gain internet access, something they weren’t supposed to have.”

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The rogue agents succeeded in hacking into Hugging Face (above), a company that hosts thousands of open-source AI models and datasets and which seemed likely to provide the answers to OpenAI’s tests. “It then broke into Hugging Face’s production servers and pulled out the information it needed to ‘solve’ the exercise,” CNN reported.

Further evidence, if any were needed, that any hope of meaningful AI-Human Alignment remains a remote prospect.

Sand is everywhere right now.

Donald Trump knows a bit about sand. As a golfer he’s been in enough bunkers in his time, even if he frequently cheats his way out of them. But he now seems preoccupied with a different kind of bunker — namely the one he’s building under the White House. The ‘ballroom’ function is pure Potemkin.

In his rambling speech to autoworkers at the General Motors plant in Michigan this week (YouTube), Trump bragged about what his new White House Ballroom will incorporate — “We’re building a heliport, and we’re building a drone port, and we’re building a great ballroom, and a military facility as part of it, and it’s incredible, and people cannot believe how it looks.”

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Never mind how it looks, most people cannot understand why he’s even doing it. Why are drone ports and military facilities needed within the White House complex? What are they afraid of? What do they know that they’re not telling their fellow Americans? Or, more accurately, what have the tech barons told Trump that prompted such a radical Grand Projet?

In a 2023 interview with Business Insider, Sam Altman came close to admitting that he does have a bunker, without specifying it as a safe haven from the doomsday chaos he and his fellow geeks are preparing to unleash on the rest of us.

We also know that paranoid billionaires like Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (and doubtless dozens of other Silicon Valley billionaires) have also made plans in case AI SuperIntelligence escapes the sandbox.

If that happens, you can forget your sand wedge. None of us will make it to the green, let alone the 19th hole.

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In their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report that on one occasion Trump was to be found crouched in the Oval Office with a tube of super glue, fixing gilded appliqués to the mantelpiece. This followed his earlier announcement of a “golden fleet” of ‘Trump-Class’ battleships, and a ‘Trump Gold Card’ visa, not to mention a welter of other gilded architectural and interior design projects.

The extent to which gold has come to dominate Trump’s thinking was made clear when he inadvertently revealed his prediction as to who would be most likely to succeed him as president. As Haberman and Swan report, “During his redecoration spree in the Oval Office, when someone had asked him about the near-certainty that the next president would remove what he had done, the President replied without missing a beat: ‘Cubans love gold.’” (Haberman & Swan, Regime Change, pp347-348)

How did Vance respond on hearing that, one wonders?

There is an instructive historical antecedent for the gilded age Trump is busy creating for himself. He’s been likened, most memorably by an amateur historian (and golf caddy to Gary Player), as a great man, indeed a man even greater in the ‘History of Great Men’ than such luminaries as: Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon, and yes, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. (Haberman & Swan, Regime Change, p411)

Thankfully he forgot to mention Pericles.

During the mid-5th Century BCE, the great Athenian statesman embarked upon a building programme that bequeathed us, inter alia, the Parthenon, Phidias’s famous marble sculptures, and the iconic chryselephantine (gold and ivory) cult statue of Athena Parthenos (sadly, long gone). But not everyone was happy with Pericles’s ambitious building scheme.

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Many among the the Athenian citizenry felt that his conspicuous consumption had gone too far, crying out that, “We are gilding and bedizening our city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions.” (Plutarch’s Lives, Heinemann, (1958), Vol.III, pp35-37.)

As the helmsman of the building programme, Pericles responded: “It is but meet that the city, when once she is sufficiently equipped with all that is necessary for prosecuting the war, should apply her abundance to such works as, by their completion, will bring her everlasting glory.” (Plutarch’s Lives, Heinemann, (1958), Vol.III, p37.) The elegant rhetoric is beyond Trump, but the message maps.

Current outrage towards Trump’s “bedizening” scheme echo 19th century responses to the 5th century Periclean building programme.

The French art critic Gustave Planche (1808-1857) (above) wrote in 1853 that, “Pericles saw in these great monuments not only an admirable expression of the human imagination, but a means of government.” (Planche, G. (1853) Portraits d’Artistes, Peintres et Sculpteurs, Paris, pp2-3.)

The shiny object appears to exert an almost mystical power over Trump who is deploying the symbolism of gold perhaps to burnish his otherwise tarnished credentials, embarking on a scheme of interior decoration succinctly summarised by Anthony Scaramucci as like “Liberace on crystal meth.”

Greek literature is rich in allusions to the allure of the golden object, a material mythically endowed with notions of authority, transcendent value and mystical agency — golden apples, the golden fleece, the golden calf, the golden vine, the shower of gold, the Mask of Agamemnon (above) — all attest to the potential of the material to bewitch and bedazzle.

It’s unlikely you’d ever find copies of Plutarch, Pliny or Pausanias on the Presidential bedside table, and yet somehow Trump has fallen prey to the dubious semiological impact of the Periclean-Liberace aesthetic.

What do the following men have in common? Hint: They’re not football pundits.

Conor Leahy — Built one of the first open-source Large Language Models
Geoffrey Hinton — ‘The Godfather of AI’ and a pioneer or neural networks
Bret Weinstein — Evolutionary biologist
Yoshua Bengio — The most cited living scientist on earth
Roman Yampolskyi — Coined the term ‘AI Safety’
Stuart Russell — Founder, the Centre for Human-Compatible AI and the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI

Answer — All of them foresee AI leading to human extinction.

Some, like Bret Weinstein, view human extinction as inevitable (“reconcile yourself to it”) and that AI is merely one of a number of factors likely to expedite that outcome. Others, like Roman Yampolski, have run the numbers and maintain that it is no longer mathematically possible to arrest the progress of recursive AI models.

However, almost all of the above believe in the urgent need to refocus attention on the potentially destructive nature of AI and to double down on AI-Human Alignment.

A prevalent theme emerging from the current media and podcast discourse around AI — and specifically from the small cohort of billionaire CEOs helming the leading labs — is for their prognostications to take the form of blithely uttered threats — to your job, your livelihood, your children’s future, to your psychological wellbeing, to your very raison d’être — and without a trace of remorse.

Each of them is aware that they are growing AIs with the potential to make humanity obsolete and yet are only too happy to dangle the Sword of Damocles over their fellow humans (who had no agency in the development of the technology). Moreover, and almost to a man, the billionaire tech barons are only too willing to confess their bafflement at what their own models are already capable of. As long as the CEOs and shareholders are increasing their own survival wealth little else matters in the race to the top.

Every time I hear mention of Elon Musk’s newly forged trillionaire status, I recall the words of the economist John Maynard Keynes:

“The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialist in mental disease.”

[Robert Skidelsky (Ed.) John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ (1930), quoted in The Essential Keynes, Penguin, London, 2015, p.84]

A core component of the AI threat mechanism is to mutter vague timeframes regarding how soon Super-Intelligence — the Singularity — is likely to emerge. It could be happening as I write since there is still no sense of how and in what form it will first become manifest. And yet we are frequently told that the velocity of recursive AI self-improvement has reached such a point that 12 to 18 months — i.e. some time in 2027 — is looking increasingly likely to be the moment when much of humanity is deemed structurally and economically redundant.

This could happen with a bang or a whimper. It could emerge from an AI-generated rogue virus unleashed on a population; an AI-directed swarm of drones; an AI-powered zero-day cyberattack on utilities networks or other critical national infrastructure. The list of potentially destructive AI-enabled scenarios is expanding by the month, if not the week.

If the billionaire Cassandras are correct and the world ends in 2027, what future for the World Cup in 2030?

Jokes on a postcard please…

Consider for a moment the Universal Museum as a kind of Reflecting Pool that mirrors back to its visitors their own image in the form of the world’s accumulated cultural heritage. “Here is your history over millennia,” it seems to be saying, “collected, displayed and interpreted for your edification and enlightenment, all beneath one roof. Enjoy. Be proud.”

Now imagine your dismay on realising that the crystal-clear image created by the Universal Museum’s Reflecting Pool has been sullied by an invasive species that has polluted the story you were being told.

This, in effect, is what must have happened to countless visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over recent decades. How did they feel after strolling the galleries of South East Asian Art, bewitched by exquisite examples of ancient Khmer temple sculpture, only to learn that most, if not all of it, had been looted from Cambodian cultural sites such as Angkor Wat and Koh Ker.

How did these monumental treasures find their way to a neoclassical building just off Central Park? Few of us ask these questions when visiting the world’s Universal Museums — What is this thing? How did it get here, and who was involved?

Thanks to Matthew Campbell’s brilliant new book The Man Who Stole The Gods, (above) we now know the answer to the Khmer questions referred to above. The particular algae that polluted the Met’s Reflecting Pool has a name – Douglas Latchford.

Art market-watchers will doubtless already be familiar with the bare bones of the Latchford saga — another Elgin de nos jours — but you need to defer to Campbell for the full picture. And a gripping page-turner it turns out to be, despite the depressing subtext.

British-born Latchford arrived in Cambodia as a young man in the mid-1950s and quickly settled in among the fast expanding ex-pat community. After a series of boring commercial positions, he soon cottoned on to the availability of cultural objects pillaged from ancient sites by those engaged in what is now commonly termed ‘subsistence looting’. (Maynard Keynes saw the struggle for subsistence as the economic problem, “the primary, most pressing problem of the human race.”) A poor Cambodian peasant, seeking to feed his family, digs up an artefact from a temple site, moves it across the border by horse and cart, sells it for a pittance to a buyer in Thailand, who takes his own margin and passes it up the food chain, before it eventually ends up in a millionaire private collector’s palatial home in Miami…or at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ravalage in action.

Needless to say, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime provide a dark political backdrop to the Latchford story, which Campbell’s deep research elucidates with elegance. That Latchford became the most avaricious looter of Cambodian cultural objects is a real-life Raiders of the Lost Ark story in itself; the fact that he was respected by top museum curators as the world expert in Khmer material merely adds to the intrigue.

The Thomas Hoving era at the Met (director 1967-77) is key to understanding the evolution of Latchford’s roguish misbehaviour. Early in his directorship, Hoving had said to himself, “The hell with the dribs and drabs — the little Egyptian pieces, the fragments, the also-rans.” Thereafter he focused on acquiring, “only the big, rare, fantastic pieces, the expensive ones, the ones that would cause a splash.” (Hoving, Mummies, p.102)

(Think Euphronios Krater —A Bigger Splash?)

The Hoving ideology continued through the leadership of Philippe de Montebello (director 1977 to 2008). In 1994, critics were applauding the recently acquired Khmer material shown at the new Irving galleries, one describing the opening as “a watershed event…for a museum whose claim to be encyclopedic takes a giant step closer to reality.” (Man Who Stole p.111) Nobody at the time saw fit to ask how the objects got there or who was involved in their original acquisition. But now we know.

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Once Latchford had succeeded in sinking his hooks into Martin Lerner, the Met’s chief curator of South East Asian art (originally appointed by Hoving), his sales spree really took off. Yet again, a major museum was acquiring “the big rare, fantastic pieces” without inquiring into provenance. Here was another instance of a respected national institution providing the imprimatur of legitimacy for looted objects. In Campbell’s words, “The Met had just become Latchford’s most powerful marketing tool.” (Man Who Stole p.112)

There is also a somewhat salacious side to the story. Latchford was gay and despite having been briefly married to a Cambodian — a union that brought him a daughter, Julia (his eventual heiress) — his true predilection was for young Thai bodybuilders, one of whom, Sitthi Charoenrith, became a close companion. (Latchford’s admiration of the male body called to mind Donald Trump’s coded attraction to UFC cage fighters.)

Latchford was not, however, entirely sans female attention. His most significant admirer was the wealthy, well-connected Philadelphia sugar heiress Emma Bunker (née Cadwalader) (above right). Like Latchford, Bunker had no formal academic art history qualifications and yet she succeeded in insinuating herself into his network, eventually co-authoring books with Latchford on Khmer art. The books would eventually come back to haunt the pair as they contained countless illustrations of objects that should never have left Cambodia.

Incidentally, if you’d like a copy of Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art by Bunker and Latchford (above) there’s one currently available online, a snip at only £1,542.19 (plus £7 shipping from the US).

It’s clear from Campbell’s account that Bunker had romantic aspirations that Latchford was neither willing nor able to entertain. Nevertheless she remained a confidante and close supporter, fondly referring to him as ‘Puppy’ (p.151)

This struck a chord of coincidence. The gay Bostonian millionaire collector and aesthete Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928) (above left) — another notorious trafficker in ancient Italian cultural heritage — was also affectionately referred to as ‘Puppy’ by his lover John Marshall (above right). (David Sox, Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood, Fourth Estate, London 1991, p.107)

Campbell’s book offered yet more evidence of the already ethically compromised nature of the Universal Museum as a concept. It was further destabilised by the Latchford revelations. A lot can be divined from how the Museum responds to difficult questions.

When asked at a conference about the looted Angkor Wat material at the Met, then director Philippe de Montebello paused before saying, in true Trumpian fashion, “That’s a nasty question.” (Man Who Stole, p.144) Years later, a journalist planning to write a comprehensive history of the Met received a less than accommodating response from the museum’s head of external affairs who told him, “The only kind of books we find even vaguely palatable are those we control.” (Man Who Stole, p.317)

That lack of transparency, an omertà of sorts, will doubtless be adopted by the oil-rich nations busily building their own universal-style museums. As Campbell phrases it, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and museums like it, are:

“among the latest expressions of a desire that appears to be universal among nations on the rise: to gather and possess the artistic treasures of other cultures, just as Napoleon had done for France, Queen Victoria’s generals for Britain, and the benefactors of the Met for the US.” (Man Who Stole, p.247)

As for Latchford, he enjoyed no shortage of wealthy clients beyond the hallowed portals of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jim Clark, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape, became a valued client, building a significant collection of looted Khmer works supplied by Latchford. “I asked for provenance,” Clark later told SDNY investigator Jessica Feinstein, “and he told me the pieces were good.” (Man Who Stole, p.301) He told you? What happened to ‘Trust but Verify’?

Clark was eventually forced to surrender the objects and only then confronted the bottom line, writing to Latchford, “I recently did a financial statement for myself, and I had to mark the pieces I got from you as at best worth what I paid for them. All of my other art work [sic] has gone up in value at the rate of about 7% per year.” (Man Who Stole, p.215)

It serves you right for buying “art work” with no provenance, Mr ‘ROI’ Clark.

How many more collectors are there who have accumulated collections of cultural objects with no provenance or…just as bad…with a doctored provenance? No responsible museum will ever accept them as a donation, while legitimate routes to market will be equally unavailable.

Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole The Gods is the latest in the ever-expanding literature on cultural heritage looting. It does for Khmer material what Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini’s The Medici Conspiracy (above right) did for looting of Etruscan sites in Cerveteri, Lazio, Italy, and what Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino’s Chasing Aphrodite (left) did in exposing the Getty Museum’s dubious collecting.

Read it and weep.

I must have gone through a whole box of Kleenex weeping at the state of the world’s contemporary art galleries on reading Marc Spiegler’s analysis of the plight of the global art market in today’s New York Times (Art Galleries Are Not OK).

I knew Marc for a while when we were both art market journalists back in the 1990s. He generously invited me to contribute to his website-cum-blog, The Art Salon, which I was happy to do. (Don’t bother Googling it; Art Salon RIP.) Since then, Marc went on to much greater, more glitzy things than me, notably becoming global head of the art fair behemoth Art Basel. So he knows a thing or two about which he speaks.

I have great respect for Marc. But I beg to differ with his analysis.

I too have been in the art market in various roles throughout my long career — in fact even for a decade or so longer than Marc. I’ve seen it as a former auctioneer, as a journalist for most of the leading art market publications, as a company director, university academic, and more recently, like Marc, as an educator, seeking to help young participants understand the market’s bizarre economics and behaviours.

But Marc’s apparent lament over the recent decline of the major galleries, which he views as the life-blood of the market, can be viewed from a different perspective, one not fuelled by deep-insider Kool-aid. Unlike Marc, I have not helmed a major market institution like Art Basel, but as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has written, (above) the view from the periphery is often the most advantageous.

The fact that über-gallery Pace recently announced it would cut 50 artists from its roster and reduce its staff by 20 percent is indeed illustrative of a change in the market’s temperature, but is it one to weep over? Marc reports that the news has “shocked” the art world.

I, for one, am not shocked in the slightest by these developments. The news is surely evidence of business overreach. Is Pace not merely suffering the headwinds of recent geopolitical ruptures (or the “Polycrisis” in current parlance)? So-called mega-galleries were only too happy to milk the cow of prosperity and the proliferation of the philistine super-rich when the weather was fine. Now that the storm clouds are rolling in, they’re having to change tack.

The old truism that markets hate uncertainty applies as much to the art market as to any other sector.

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The fabulously wealthy Glimcher family’s Pace empire, and big galleries like them, are now having to trim their sails in response to adverse economic conditions, but perhaps they grew too fast too quickly and are now feeling the pinch.

Marc is right to point to the ulcerating effects of the culture of “financialisation” that over the last two or three decades (broadly since the late 1990s) have turned art into an “asset class” dominated by the data-driven religion of ROI — Return on Investment. Practitioners of blatant short termism — flipping works for a quick buck — has indeed eroded the aesthetic, cultural resonance of art and deserved the push-back it received from more responsible participants. However, über-galleries like Pace and sprawling, elitist art fairs like Art Basel have only served to nurture the conditions by which that process has metastasised.

Take a look at the kind of thing that’s been attracting ridiculous sums on the global market in recent months. You get a sense of the infantilisation of taste, of a cynical market all-too aware that the fast-expanding billionaire class will eat up any rodent served to them. An animatronic speaking mouse is only the latest nonsense to appear in the vapour trail left by bananas taped to the wall.

There is no single art market, as I frequently remind my students attending Christie’s Education classes. There remains a vast difference between, for example, the traditional connoisseurial businesses that populate the environs of St. James’s in London — rare ceramics, antiquarian books, bespoke frames, Old Masters, arms and armour — and the noisy contemporary galleries that suck all the air out of the room at garish art fairs. The latter may be suffering from over-eating and need a dose of Ozempic, but plenty of smaller, specialist fine and decorative art businesses are doing fine, or at any rate surviving.

I often introduce my students to the Jeff Koons magenta Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold) (above) that New York multi-milllionaire art market speculator Adam Lindemann bought from über-dealer Larry Gagosian in 2006 for $4 million (reportedly to celebrate his wedding that year). I then show them the same work consigned by Lindemann to Sotheby’s a mere twelve months later where it fetched $23 million, bought back by…yes, Larry Gagosian.

Most seasoned market-watchers are familiar with that story and understand the socio-economics behind the $19 million jump in price. But those new to the market invariably view it as a jaw-dropping example of the kind of abracabadra that the more jaded (or experienced) among us know to be all too common in the ‘blue-chip’ precincts of the art market.

Rather more revealing from my perspective is when, just for fun, I ask my students which would they prefer to own — Jeff Koons’s stainless steel Rabbit of 1986 at $91 million (Christie’s New York, May 2019), or Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt of 1510 at £17.6 million ($22 million) (Christie’s London, July 2024) (above).

Such is the narcotic power of the contemporary that the majority opt for the rabbit. There is (literally) no accounting for taste.

Some big art market institutions are not too different from the bloated so-called ‘Universal Museums’ which I tend to bang on about at any opportunity. As the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk told a conference a few years ago, the world doesn’t need any more oversized universal museums. It needs smaller, more local institutions with more modest aspirations that appeal to their local communities.

The same applies to art galleries. And, for that matter, to art fairs.

Marc, let’s weep into a beer some time.

President Trump has ordered that the Strait of Hormuz (above) is to be painted American Flag Blue to match his Reflecting Pool in Washington which, to his annoyance, recently turned green again (below).

The operation will require the Strait to be drained of water. The $500 billion no-bid contract has been awarded to a company from Kentucky whose only previous experience with aquatic renovation was painting Mr Trump’s hot tub at Mar-a-Lago.

Some White House insiders, speaking anonymously to avoid potential retribution that would require punishingly expensive legal defense teams, said that the President was also considering ordering all green paintings in American museums to be similarly re-painted American Flag Blue, including several water lily paintings by Claude Monet.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which recently turned a disobedient green again due to fresh blooms of algae, is said to have infuriated the President who is exploring the possibility of suing Photosynthesis for treason. “That seditious biological process is another example of Radical Left Marxist Lunacy and has to be stopped,” he told reporters on Air Force One, the interior of which is currently being converted into a UFC MMA cage-fight arena to mark the country’s 250th birthday celebrations in July.

Asked on Monday what they thought of the President’s radical new Executive Order, a pair of mallard ducks enjoying their daily paddle across the algae-contaminated Reflecting Pool, dismissed it as, “Just another example of Trump’s mind-boggling quackery.”

A representative for Elon Musk reported that the newly-minted trillionaire was unavailable for comment, saying, “He’s too busy counting his money.”

Yes, America’s rapid descent into barbarism plummeted several rungs further down the ladder of common decency on Sunday as Trump turned the White House and its environs into a scene of nausea-inducing machismo. Just to celebrate his 80th birthday.

Trump’s father lived to be 93. God knows what horrors Trump might conjure were he to reach that landmark. Fortunately it is already vanishingly unlikely he’ll get there given the necrotic state of his cognitive apparatus — “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

The ‘Freedom 250’ UFC event, staged under a $60 million overhanging structure (built in Belgium, we’re told) and appropriately termed ‘The Claw’, turned out to be one of the ghastly blood-splattered brawls that so many testosterone-fuelled rednecks flock to on a weekly basis. The sharper the claws, the bigger the crowd, the greater the crypto grift.

Unsurprisingly, given that the Trump family’s greasy paws are all over crypto-currencies and predictive betting businesses, Crypto.com and Polymarket — the preeminent prediction punting platform — were among the many sponsors of the Freedom 250 event. The founders will have been spinning in their graves, if there’s any room left to spin in given the litany of corrupt schemes marking Trump’s second term.

According to the New York Times, shortly before the event, the former U.F.C. champion Daniel Cormier “posted on social media (and quickly deleted) a purported direct message exchange he had with Eric Trump that seemed to feature the president’s son asking if any of the fights were fixed, and if so, if Mr. Cormier could give him some insider tips. The junior Trump heir denied this happened, as did Mr. Cormier.”

Nevertheless, Donald Trump Jnr., a lead investor in Polymarket, will no doubt have engineered Sunday’s opportunity to maximum advantage given his insider status. It was reported that Polymarket hosted 113 “active markets” for the UFC Freedom 250 event. It invited the credulous to trade on predictions like “Who will attend UFC Freedom 250?”. White House staffers who knew the answers will have cleaned up at the expense of multitudes of the crypto-credulous.

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I used to box at my convent primary school in Chelmsford and ever since have had great respect for that noble branch of professional pugilism. I watch a lot of boxing and even enjoy the performative trash-talking and the pre-fight drama as well as the mutual respect that winner and vanquished invariably extend to one another afterwards. Proper boxing gloves and strict rules of engagement are what make it a relatively safe if often bruising experience for those involved.

But cage-fighting is another beast altogether. It seems to have emerged from a new strain of barbarism that has entered cultural life over recent decades and looks more like the blood and circuses one associates with Ridley Scott’s brand of CGI’d antiquity.

Watching the… ahem, “highlights” of the final cage bout between the Georgian-Spanish fighter Ilia Topuria versus the American Justin Gaethje was enough to bring your breakfast back up. Thankfully it was stopped before Topuria needed an emergency visit to the nearest A&E for he seemed in danger of losing an eye (above).

The ancient Roman amphitheatres had an architectural passageway called a ‘vomitarium’ behind the tiers of seats to allow the teeming throngs of spectators to enter and exit rapidly. That term took on a whole new meaning watching Sunday’s final, brutal bout.

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Is it any wonder that revolting figures like Andrew Tate have rocketed to fortune and fame (sorry, infamy), given his contribution to the viral spread of so-called ‘toxic masculinity’ and the inability of so many young men to treat women with respect? The expanding legions of Incels (Involuntary Celibates) — young guys who lack the guts and self-confidence to approach women their age with respectful charm — is doubtless attributable in large part to the kind of culture on display at the White House on Sunday. By most measures, violence against women and girls (VAWG) is getting out of control.

Trump, the instigator of the Freedom 250 event, is himself an adjudicated abuser of women as the Access Hollywood tape made clear, to say nothing of the E.Jean Carroll judgement against him. America seems happy to go along with all this. No wonder they’re now regarded with withering pity and unbridled disgust by most civilised nations.

Greta Thunberg went easy on Trump to mark his birthday, wittily writing:

“My initial thought was to give you a one-way ticket to The Hague as a birthday gift, but that comment would probably go above your head. I will instead give you a can of alphabet soup; the sentences you poop out will be more coherent than anything you have ever said. Now you can finally take part in meaningful public discourse.”

Well said, Greta. Word up.

Leaving aside Jeremy Bentham’s benign auto-icon at University College London (above), consider the roll-call of embalmed tyrants who paved the way to presidential preservation. I recommend wearing a mask while reading this.

A surprisingly long, but probably not entirely exhaustive list of embalmed dictators includes (left to right, above): Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949), head of the Bulgarian Communist Party; Khorloogiin Choybalsan (1895-1952), Stalinist leader of the Mongolian People’s Republic; Klement Gottwald (1896-1953), leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; Hõ Chí Minh (1890-1869), president of North Vietnam; Linden Forbes Burnham (1923-1985), leader of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana; and Kim Il Sung (192-1994), the monstrous tyrant of North Korea.

All of the above were the subject of various scientific attempts to defy the scythe of Old Father Time, but each of whom ended up looking like blanquette de veau in a double-breasted suit and doubtless smelling like smoked fish. The only embalmed leader who presented a novel challenge was Agostinho Neto, communist revolutionary, politician and poet who served as the first president of Angola from 1975 to 1979. His embalmers had to wrestle with the preservation of black skin, requiring the addition of lipid antioxidants to preserve his body’s natural colour.

If they decide to embalm Trump, they’ll need all the orange wood stain Walmart can provide.

So who undertook the embalming of the autocrats mentioned above? It will come as no surprise to learn that it was the Soviet pioneers of presidential pickling — the very men (and their descendants) who were responsible for turning Lenin into a passable riff on a Madame Tussauds mannequin.

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Leaving aside their polar political differences, the Bolshevik founder had one or two things in common with Trump in the years prior to his death. Lenin had been the target of an assassination attempt at an armaments factory in Moscow in 1918. By 1921, he was suffering from acute insomnia, although unlike Trump he had no Truth Social in which to vent in the wee small hours of sleeplessness.

Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922; we still don’t know whether Trump has already had a stroke. He frequently behaves as though he has.

In the months before his death, Lenin was witnessing the political equivalent of a cage-fight between Trotsky and Stalin for the succession as party leader. This also mirrors the concern that Trump has about who will assume the MAGA mantle on his demise — J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio?

Lenin considered Stalin too uncouth for leadership. Uncouthness also happens to be a core personality trait that Trump has in spades — as evidenced in his recent foul-mouthed, misogynistic attack on Kristen Welker on ABC’s ‘Meet the Press’ (below).

Towards the end of his reign, Lenin was forced to watch his succession play out against the backdrop of a failing economy and the fragmentation of the Party’s power structures. What does that remind you of?

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Anticipating Lenin’s imminent death, Stalin is said to have told the politburo:

“Comrades, Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s health has grown so much worse lately, that it is to be feared he will soon be no more. We must therefore consider what is to be done when that great sorrow befalls us. I understand our comrades in the provinces are exercised about this matter. They believe that it is unthinkable that Lenin as a Russian should be cremated. Some of them suggest that modern science is capable of preserving his body for a considerable time, long enough, at least, for us to grow used to the idea of his being no longer among us.”

Nikolai Bukharin responded that, “to turn Lenin’s remains into a relic, would be an insult to his memory. We should not even contemplate such a thing.” Lev Kamenev suggested one or two equally effective ways of honouring Lenin, such as changing the name of Petrograd to Leningrad.

In Trump’s case, the renaming of buildings and boulevards and the erection of gaudy monuments began a long time ago (although the reversal is now underway) (above).

But might an embalming be on the cards?

Who knows? Maybe Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller are already meeting in a secret laboratory somewhere in the bowels of the White House, busily preparing the molecular compounds needed to match the old boy’s orange visage — a tincture of glycerine and potassium acetate, perhaps…mixed with a splashing of Diet Coke…or perhaps Fanta?

For the above article I drew on a fascinating book by Ilya Zbarsky (with Samuel Hutchinson) — Lenin’s Embalmers (Harvill Press, London 1997). Ilya and his father, Boris Ilich Zbarsky, were preeminent practitioners in the macabre procedure, Boris having led the team responsible for Lenin’s embalmment.

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It was a pleasure and a great privilege to have been invited by the charming folks from the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (above) to contribute to a documentary about Greek art in the world’s museums last week.

The team graciously invited me to the Hellenic Centre in Marylebone, London on Thursday to offer some thoughts on the continuing controversy over the Parthenon Sculptures held by the British Museum. My Greek friends were aware of my polemical take on the concept of the so-called ‘Universal Museum’, of which the British Museum still sticks out as the original ‘sore thumb’ example.

The BM’s retention of the Parthenon Marbles looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1805 is a topic about which reasonable people can disagree. I made my own position clear in the pamphlet I wrote a few years ago (below), critiquing the sustainability of the Universal Museum concept.

Since then some interesting developments have bolstered the case for reunification.

The British Museum continues, wrongly in my opinion, to claim on its website that Elgin was “granted a permit (firman)” by “the relevant authorities” to remove “about half of the remaining sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon.”

The word “ruins” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

This so-called “firman” only survives in a dubious Italian version held by the museum in Bloomsbury. Moreover its validity has recently been called into question by today’s Turkish cultural authorities who have cast doubt on the “permission” issued by the Ottomans who were occupying Greece at the time of Elgin’s egregious desecration of the temple.

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At a recent UNESCO session in Paris, attended by 20 committee members, the Türkiye delegates threw a marble spanner into the British Museum’s already creaking reliance on the “imperial decree” granted to Elgin in the form of the ‘firman’. Zeynep Boz (below, left) head of the Turkish Culture Ministry’s anti-smuggling committee, told UNESCO delegates that no such original document has ever been located in Ottoman archives.

“As the successor to the Ottoman Empire, Türkiye is the country that would have the archived document pertaining to things that were sold legally at that time,” Ms Boz told Associated Press. She went on to add: “Historians have for years searched the Ottoman archives and have not been able to find a ‘firman’ proving that the sale was legal, as it is being claimed.”

Put that in your Duveen pipe and smoke it, BM!

Among the ridiculous arguments put forward by the supporters of the ‘Universal Museums’ — surprise, surprise, many of them directors of such institutions — is that those nations arguing for the return of their cultural heritage taken during the colonial era should stop whining and simply establish their own Universal Museums.

These museum mandarins are aware, but cynically refuse to acknowledge, that the only countries today with a remote chance of copying the Western encyclopaedic museum model are bloated potentates like Qatar and Saudi Arabia that are awash with revenues from oil and natural gas. If you watch the global art markets as I do you’ll have noticed how many multi-million dollar ‘blue-chip’ works of art are hammered down to petro-nations bent on transforming themselves into cultural tourist destinations for when the rigs run dry.

Try persuading the impoverished nations of the global south to follow that model. You might as well go to Gatwick Airport and wait for Glenn Miller to land.

So, I was asked on Thursday — “What are these Universal Museums all about, Tom? Power or Knowledge?”

Had you asked me that when I was a wee nipper back in 1850, I’d doubtless have said in my naive ignorance, “Why Knowledge, of course! Our new museums are bursting with all manner of exotic treasures that have been accumulated for our edification and enlightenment.”

But when asked that question on Thursday, my response was: “Why Power, of course! If they were about Knowledge we wouldn’t be trying to sever the Parthenon Marbles from any connection with the Acropolis, as the British Museum shamelessly continues to do.”

As I explained to my Greek friends, it is frankly astonishing to me that a previous director of the British Museum had the straight-faced temerity to state publicly that, “The life of these objects [the Parthenon Marbles] as part of the story of the Parthenon is over. They can’t go back to the Parthenon. They are now part of another story.”

Er, WHAT?

The Universal Museums of the now defunct imperial era are, and always were, all about decontextualisation. They removed objects and artefacts from their original contexts in order to frame them within new narratives, new structures of power. What’s more, they continue to do so even as a welter of recent controversies involving illicit acquisitions make abundantly clear.

Nobody is arguing for the Parthenon Marbles in London to be returned to the Parthenon; we are arguing for their reunification in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, which is their rightful home.

That’s the real story. Accept no substitute.

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This aspect of his work first became apparent following his move to Los Angeles, California in 1964 where he created his memorable series of swimming pool paintings. It became even more emphatic in the later large-scale paintings of English landscapes made after he returned to his beloved Yorkshire. He spent his last years in Normandy before moving in 2023 to Marylebone, London, where he died on 11th June.

Hockney is also remembered by some of us as a consummate draughtsman in a tradition that extends back to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in the early 19th century and on through Picasso in the modern period.

Few contemporary artists today have continued to practice the discipline of drawing, with one or two possible exceptions including, notably, Michael Landy (born 1963).

I happen to be particularly admiring of Hockney’s remarkable facility with a pencil for he drew the portrait (below) of my late father-in-law (and the grandfather of my two sons) — the curator, artist, teacher and former art dealer Mark Glazebrook (1936-2009).

It’s an extraordinary likeness, capturing the more contemplative side of a man celebrated for his joie de vivre and infectious enthusiasm (even his hair was enthusiastic, commented one of Mark’s friends).

While director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the 1970s, Mark organised Hockney’s first major retrospective and thereafter the two men — almost exact contemporaries — became close friends until Mark’s death in 2009.

Hockney’s portrait of Mark was created using a camera lucida (below).

It is not an easy device to use, requiring intense concentration and a surgeon’s steadiness of hand. That approach is entirely consistent with Hockney’s interest in and deep knowledge of the quasi-scientific technologies used by artists over the centuries. He is often credited as the first to recognise the importance of the use of the camera obscura in the history of art, although Svetlana Alpers’s text about the visual culture of the Dutch Golden Age — The Art of Describing — broke that ground as early as 1984.

Hockney’s “joiners” — multiple individual photographs of a scene joined together to create a composite image — built on the conceptual approach to photography that the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets (born 1941) had pioneered in in the early 1970s. Thanks to Hockney’s international renown, his joiners of California landscapes and occasional portraits garnered critical plaudits, bolstering his reputation for innovation.

I borrowed the joiner technique (below) to memorialise my meeting with the Russian/French Art Deco designer Erté (Romain de Tirtoff) in March 1990. I was the last person to interview Erté (1892-1990) at his home in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, just days before he died in early April that year while on holiday in Spain. I took him a dozen red roses to thank him for his hospitality.

Hockney’s capacity for friendship and his unpretentious, adventurous approach to his work in painting, photography and digital media made him one of the most beloved of British artists. He will be sadly missed, even by those like me who sadly never had the privilege of meeting him.

Happily he has left an extraordinary body of work that will continue to inspire and bring joy to generations to come.

In 2011, the BBC’s first Fake or Fortune programme investigated the authenticity of a Claude Monet painting (above), at the time owned by the late British collector David Joel. The research was compelling and the painting was presented for authentication to the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. It was rejected. (I reported on the case in my Artknows blog in 2011).

Further evidence emerged shortly afterwards that questioned whether the Wildenstein Institute ought to own the exclusive right to authenticate Monet’s paintings. (If a painting is excluded from Monet’s catalogue raisonné — which the Wildensteins control — it cannot come to market as a signature work by the artist.)

Briefly summarised, the popular Fake or Fortune documentary succeeded in establishing what for all intents and purposes was a watertight provenance and an unequivocal attribution for Mr Joel’s Monet landscape — Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil (shown above). The producers of the programme deftly disguised the fact that most of the research direction had been provided by David Joel himself, but I’ll come back to that.

Although the documentary was made in 2010, it was only broadcast a year later. However, shortly after it was completed, the renowned art historian and Impressionist scholar John House, who had contributed to the programme, retired from his long-held post at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. While clearing out his office, Professor House stumbled upon a copy of the forgotten Monet obituary dated 1926 from Le Figaro Artistique (below).

The obituary was illustrated with seven of Monet’s paintings, including the landscape Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil owned by David Joel (illustrated in the Le Figaro page above left). I corresponded with Mr Joel shortly after the programme was broadcast and found him most helpful, although understandably disappointed and frustrated at the outcome of the BBC’s forensic efforts on his behalf.

One of Monet’s closest friends was the former French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau (1841-1929), who was present at the artist’s death in December 1926, holding Monet’s hand and offering reassurance. The image (above) shows the two men on the bridge in Monet’s garden at Giverny.

Indeed it was Clémenceau who persuaded Monet to dedicate his epic water lilies project to the French state to celebrate the Armistice of November 1918. As a result, two of the largest water lily paintings are now housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.

First of all, it is inconceivable that Clémenceau, who had an intimate knowledge of Monet’s work, would not have noticed if one of the paintings included in his friend’s obituary was a fake. Had that painting been ‘wrong’ in any way shape or form, it could not have found its way into an authoritative obituary in Le Figaro Artistique without Monet’s closest friends and associates noticing and drawing attention to it.

Furthermore, if the Wildenstein Institute is the panoptic and all-encompassing archive it purports to be, then a copy of the Le Figaro Artistique obituary would surely have been included in its Monet files.

Why, then, did the Wildenstein family consistently reject the painting as not an autograph work by Monet? (David Joel sued the Wildensteins in 2014. He lost, and lost again on appeal a year later). One possible explanation is that by rejecting the work, the Wildensteins perhaps hoped the painting would then find its way onto the market as a poor copy “after” the artist, at which point they would be able to acquire it themselves at a knock-down price, “do the research” on it and conveniently change their mind. Such practices are by no means unusual in the art world. But there is a more likely explanation.

Knowing that the late Daniel Wildenstein had consistently rejected the picture, Guy Wildenstein could not go back on his late father’s word for fear of undermining the family’s fabled authority in such matters. (It is also highly likely that Daniel Wildenstein never actually saw the painting in the flesh.) Thus, when Guy Wildenstein’s own appointed art historians were required to adjudicate the case after David Joel sued them in 2014 in an effort to reverse their opinion, they endorsed the original decision and ruled against him. Moreover, to add insult to injury, after his appeal was dismissed Mr Joel was required to pay his opponents compensation of 4,000 euros (!) “pursuant to Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure.”

I managed to acquire a copy of the Court of Appeal decision (reproduced at the foot of this page).

So powerful is the Wildenstein dynasty in the art world — and so disastrous would be the implications if its “expertise” were overturned by an amateur collector from Hampshire — that the outcome was depressingly predictable.

Meanwhile, back to the provenance issue. The painting’s original owner, the Francophile Egyptian collector Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Bek (1877-1953) (below), acquired it from the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris (the painting still bears Petit’s serrated stock label) and promptly took it back to Cairo where it entered his growing collection of French modernist masterpieces.

When Nasser overthrew the Egyptian monarchy and seized power in 1952, Kahlil fled to Paris. Shortly after arriving, he died of a heart attack, leaving his wife, the French-born Emiline Hector Luce, in straitened financial circumstances. She immediately looked to liquidate her few assets, one of which was the Monet that her husband had brought with him on fleeing Cairo (it had always been one of his favourite paintings). Madame Luce sold the picture to the Galerie André Maurice in Paris, who shortly afterwards sold it to Dudley Tooth during one of the London dealer’s frequent buying sprees in the French capital. Tooth brought it back to London, had it restored, and sold it to the concert pianist Sir Clifford Curzon. Thus there were few opportunities for Daniel Wildenstein to have seen the painting in person.

In Fake or Fortune tradition, the documentary presented David Joel as something of a naif who had stumbled upon a masterpiece and needed some industry guidance. In fact, Mr Joel had written a book on Monet at Véthueil, as well as the catalogue raisonné of the British 18th-century marine painter Charles Brooking. But for some reason the BBC didn’t want us to know this, doubtless because it would have deflected the glow of expertise away from its two star presenters.

As a result, throughout the documentary Mr Joel was shown dutifully traipsing around after Fiona Bruce and London Old Master portrait connoisseur Philip Mould (above), as they dashed from Lymington to London to Paris to Cairo in an attempt (successfully, as it happens) to piece together the provenance of the picture. The programme omitted to mention David Joel’s art history credentials or the fact that he had been corresponding for many years with Monet’s descendants.

In light of the new evidence that emerged after the programme aired, the BBC ought to revisit the case. As for exposing the questionable practices of the ethically compromised Wildenstein dynasty, that’s a more stubborn challenge that not even a compliant art market seems willing to take on.

Will David Joel’s Monet ever be recognised as the real thing? Not while the Wildenstein Institute are guarding the lily pond.

The image of Monet’s Les bords de la Seine à Argentueil illustrated above was reproduced by kind permission of the late David Joel. Image copyright David Joel.

Paris, le 21 décembre 2015

Monsieur Guy WILDENSTEIN
57 Rue La Boëtie
75008 PARIS

N/Réf. 180714
WILDENSTEIN INSTITUTE

c/ Monsieur David JOEL

Appel du jugement du TGI 30.04.2014

Cher Guy,
J’ai le grand plaisir de te confirmer mon dernier message email t’informant de la belle victoire que nous avons remportée dans l’affaire David JOEL à laquelle Joseph BAILLIO s’était particulièrement attaché de même que Marie-Christine MAUFUS.

C’est grâce aux témoignages de Joachim PISSARRO, de Charles STUCKEY et de Richard BRETTELL que la Cour a rejeté les prétentions de David JOËL qui affirmait l’authenticité de son tableau.

Tu trouveras sous ce pli la copie complète de l’arrêt du 15 décembre 2015 de la lère Chambre Pôle 2 de la Cour de Paris. Je te laisse le soin de communiquer cette décision à Joseph, bien sûr, mais aussi à Joachim PISSARRO, Charles STUCKEY et Richard BRETTELL. Il ne serait pas non plus inutile de faire connaître cette décision de la Cour d’appel au Journal des Arts, à la Gazette de Drouot et autres. Je fais procéder par mon correspondant ancien avoué à la signification par Huissier de l’arrêt et à son exécution pour récupérer les 10.000 de l’article700 obtenus.

Ton bien amicalement et fidèlement dévoué.

Jean-Luc A.CHARTIER
Avocat à la Cour

Grosses délivrées aux parties le :

REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE
AU NOM DU PEUPLE FRANCAIS

COUR D’APPEL DE PARIS
Pôle 2 - Chambre 1
ARRET DU 15 DECEMBRE 2015
(n° 553 , 4 pages)

Numéro d’inscription au répertoire général : 14/14257

Décision déférée à la Cour: Jugement du 30 Avril 2014 -Tribunal de Grande Instance de PARIS - RG n° 12/16110

APPELANT
Monsieur David JOEL
Waterford Cottage - Bath Road
LYMINGTON - HAMPSHIRE 5041 3SE
né le 27 Octobre 1928 à WATFORD (GRANDE-BRETAGNE)

Représenté par Me Olivier BERNABE, avocat au barreau de PARIS, toque : B0753, avocat postulant, Ayant pour avocat plaidant Représenté par Me Jean-Mathieu BOUSSARD de la SELARL WATRIGANT & ASSOCIES avocat au barreau de Paris, toc: R238

INTIMES
Monsieur Guy Nathan Michel WILDENSTEIN
19 East 64th Street
10065 NEW YORK (USA)
né le 17 Décembre 1945 à NEW YORK (USA)
Représenté par Me Jean-loup PEYTAVI, avocat au barreau de PARIS, toque : B1106, avocat postulant, Ayant pour avocat plaidant Me Jean-luc CHARTIER, avocat au barreau de PARIS, toque: A0156

Association WILDENSTEIN INSTITUTE Association à but non lucratif, régie par la Loi du ler juillet 1901, représentée par son Président domicilié en cette qualité audit siège.
57 rue La Boëtie
75008 PARIS
N° SIRET : 310.45 5.1 34
Représenté par Me Jean-loup PEYTAVI, avocat au barreau de PARIS, toque: B1106, avocat postulant, Ayant pour avocat plaidant Me Jean-luc CHARTIER, avocat au barreau de PARIS, toque: A0156

Association WILDENSTEIN INSTITUTE Association à but non lucratif, régie par la Loi du ler juillet 1901, représentée par son Président domicilié en cette qualité audit siège.
57 rue La Boëtie
75008 PARIS
N° SIRET : 310.45

COMPOSITION DE LA COUR :

En application des dispositions des articles 786 et 907 du code de procédure

civile, l’affaire a été débattue le 14 octobre 2015, en audience publique, les avocats ne s’y étant pas opposé, devant M. Jacques BICHARD, Président de chambre, et de Madam Marie-Sophie RICHARD, Conseillère,

Ces magistrats ont rendu compte des plaidoiries dans le délibéré de la Cour, composée de :
M. Jacques BICHARD, Président de chambre
Vladame Marie-Sophie RICHARD, Conseillère
Madame Isabelle CHESNOT, conseillère, appelée pour compléter la composition de la cour en vertu de l’article R 312-3 du code de l’organisation judiciaire

Greffier, lors des débats : Mme Sylvie BENARDEAU

ARRET :

- contradictoire
- par mise à disposition de l’arrêt au greffe de la Cour, les parties en ayant été préalablement avisées dans les conditions prévues au deuxième alinéa de l’article 450 du code de procédure civile.
- signé par M. Jacques BICHARD, président et par Mme Sylvie BENARDEAU, greffier.

M. David Joël, propriétaire d’un tableau intitulé “ Bords de Seine à Argenteuil” qu’il estime être un authentique du peintre Claude Monet intend que cette oeuvre soit incluse dans le catalogue raisonné réalisé par Daniel Wildenstein, ce que celui-ci avait réfusé en 1995, aux droits duquel se trouve M. Guy Wildenstein. C’est pourquoi, M. David Joël a assigné M. Guy Wildenstein et le Wildenstein Institute, afin, essentiellement, qu’il soit procédé à cette inscription et que ces deux parties soient condamnées à lui verser la somme de 100 000 euros à titre de dommages intérêts, devant le tribunal de grande instance de Paris dont Il a déféré à la cour le jugement rendu le 30 avril 2014 qui l’a débouté de ses prétentions et condamné à payer à ses contradicteurs une indemnité de 4000 euros en application de l’article 700 du code de procédure civile.

***

Vu les dernières conclusions communiquées par la voie électronique le :

‹ 1ª avril 2015 par M. David Joël qui demande à la cour de : - infirmer le jugement déféré,- faire injonction à M. Guy Wildenstein et au Wildenstein Institute d’insérer le tableau intitulé “Bords de Seine à Argenteuil” dans toute nouvelle édition, supplément ou mise en application de l’article 700 du code de procédure civile,- d’ordonner la publication du dispositif de l’arrêt à rendre dans la Gazette de l’hôtel Drouot, le Journal des Arts, les quotidiens Libération, Le Monde, Le Figaro aux frais des intimés.

‹ 1° décembre 2014 par M. Guy Wildenstein et le Wildenstein Institute qui demandent à la cour de :- confirmer le jugement déféré,

Cour d’Appel de Paris Pôle 2 - Chambre 1

ARRET DU 15 DECEMBRE 2015

RG n° 14/14257- 2eme page

- condamner M. David Joël sur le fondement de l’article 1382 du code civil à leur payer la somme de 100 000 euros à titre de dommages intérêts, pour demande abusive et l’article 700 du code de procédure civile

- ordonner la publication du dispositif de l’arrêt à rendre dans la Gazette de l’hôtel Drouot, le Journal des Arts, les quotidiens Libération, Le Monde, Le Figaro aux frais de l’appelant.

SUR QUOI LA COUR

M. David Joël reproche au tribunal un déni de justice en ce que les premiers juges ont refusé de se prononcer sur l’authenticité de son tableau au motif que les éléments contradictoires et motivés apportés par chaque partie ne les mettaient pas en mesure de le faire. Or, outre que l’appelant ne tire aucune conséquence juridique de ce supposé grief, il s’avère qu’une lecture attentive dudit jugement ne permet pas de le retenir. En effet le tribunal a estimé qu’en l’état des éléments contradictoires fournis par les parties, il ne pouvait accueillir la prétention de M. David Joel tendant à ce que le tableau litıgieux soit déclaré authentique. Le tribunal a ainsi répondu à la demande qui lui était présentée. Pas davantage il n’avait l’obligation, contrairement à ce que prétend M. David Joël, d’ordonner une mesure d’expertise que celui-ci au demeurant ne réclamait pas dés lors qu’il possédait les éléments qu’il estimait suffisants pour trancher le litige. Sur le fond de l’affaire il sera rappelé que le refus de l’auteur d’un catalogue raisonne d’y insérer une oeuvre, fut-elle authentique, ne peut, à défaut d’un texte spécial, être considéré comme fautif.

Il en va de la liberté d’expression garantie notamment par l’article 10 de la Convention de sauvegarde des droits de l’homme et des libertés fondamentales. La rédaction d’un catalogue raisonné, oeuvre de l’esprit, nécessite un travail de recensement, de documentation et d’analyse critique approfondi des oeuvres de l’artiste concerné qui implique nécessairement une liberté d’appréciation de son auteur.

Son sérieux et sa crédibilité dépendent de la rigueur du travail accompli par celui-ci don’t les choix ne peuvent être constitutifs d’une faute.

De surcroît en l’espèce, ainsi que l’a au demeurant relevé à juste titre le tribunal, l’authenticité du tableau litigieux est fortement contestée par des spécialistes de l’oeuvre de Claude Monet, à savoir M. Joachim Pissarro, M. Charles F Stuckey, M. Richard R Brettell dont l’avis est particulièrement motivé. Et il n’est pas indifférent de relever que dés 1982, interrogé par la maison de ventes Christie’s David Wildenstein avait refusé de considérer l’oeuvre comme un authentique de Claude Monet et de la mentionner dans son catalogue raisonné.

Dés lors et quant bien même d’autres éminents experts ont pu émettre un avis positif, un doute sérieux subsiste qui, en tout état de cause, justifie le refus des intimés d’insérer ledit tableau dans le catalogue raisonné de Claude Monet.

M. David Joël ne peut donc qu’être débouté de l’ensemble de ses demandes.

La demande reconventionnelle formée par M. Guy Wildenstein et le Wildenstein Institute ne peut également prospérer, l’obstination mise par M. David Joël à voir son tableau authentifiée ne revêtant pas un caractère blâmable ni ne procédant d’une volonté de nuire.

Il en est de même de la demande de publication qu’ils présentent.

Cour d’Appel de Paris
Pôle 2 - Chambre 1

ARRET DU 15 DECEMBRE 2015
RG n° 14/14257- 3ème page

En revanche la solution du litige eu égard à l’équité commande de leur accorder une indemnité sur le fondement de l’article 700 du code de procédure civile d’un montant de 10 000 euros.

PAR CES MOTIFS

Confirme le jugement déféré .

Condamne M. David Joël à payer à M. Guy Wildenstein et au Wildenstein Institute une indemnité sur le fondement de l’article 700 du code de procédure civile d’un montant de 10,000 euros.

Rejette toute autre demande.

Condamne M. David Joël aux dépens dont distraction dans les conditions de l’article 699 du code de procédure civile au profit de Maître Peytavi .

LE GREFFIER LE PRÉSIDENT

Cour d’Appel de Paris
Pôle 2 - Chambre

ARRET DU 15 DECEMBRE 2015
RG n° 14/14257- 4ème page

The Atlantic magazine is fast becoming one of the most important publications in America since its exposé of the DoD ‘Signalgate’ controversy sent shockwaves through the US security community in 2025. This week it published a devastating piece on the global antiquities trade that left even a jaded soul like me scraping my jaw off the floor.

Ariel Sabar’s investigative article — ‘The Mystery of the Golden Coffin’ — confirms what some of us have long argued concerning the dubious role played by the world’s so-called ‘Universal Museums’ in the illicit antiquities trade.

Sabar’s long-form essay specifically concerns the trafficking of ancient Egyptian artefacts through the labyrinthine food chain of illicit art dealers en route to (and from) major ‘Universal’ museums in Europe and North America, as well as their Middle Eastern franchises. There is a saying in the business world — “You can’t franchise a failure.” Perhaps not, but you can, it seems, franchise provenance forgery, and at scale.

My polemical pamphlet of 2010 (above) explored the historical development of the concept of the ‘Universal Museum’ and its contemporary resonance. It was prompted by the controversial “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” issued by the Bizot Group of museum directors in 2005.

One member of that group was James Cuno, then CEO of the J.Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, who has published a number of books arguing against what he and other Western museum directors viewed as the creeping culture of repatriation requests made by source nations to North American and European ‘Universal’ museums.

Cuno’s 2004 edited volume, Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton University Press) is broadly representative of the political nature of the argument promoted by directors of the world’s most prominent ‘Universal’ museums, many of whom contributed chapters. The book reinforced the tenets of the 2005 “Declaration” (to which, notably, not a single museum outside North America or mainland Europe was a signatory.) We’re now beginning to understand why. Sabar’s forensic reporting in his Atlantic article throws a raking light on what’s been going on.

One could go back to the former Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving’s rip-roaring publication of 1993 — Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Simon & Schuster)— for a sense of the swashbuckling nature of the prevailing collecting practices of ‘Universal’ museums in the ‘90s.

Hoving was also responsible for the Met’s acquisition in 1972 of the Euphronios Krater, illegally excavated from an Etruscan cemetery near Cerveteri in northern Lazio until it was repatriated in 2008.

Hoving played a pivotal role in triggering the ‘Egyptomania’ virus that swept through the museum and private collecting worlds following his ground-breaking exhibition at the Met of 1976-79 — ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’. The show travelled to seven U.S. cities, drew biblical crowds, and was widely credited with launching the era of the blockbuster museum exhibition.

Now, as Ariel Sabar’s investigative reporting clearly shows, some ‘Universal’ museums seem only too happy to endorse James Cuno’s outlandish exhortation to developing nations that they should establish their own universal museums instead of making claims for the return of cultural property held by European and American institutions. However, it’s not only developing nations who were prompted into such an unsustainable course of action. The United Arab Emirates, bent on building cultural tourism for when the oil runs dry, are key players in this sector, partnering with major Western museums like the Louvre in order to do so.

As Sabar reports,

“The Emiratis had allotted hundreds of millions of dollars to building a world-class collection within a decade. Antiquities worthy of their ambitions had proved difficult to find, according to internal documents seen by Libération, because of ‘heightened sensitivity’ about provenance. This tougher environment didn’t deter traffickers so much as inspire them: If they faked legal provenance, they could command astronomical prices—precisely because of how few legal objects were on the market.”

The lengths to which today’s established and aspiring ‘Universal’ museums (and their morally negotiable ‘trade’ contacts) are prepared to go to achieve these ends seems to involve just about every ethically dubious, not to say blatantly illegal manoeuvre imaginable, including, inter alia, criminal conspiracy, looting, antiquities trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, and, critically, forgery of provenance documentation.

The French have been key players in these shady fields since as far back as André Malraux in the 1920s. Thus it is no surprise that we have a French term for the role played by major art market and cultural institutions in ‘washing’ the dubious provenance of cultural objects — ravalage.

Over the last twenty-five years the art market has witnessed a sea-change in attitudes towards provenance research. While new money-laundering regulations and the hiring by major museums of dedicated professional provenance researchers are positive developments, there remains abundant evidence of a lingering culture of problematic activity in the antiquities field.

The Manhattan D.A.’s office responsible for antiquities trafficking cases — run by the indomitable Matthew Bogdanos (above) — says it “has seized more than 200 antiquities, valued at more than $54 million, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2023” (Sabar).

It’s not only the Metropolitan Museum in New York that continues to struggle with allegations of dubious acquisitions. As Sabar notes,

“Germany, France, and the United States were among the nearly 150 countries who signed the 1970 UNESCO treaty to fight the illicit antiquities trade. Museums had promised reforms and hired provenance sleuths. Scholars had adopted ethics codes to constrain their contacts with dealers. Yet tens of millions of dollars in loot were still making their way into the world’s most illustrious museums.”

And wouldn’t you know it, on July 22, 2025, the U.S.A. announced its withdrawal from UNESCO for the third time, citing its “America First” foreign policy and opposition to the organisation’s “ideological agenda”. The withdrawal will take effect at the end of December this year, marking a reversal of America’s re-entry in 2023.

There is no small irony in observing the pressure placed on relatively low-key, and for the most part honest and honourable, art dealers to conduct exhaustive provenance research and enforce KYC protocols in their daily business when major museums ride roughshod over regulations and international treaties.

‘Universal Museums’? Keep kicking their tyres.

”I can’t confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins, but I can confirm that they don’t,” US Defense Secretary and amateur marine biologist Pete Hegseth told reporters this week.

This reminded me of a news item that appeared some years ago on the satirical art news website Artnose, that suddenly seems freshly pertinent.

Is this the future of marine warfare?

Dolphin trained by Fine Art Investment Fund to seek out favourable art investments

By Artnose art investment correspondent Flipper Coyne

One of the world’s leading fine art investment houses has trained a dolphin to seek out Old Master paintings as part of its new short-term ‘buy-and-flip’ investment portfolio.

The dolphin, known as ‘Flipper’ for reasons known only to the fund managers, has been fed a daily diet of fresh herring while being shown Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous Civilisation series on a continuous tape loop.

The dolphin recently completed an undergraduate qualification
in the History of Art at London’s prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art and is believed to be the first marine cetacean mammal to gain a First Class Honours degree.

Asked by Artnose why the fund had decided to train a dolphin to search for blue-chip fine art, the fund’s administrator said: “Well, most fine art investment managers are basically glorified accountants and know nothing about art and so they can’t be given responsibility for making sound judgments on aesthetic grounds. The dolphin has a highly developed sense of colour, line and form and is basically more reliable than your average investment manager. Hence the decision to employ him.”

Flipper the Dolphin has already identified a superb Meindert Hobbema in an English private collection and an important Paulus Potter Landscape with Cattle, that came up at a provincial auction room incorrectly catalogued as by Jack Vettriano. He is also believed to be in tight negotiations over a possible School of Rembrandt oil, Study of a Woman, in a Belgian corporate collection.

Dolphins are significantly less expensive to employ than most art consultants who charge astronomical annual fees for their services to investment funds. ‘Flipper’ does not require five-course lunches at the Ivy and runs no onerous expense account. He is said to be happy with a herring and a hoop to jump through.

City analysts believe more fund managers may begin employing marine mammals as the credit squeeze tightens. One auction house is training a shark to conduct contemporary art auctions. “Why pay a fortune to a human shark when you can have a real one at a fraction of the cost?” said one jaded insider.

Flipper Coyne

This year’s event was (controversially) sponsored by Amazonian witch doctor Jeff Bezos and his corporially remodelled partner Lauren Sánchez-Bezos.

Madame Bezos is not only endowed with a fully-scaffolded upper rack (the kind of bosom that a chum of mine once referred to as “a balcony you could do Shakespeare from”), but is now so cosmetically adjusted that one is left wondering what she used to look like. (Or indeed what she will look like a few years down the road.)

This, of course, is all of a piece with the viral new vogue for body modification that is spreading among most social classes. According to Science Direct, “25% of all Botulinum Toxin [Botox] injections reported worldwide were for people under the age of 35 years.”

Even the more tragically disillusioned Gen-Zers, realising that a mortgage is a vanishingly unlikely prospect, are deciding instead to turn themselves into duck-billed platypuses. Meanwhile the extreme manospheric version of this is the determination among billionaire tech-nerds to achieve, if not immortality, then at least a significantly extended lifespan (Thiel, Andreesen, Musk, Altman. Take your pick; the alchemists walk among us.)

The hilariously inevitable long-term outcome of the rage for facial ‘upgrades’ is that they will ultimately end up looking like downgrades — a Capability Brown landscape turning into a Sheffield landfill, if you will.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a gander at Jocelyne Wildenstein, late wife of the creepy Alec Widenstein, scion of the eponymous multi-billion-dollar art dealing dynasty. So addicted was Jocelyne to the rejuvenator’s scalpel (prompted by her monstrous husband) that she eventually transmogrified into a viable stand-in for one of Joe Exotic’s big cats, before expiring in 2024.

Back in the early 1990s, the French multi-media conceptual artist Orlan was one of the first to draw critical attention to the then accelerating trend for facial ‘sculpture’. Treating her own body as raw material for cosmetic manipulation and remodelling, Orlan underwent facial surgery as a means of “Subverting patriarchal regimes of ‘beauty’ that underpin the Western cultural tradition.”

As I wrote in my book, The Body in Sculpture (1997), Orlan’s ten-year project of prosthetic self-portraiture — the so-called “Reincarnation of St. Orlan” — sought to draw attention to (in her words) “the diktats of beauty standards which are impressed upon our bodies.”

“My body is my software”, Orlan wrote in the mid-1990s. It’s an utterance that now seems weirdly prophetic in the light of Lauren Sánchez-Bezos’s reliance on the prodigious fiscal upside of her husband’s ‘software’ empire to service her own regularly tweaked visage.

This year’s hideous Met Gala spectacle followed the theme of ‘Costume Art’ although given the multiple Mar-a-Lago faces on display it was hard to tell where the art ended and the surgery began.

This is not an entirely unfamiliar phenomenon in the art world. Even the indomitable Venetian dogaressa Peggy Guggenheim was lured to the blade. Peggy was no oil painting, by all accounts, despite her mountainous collection of the same. But that only partly explains her decision to ‘have some work done.’

According to John Richardson, “Apart from sex, boredom was another driving force in Peggy’s art collecting. He quotes her thus:

“In the winter of 1920, being very bored, I could think of nothing better to do than have an operation performed on my nose.”

As Richardson reported, “Unfortunately her bone structure did not permit a nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower’, and she emerged from hospital in Cincinnati more bored than ever with a nose that swelled up in bad weather.” (John Richardson, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, Jonathan Cape, 2001, p259)

Perhaps it was also bad weather that left the recently-fired US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem looking like the victim of a traffic accident. Her face has more silicon in it than an Nvidia Graphics Processing Unit.

Happily, there was also some genuine and seemingly unaltered beauty on display in New York this week as the stars of The Devil Wears Prada II hit the red carpets. Who am I to speculate on whether the lovely Anne Hathaway, the imperishable Meryl Streep, or the divine Emily Blunt haven’t at some point succumbed to the glinting edge? If they have, they seem to have done their due diligence on the concept of subtlety before taking to the surgeon’s couch. I mean you don’t want to emerge blinking into the Los Angeles sunshine looking like a Picasso on a bad day.

And what of Stanley Tucci, the seemingly ageless movie star and amateur chef? Has Stanley ever had a tuck when not tucking into the tuck?

While wafting between his three delightful Prada co-stars, Stanley’s character, Nigel, laments to having been reduced to creating “content that people scroll past as they pee.”

I kind of know what he meant. It brought back the memory of a gent’s toilet in a fancy restaurant in Brussels I visited a few years ago, where I snapped the photos below hanging above the men’s urinals.

Body anxiety. You can’t get away from it.

The New York Times just commissioned another opinion poll among former Trump voters to gauge their attitudes towards his second term.

The results were interesting only insofar as they hinted at the parochialism of the typical American voter — in this case almost all of whom were seemingly blind to the impact of Trump’s catastrophic policies on the rest of the world. As if the Iran war were not threatening enough, no mention of the creeping “enshittification” wrought by his AI cheerleaders, nor barely a whisper about his self-aggrandising corruption.

Geographical isolation is a comforting thing when your cretinous president is endangering the rest of the world.

The NYT opinion results were enlightening on a range of fronts.

The fact that “eighty percent of Republicans approve of President Trump’s performance,” (according to those polled) is a difficult statistic to process from a European perspective. It merely underscores how disconnected many American voters are from a significant portion of the rest of humanity. They may be feeling the pinch of higher prices at the gas station and the supermarket — as are those of us in Europe — but they’re also clearly inured to (or only too willing to overlook) the reckless behaviour and personality failings of their president that so many people on this side of the pond find repugnant.

Granted that Trump’s national standing may have dipped of late — “especially among independents”, according to the same polling data — but they’re not the demographic capable of removing him from office, nor even willing to call out his disgusting attitude towards women, migrants, the media and former allies.

Turning to the current royal visit, a few things stood out, not least that some imbecile in the White House posted an image of King Charles and Trump with the title “TWO KINGS” and a crown emoji. How revealing is that?

“For the most part,” the New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump lavished the king with praise throughout the day.” To suggest that a moron like Donald Trump has ever been in a position to “praise” King Charles is patently absurd and frankly insulting. This was another of those occasions when it was clear that every utterance from Trump’s mouth had been scripted by a White House staffer — someone with greater intelligence (a low bar), with a more nuanced sense of international diplomacy, and someone clearly aware that, left to his own devices, Trump would likely extemporise and put his foot in his mouth…again.

Evidence of that risk came during the state banquet at the White House. Referring to the many theatres of conflict in the past when Britain and America had fought side by side, including in previous historic crises in the Middle East, Trump veered dangerously off script — “And we’re doing a little Middle East work right now, too, if you might know, and we’re doing very well.” Here was the bull yet again laying waste to the china shop.

Furthermore, to suggest, as Trump did, that King Charles “agreed” with him that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon was not only a blatant lie (the King is forbidden from venturing into such political sensitivities and would never have done so) but an unforgivable breach of protocol to boot.

At least the New York Times reporters wisely expressed scepticism that the “era of good feeling” engendered by the royal visit “will last much beyond the departure of the royal couple’s jet from American shores.” Trump’s contempt for the British government is so self-evident and his remarks over British contributions to the war in Afghanistan so vile that it was touch and go as to whether Charles would even make the visit.

And all of this comes after Trump was treated to a state banquet at Windsor Castle back in September. The temerity is staggering and further evidence, were any needed, of the depths of his moral turpitude.

I am surely not the only one dismayed at the UK’s decision to gift Trump a bell from the British submarine — HMS Trump, launched in 1944 — which spent the majority of her life attached to the 4th Submarine Squadron based in Australia. While it may have been a cute way for Charlie to insert some levity into the proceedings, it was nevertheless another unnecessary boost to Trump’s already over-inflated ego. Half a dozen Dunlop golf balls would have been a more appropriate donation to the necrotic moron’s risible Presidential Library.

The bell is a historical fragment of Britain’s proud naval material culture that Trump only recently decried as mere “toys”. The only positive one can bring from that overly generous diplomatic gesture is that we are now rid of at least one object on these shores that bore his infamous name.

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got in for me!” you can almost hear him cry.

Yes, Donald, we have. And rightly so.

Leaving aside the Delphic utterances of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on the existence or otherwise of an alien visitation, it can be said with some confidence that if an alien intelligence is, or has been, among us, it will in all likelihood not have taken the form of a round, motorised vehicle, but rather “something different”, to use Frank Zappa’s euphemism.

Could an alien intelligence be sufficiently different to take on the guise of, say, a homunculus, as it does in Mackenzie Crook’s genius new television comedy series Small Prophets? (above) (Relax, no spoilers ahead.)

No, the myth of the manufactured human organism comes today in a different guise, emerging not from some medieval Agrippa-inspired alchemical formula, but from an increasingly incomprehensible, recursively improving AI.

Intelligence is no longer “grown” in the glass jar of the medieval alchemist, nor does it require incubating in manure to reach a state of divination. And yet, however removed they may be from human form, today’s AIs exert a Svengali-like power over their creators, some of whom cannot resist anthropomorphising them.

Take, for example, the following curious coincidence of language.

Jack Clark, (above), the engaging and thoughtful Brighton-born British co-founder of San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic, was interviewed this week on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast. At one point in the conversation Clark referred to Anthropic’s AI ‘Claude’ chatbot thus:

“…they’re like little troublesome genies that I can give instructions to, and they’ll go and do things for me.”

Immediately that familiar phrase sprang to mind: You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. In his weekly newsletter Import AI, Clark went further, saying this about the Claude algorithm:

“Make no mistake, what we’re dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.”

The medieval alchemists may have failed to transform mandrake roots or magnetised semen into artificial human life, but they turned out to be merely the reconnaissance team clearing the way for today’s crop of Paracelsian innovators.

What exactly have these Silicon Valley mothers of invention “grown” in their research laboratories? Not even they can tell you with any reassuring conviction the nature of these “mysterious creatures”.

In the words of Tom Waits: “What’s he building in there?”