In Miami Beach this week, some blue-state gallerists in town for Art Basel struggled to find congenial ways to talk about the presidential election without alienating their affluent, increasingly conservative clientele. Miami-Dade County, after all, just went red for the first time in 36 years. Many opted for some version of “I’m just glad it’s settled” or “Now we can move on.”
On the other hand, maybe they meant it. After eight years of art-world resistance, including activists and artists protesting and even ousting museum trustees over their unsavory behaviors and ill-gotten fortunes — and of collectors and dealers in turn blacklisting some artists over their political views, especially around the Israel-Palestine conflict — the art world may, in fact, be ready to “move on” from the politics of cancellation and get back to business.
At Art Basel, all four international galleries that represent Kehinde Wiley, an artist whom four men accused of either rape or sexual misconduct this past spring, presented his work at the fair, sometimes in very big ways.
Wiley’s work is rooted in identity politics. The artist, who is Black, gay, and of decidedly nepo-free lineage, built a spectacular career out of inserting Black figures into the art-historical canon, a practice that led Barack Obama to select him as the artist of his official presidential portrait. He’s also become one of the most prolific and commercially successful artists of his time (he even threw a fish fry with Chaka Khan at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2022). Still, the accusations threw his juggernaut into doubt, with museum shows put on hold and paintings withdrawn from auction presumably for fear that his reputational damage would also ding his prices. But, at least judging by Art Basel, that commercial fear seems to have abated.
“Our stance is no stance,” David Daniels, sales director at the Los Angeles gallery Roberts Projects, told me at his booth on Friday evening of the accusations against Wiley. “We’ll wait to see what happens, and, so far, no one has brought anything to court.”
The gallery brought two paintings by the artist to the fair. Daniels said that one of them, a portrait of a shirtless young man wearing a yellow turban, had sold, but as I asked for more information about it, a colleague of his approached to make sure I wasn’t a reporter. Apparently, the allegations are still a sensitive subject, because they then declined to tell me the painting’s price or even its title (which was readily available on the gallery’s website: Portrait of Seydina Omar Gueye II, 2024), and I was referred to a PR company.
Stephen Friedman, Wiley’s London gallery, dedicated a large, dark-green wall to a salon-style hanging of 18 miniature paintings of Nigerian college students by Wiley. Some of the works, which are priced between $65,000 and $150,000 each, also appeared in a recent show at the gallery. (Apparently, the gallery didn’t sell all the works on purpose so that it could bring some of them to Miami.)
In October, some attendees of Art Basel Paris were dismayed to see that Wiley’s French gallery, Templon, prominently showed one of the artist’s paintings at the fair so soon after the allegations. “I guess they’re just pretending like it doesn’t matter,” the adviser Heather Flow said at the time.
Templon brought Wiley’s enormous, 13-by-8.5-foot Tiepolo-inspired painting of a young woman with cornrows, priced “in the range of €1 million,” to Miami; as of Friday evening, it was on hold for a potential buyer. There was also a bronze sculpture of a splayed-out, seemingly dead young man. It comes in an edition of three, one of which sold for £254,000 at auction in October. The gallery said that it had just sold the other two for somewhere between €250,000 and €350,000 each.
“For us, it’s really not an issue,” said Templon executive director Anne-Claudie Coric, referring to the allegations. “It was a rumor on Instagram over six months ago. It has nothing to do with any kind of reality.”
She pulled out her phone to show me an article that had come out the previous day on the news platform Pulse Ghana. It was about one of Wiley’s accusers, Joseph Awuah-Darko, an artist and founder of the Noldor Artist Residency in Accra. Awuah-Darko has a growing list of accusers of his own: Several former residents claim he collectively owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars for selling their artwork without paying them for it. (Soon after the story came out on Thursday, Awuah-Darko posted a disturbing announcement on Instagram saying that he had moved to the Netherlands to undergo euthanasia sometime this coming spring, after the release of his new book.)
Elsewhere at the fair, the formerly canceled artist Tom Sachs was showing his riffs on Picasso paintings. Thaddaeus Ropac sold one for $190,000. Sachs was accused last March of sexually harassing colleagues and subjecting his staff to grueling, degrading demands (including putting up with him in the studio wearing just his underpants). It cost him his lucrative sneaker deal with Nike — briefly. Two months ago, Nike announced that “Tom has demonstrated and recommitted to fostering a culture of respect and inclusivity.” The company will release Sachs’s Mars Yard 3.0 sneaker next year.
A recent essay by Dean Kissick in Harper’s denounced how the post-2016 art world is “driven by a singular focus on identity” and raising the question: “When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?” His answer is no: “The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed.” Whether or not that is true in any sort of lasting way is an open question, but for now, especially with the revanchist direction politics have taken, the art world might just be moving on from trying to do better. As one art adviser told me recently, “The tide has turned very strongly against these types of triggered social demands.”
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