The email arrived in the art world’s inboxes last week with a thud. The subject line was “Important security update from Art Basel,” which slightly undersold the reveal. The world’s biggest art-fair concern had been hacked.
“We write to let you know that last week our parent company, MCH Group, was hit by a criminal cyber-attack using malware,” the letter started.
“The information currently available to us suggests that the perpetrators may have gained access to data such as personal contact details,” the email read. “We do not yet know the extent of the data breach and these traces are being analyzed in cooperation with cybersecurity experts as a matter of urgency.”
Some dealers who spend a chunk of June on the Rhine each year communicating with the famously neutral locals could read between the lines.
“It was in coded Basel-speak—that Swiss ‘we don’t make mistakes’ attitude,” said one dealer who works at a booth at the fair. “So clearly something bad happened.”
Indeed, Adam Prideaux, the managing director of the art insurance firm Hallett International who specializes in ransomware recovery, said that companies generally describe hacks in the vaguest way possible, so as to avoid a general freakout as the I.T. crew cleans up the mess and the hackers are paid off.
“When you hear about a hack, you never actually find out what happened because sometimes it can be so worrying—it’s just terrible publicity,” Prideaux said.
Its severity notwithstanding, news of the breach certainly gave pause to every dealer who had ever participated in Art Basel or any of its global spin-offs—the art market serving as a nexus of money, fame, and power and all. This is some potentially primo data.
“There are sophisticated hackers who are looking at sectors of the economy where they know there are transfers of large amounts of money, especially sectors of the economy that aren’t very tech savvy,” Prideaux said. “It’s easy picking. The art world gets targeted because it is a world where there’s exchanges of very large sums of money, and there are wealthy individuals and getting to them is very valuable.”
While Art Basel’s parent company says they are working with the authorities in Switzerland to catch the cyber perps, previous data hacks have seen the spoils sold or released despite investigations. If not leaked to the general public, the trove could be sold to the highest bidder—individuals who need all the personal information about the most powerful people on earth, perhaps for nefarious purposes.
Or instead of selling the data, they can use it to go after the collectors themselves. It’s happened before.
In 2017, several galleries in the U.K. were hit by a cyberattack where hackers pulled a “man in the middle” gambit, hooking marks by mimicking the invoices sent by the dealer—as was routine, six- or seven-figure deals were being finalized over email, on accounts that could be accessed through a password-phishing scam. The London gallery owner Laura Bartlett said that after she sent a client an invoice for a bundle of works bought from the gallery, the hackers swooped in to intercept the payment.
“Somebody sent out another email saying: ‘Ignore my previous invoice. I sent you old bank details; please use this invoice instead,’” Bartlett told The Art Newspaper at the time.
Bartlett kept on emailing with her client asking for money, but at a certain point realized that the tone had shifted—the hackers were impersonating her client to Bartlett, and impersonating Bartlett to her client, hoping to seize control of the entire transaction. The hackers were dictating all the correspondence.
And the thieves also secured the bag—the gallery’s client wired the large sum of funds not to the dealer, but to the hackers, and their bank was unable to reimburse the funds simply because they were targeted by fraudsters. “The bank has not made an error for which it necessarily has to take responsibility,” Chris Bentley, a director at insurer AXA Art, explained at the time.
But hacking a single gallery is one thing; hacking an art fair could present a potential clearinghouse. In 2017, hackers went after Expo Chicago, the oldest contemporary art fair in America. After breaching the system the perpetrators sent phony invoices to clients in an attempt to phish out financial information, a scheme that worked, for at least a while.
“They’d see a transaction and mirror that with their own transaction and redirect wire transfers, and all we had to do was put another couple of layers of authentication and then we got in the habit of all changing our company password every 30 days,” said Expo director Tony Karman, in a phone interview.
What we know about the Basel hack, where the information in the email—as well as a second email sent this week asking Basel clients to change all their passwords—points to a widespread scooping up of data. When asked how the Art Basel data breach compared to the Expo Chicago data breach, Karman said, “It sounds pretty serious—it sounds a lot more than what I experienced.”
“It sounds like the breach at Art Basel was much deeper into their systems,” Karman said.
While the fair is cooperating with the Swiss authorities, there’s no indication that the fair has been in any contact with the forces that now control their digital coffers. Perhaps collectors buying work at Art Basel Miami Beach next month might want to err on the renewed opportunity for in-person check, or better yet cash, delivery.
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…The art world’s most wanted man, Christian Rosa, is still at large, but in the days since my investigation into his whereabouts published last week, several sources have offered some intel on his whereabouts—and his past. In the German newsmagazine Welt am Sonntag, the journalist Boris Pofalla detailed some never-reported tidbits from Rosa’s time in Austria, where he was studying under the painter Daniel Richter at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2015, Rosa told a writer for the same newspaper about an incident that got him kicked out of school, but brushed it off as a minor scuffle. “I was even banned from the academy for a while. There was a brawl with a guy and then he teased me,” he said at the time. But in this week’s story, Pofalla reveals that that “brawl” was deemed assault in a ruling by the Landesgericht für Strafsachen Wien, the local Vienna court, and that the person Rosa called “a guy” received hospital treatment after the fight. Rosa was sentenced to 14 months on suspension with a probation period of three years. The article also mentioned that “A dozen people reported beatings, harassment, and threats to this newspaper, including against women,” but did not elaborate.
As for Rosa’s whereabouts, this week two sources said they heard he has made his way to Brazil. If that’s true, it means that Rosa, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, may not be extradited to the U.S. In 1988 the Brazilian government signed an amendment saying that "no Brazilian shall be extradited” and the South American country has enforced this bylaw on numerous occasions over the years. As for how Rosa would have possibly been able to escape Europe while being pursued by the FBI, a former intelligence operative with a focus on foreign relations explained that even if there’s an Interpol red notice on Rosa’s name, the flag is not an international arrest warrant but merely a request, and countries who see no need to do the U.S. a favor can easily overlook it. So, if Rosa were able to get to, say, Turkey or certain countries in Africa by boat or car, he could easily book a flight to Brazil without any obstacles. We’ll keep you posted on any other news of his whereabouts.
…The Joy of Basketball, a new book by artist Andrew Kuo and his Cookies Hoops podcast partner and writer Ben Detrick, is out on Tuesday, and from an early look the coffee-table tome is stuffed with hot hoops takes and gorgeous artwork from Kuo. Day ones stand up!
…China Chalet, the now closed infamous downtown party staple in an otherwise nondescript Financial District Chinese lunch spot, reopened very briefly and unofficially on Halloween when a bunch of marauding kids broke in—only to scatter when five cop cars swarmed the block.
…Allie Card will be joining Lehmann Maupin as senior director, as her current gallery, Metro Pictures, will shut down after its show of new work by Paulina Olowska closes next month. While at Metro, Card worked with artists such as Sara VanDerBeek, André Butzer, and Olaf Breuning, all of whom will need a New York gallery once the Chelsea stalwart closes its doors. A rep for Lehmann Maupin said there’s no new artists on its roster to announce right now.
…Artists at the Stanley Whitney opening Tuesday at Lisson Gallery included David Salle, Joe Bradley, Kayode Ojo, and Whitney’s wife, Marina Adams. The whole crew shuttled from Chelsea to the Odeon for a blowout gallery dinner at the classic spot.
…Half Gallery, the East Village outfit run by Bill Powers, will stage what has to be the most remote show in the history of Art Basel Miami Beach. He’s taking over a cabin a mile out to sea only accessible by boat, in an old shack that was once part of a nautical constellation of floating little homes called Stiltsville. Charter a skiff and head out to see works by Richard Prince, Lucien Smith, Mark Grotjahn, and more.
…In a sign that nature is truly healing, the fashion crowd has been Instagramming like crazy from a boondoggle out to Doha, Qatar, where Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has finally unveiled to her family’s kingdom…a Virgil Abloh show at Qatar Museums.
…Miami Beach voters passed a referendum this week banning the sale of alcohol after 2 a.m. Sounds like local government is still working out how to enact the last-call rollback, so dealers might have one more Basel to slum it into the sunrise at Mac’s Club Deuce next month.
…Are we living in the last days of Boom Boom? The Standard High Line, whose top-floor lounge, the Boom Boom Room, has been the site of many a blowout gallery dinner and fashion shindig over the years, but lender Wells Fargo is now moving to foreclose on the hotel’s current owner, Gaw Capital. According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court this week, Gaw hasn’t paid since May 2020 and owes its bank at least $186 million. (Reached for comment, a Gaw Capital Hospitality rep said, “the owner of the property would like to assure our colleagues and patrons that it is business as usual for the property and that the owner will use all available resources to vigorously defend the claims asserted in the complaint…”)
…Star-filled gallery alert: A ton of celebs stopped by UTA Artists Space in L.A. Wednesday to celebrate British Vogue editor Edward Enninful: Robert Pattinson, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry, Salma Hayek and Francois-Henri Pinault, Serena WIlliams, and many more.
Apparently on Wednesday night, there was something called “NFT.NYC” happening in Times Square, but if you walked a few dozen blocks to the Park Avenue Armory you would find that the very fungible, very non-token art world was very much still in full swing. For the first time since its February 2020 event snuck in just before lockdown, the Art Dealers Association of America held its annual swanky painting expo—called, simply and definitively, “The Art Show”—at the historic Upper East Side exhibition hall.
NFTs supposedly open the art market to the masses. The Art Show is slightly more exclusive. In order to access the fair during its VIP hour at 4 p.m. one needs to procure a $2,000 ticket, with all proceeds going to the Henry Street Settlement. At that hour it was the true lifers who punched in for fairgoing duty.
Octogenarian billionaire Leonard Lauder made the two-block walk from his apartment at 2 East 67th Street and showed up early, as did his fellow billionaire Aggie Gund. KAWS isn’t a billionaire (yet!) but the artist formerly known at Brian Donnelly walked through the aisles at the elite hour too. As the night went on, the tiers got less exclusive—5 p.m. entry is $1,000, 5:30 p.m. entry is $500, 6:30 p.m. entry is $350, etc. And as the crowds at the Armory swelled to normal art-fair levels, True Colors decided it was perhaps time to move on to where the real masters of the universe perch, a quick walk up Madison: Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. There 10 blocks from the Armory, and a couple miles from NFT Week, Sandy Heller, art adviser to Dasha Zhukova and Steve Cohen, was at a good table, phone in hand, closing deals.
This article has been updated.
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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