Ari Emanuel buys Frieze from Endeavor

Days before the start of Frieze New York, Ari Emanuel, the former CEO of Endeavor, is acquiring the art fair and publishing group from Endeavor ­in a deal valued at nearly $200m, reports the Financial Times. In a statement, Emanuel said that Frieze will be a ‘cornerstone’ of an as-yet unnamed ‘global events platform’. Bloomberg reports that this new company is backed by investors including Apollo Global Management and RedBird Capital Partners. The announcement ends months of speculation about the future of Frieze, which was floated for sale in October last year ahead of Endeavor’s acquisition by the private equity firm Silver Lake. After that deal was finalised in March, Emanuel stepped down as CEO, though he remains chair of Endeavor’s talent agency, WME Group. Frieze’s current leadership team, including CEO Simon Fox, will continue in their positions. The sale is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year.

Wolfram Weimer will be the next German minister for culture. His appointment was announced on 28 April by the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, chairman of the centre-right CDU party. Weimer is a former editor-in-chief of Die Welt and founded the political magazine Cicero and the publishing company Weimer Media Group. He has published several books, including a ‘conservative manifesto’ that advocates for a return to religion. The Art Newspaper reports that the appointment of Weimer has been criticised: an opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where Weimer worked in the 1990s, said that ‘it would be speculative to assume that Weimer has an interest in art or intellectual pursuits’. Weimer is not a member of the CDU but is aligned with the party, reports Monopol. He is replacing Green party minister Claudia Roth, whose initiatives included the establishment of a tribunal designed to help heirs of Jewish collectors recover art looted by the Nazis.

The Mellon Foundation will provide $15m in emergency funding to state humanities councils across the United States and in six of the country’s territories in response to major cuts to federal funding, reports the New York Times. The 56 councils that make up the Federation of State Humanities Councils (FSHC) were set to receive $65m in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Those grants, awarded during President Biden’s term, were cancelled by the Trump administration in March, with a portion of the funds set aside for a planned ‘National Garden of American Heroes’. The move left many of the councils – which support libraries, museums and community arts initiatives – at risk of closure, according to a statement issued by the Mellon Foundation earlier this week. Each council will receive a $200,000 one-off payment, and the remaining $2.8m will mostly be used to match donations of up to $50,000 per council. Phoebe Stein, president of the FSHC, said, ‘This is more than a grant – it’s a lifeline for communities across the country who rely on their humanities councils’ programs and grants to fill critical needs and enrich their lives.’

The €30m sale of a long-lost painting by Gustav Klimt, which last year broke the record for the highest price ever achieved at auction in Austria, has fallen through due to concerns about its provenance, reports Artnet. Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917) was sold by the auction house im Kinsky in April 2024 to an anonymous buyer from Hong Kong after the consignor agreed to pay half of the sale’s proceeds to the heirs of the portrait’s sitter, who came from a family of Jewish industrialists. However, two more descendants claimed rights to the work after it was sold. A settlement could not be reached, and the buyer backed out of the transaction. Der Standard reports that im Kinsky has lost at least €1.5m in the failed sale.