Goldsmiths’s Centre for Contemporary Art said on Wednesday that it had been forced to close because its staff could not resume operations as usual.

“We’re doing this because while the occupation continues, we are unable fulfil the terms required by our insurers for keeping artworks safe and unable to maintain health and safety standards for visitors and staff,” the art space said in a statement.

A show devoted to the German artist Galli will be rescheduled from this summer to early 2025. A residency program at the center was also put on hold.

The students’ occupation of the Centre for Contemporary Art was related to a larger protest at Goldsmiths surrounding the school’s ties to Israel. Students had occupied other buildings at the school, moving the university to make a set of commitments in May that included a scholarship fund for Palestinian students, a statement on the conflict, and a review of the school’s investments.

That set of commitments did not include a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 37,000 people have been killed since October 7, according to the local health ministry. As a result, students at the school announced an occupation of the Centre for Contemporary Art.

“We reject an institution that co-opts the student movement for Palestine whilst continuing to fund genocide,” a group representing the students wrote on Instagram in late May. The statement called on the center to cut ties with Candida and Zak Gertler, two donors who have been linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Outset, a British arts fund cofounded by Candida, has also been the subject of recent Palestine-related protests.

The center’s statement did not mention Israel and Palestine by name, and said the protest “prevents us from being able to operate properly as a public art gallery.”

“We want to express our extreme sadness and sorrow to stakeholders (artists, educators and audiences) and staff for this temporary closure, which is a decision we have taken with a heavy heart,” the center wrote. “We hope for an end to the occupation, so Goldsmiths CCA can return to supporting artists, making exhibitions, and hosting our Residents.”

A spokesperson for Goldsmiths said, “We have looked to work with the campaign group and are making progress on the College’s commitments to them, so it is very disappointing that they are occupying a campus building again. It’s also deeply regrettable that their presence in the gallery means it cannot operate normally which includes being able to insure works of art and meet health and safety guidance for visitors. The gallery is a very special place which provides a cultural space for students, staff and our local community through a dedicated outreach programme.”

Update, 6/12/24, 1:20 p.m.: This article has been updated to include a statement from Goldsmiths University.

But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

On Instagram on Monday, activist Derrick Ingram accused Wiley, a painter most widely known for doing Barack Obama’s official portrait, of having raped him in 2021. Ingram alleged that the assault happened in Wiley’s SoHo apartment. Then, on Tuesday night, Terrell Armistead also accused Wiley of having raped him.

“Posting something to Instagram doesn’t make it true,” Jennifer Barrett, an attorney for Wiley, said in a statement to ARTnews in response to Ingram’s allegations. “Yet, in today’s world, anyone can spread blatant lies with a single post, and the public accepts it at face value.” She said there was “no evidence” for Ingram’s claims.

Ingram, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and the executive director of social justice non-profit Warriors in the Garden, said he was in a three-month-long relationship with Wiley, whom he accused of “extreme violence” and “severe emotional manipulation” during their time together. According to the timeline laid out by Ingram, the alleged rape happened during their relationship. He said he planned to sue Wiley in New York.

Barrett said that Ingram and Wiley had had a “one-time consensual encounter.” Ingram did not respond to a request for additional comment.

In the text posted as an image to his Instagram, Ingram explicitly named Wiley. In an accompanying caption that did not name Wiley, he wrote that he had been assaulted by “a predator that met me at my most vulnerable and knew that I was just starting to heal. He actively exploited my pain and today I am taking back my power.”

Ingram linked in his bio to a petition launched by Joseph Awuah-Darko, who accused Wiley of sexual assault last month. Like Ingram, Awuah-Darko claimed he had been assaulted in 2021. Also like Ingram, Awuah-Darko said he planned to take legal action against Wiley.

Armistead’s claims revolved around an alleged encounter in 2010 at Wiley’s New York apartment. Armistead accused Wiley of having made an effort to “grab my genitals aggressively” and of “performing forced oral penetration on me.” Armistead said he planned to join a class action lawsuit filed by Awuah-Darko, Ingram, and Nathaniel Lloyd Richards, who had also previously accused Wiley of sexual misconduct on social media.

Through Barrett, Wiley denied having known of Armistead or having ever met him. Barrett disputed certain details of Armistead’s claims, including a portion referring to “two big dogs” that Wiley allegedly held within his apartment. She said Wiley did not acquire his two Afghan hounds until 2015.

Armistead did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Barrett alluded to Awuah-Darko’s allegations, which she said were untrue.

“The false claims against Mr. Wiley began as a vendetta by an individual who shared a single consensual encounter with him,” she said. “This person pursued Mr. Wiley for over a year, unsuccessfully pushing for a relationship. Recently, this individual has reinvented himself, soliciting cash contributions from followers and encouraging others to join his fraudulent Instagram campaign. His efforts have produced one other person, who also had a one-time consensual encounter with Mr. Wiley years ago and subsequently spent months sending him romantic texts seeking a deeper relationship.”

In a follow-up statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday, Wiley called the allegations from Awuah-Darko and Ingram “baseless and defamatory,” and questioned whether money, fame, and an “insatiable need for attention” had driven the two to come forward. Wiley included what he said were screenshots of text conversations between him and his accusers, which he said discredited their claims.

“What is clear,” Wiley wrote, “is that my accusers wanted far more than I was willing to give them.”

Wiley previously denied Awuah-Darko’s claims, saying, “Someone I had a brief, consensual relationship with is now making false, disturbing, and defamatory accusations about our time together. These claims are deeply hurtful to me, and I will pursue all legal options to bring the truth to light and clear my name.”

Wiley is renowned for his paintings of Black sitters that reference Old Masters portraiture techniques. A 2022 New Yorker profile labeled him “one of the most influential figures in global Black culture,” and said that with his Black Rock Senegal artist residency program, he was “shifting the art world’s center of gravity toward Africa.”

A Wiley survey held the following year at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was a hit, drawing massive crowds. It has since traveled, appearing recently at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, with future stops planned at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the coming year, according to Wiley’s website. Spokespersons for the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Minneapolis Institute of Art did not respond to requests for comment.

Update, 6/11/24, 10:15 a.m.: This article has been updated to include a follow-up statement from Wiley.

Update, 6/12/24, 3:15 p.m.: This article has been updated to include mention of new claims posted on Tuesday by Terrell Armistead. Through his lawyer, Wiley denied these claims.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported last week that Honoré’s suicide had been determined a “work accident” by French social security and featured allegations from unnamed MO.CO workers who claimed Honoré had a tense relationship with museum management. The publication quoted a text from Honoré to a friend in which he said he felt “trapped.”

In an unusual move, MO.CO issued a lengthy statement Friday rebutting the Le Quotidien de l’Art article, saying that the museum considered the report “an unbearable exploitation of a tragic event which deserves dignified, measured and respectful treatment for all.”

The museum said it had set up a “psychological support unit” for staff there following Honoré’s suicide in November and wrote that his “memory was sensitively honored” in a number of ways, including via the staging of a Huma Bhabha exhibition that he had organized, which the museum has offered to the public free of charge.

Responding to Honore’s text about feeling “trapped,” the museum said that he had never taken sick leave “in recent years,” and that it had never denied a request by him for time off.

Le Quotidien de l’Art reported that Honoré had been facing a “hidden demotion” just prior to his death wherein certain unspecified responsibilities were to be taken away from him. MO.CO denied this, saying that his “positions and responsibilities have never been called into question.”

The museum did not deny that French social security had determined his suicide was a “work accident,” noting that the institution confirmed receipt of the decision in March. MO.CO is currently appealing that decision.

Honoré was 48 when he died by suicide last year. He had been head of exhibitions since 2019, and had before that been senior curator at the Hayward Gallery in London, where he gained a reputation as a closely-watched figure in the European scene.

Between 2021 and 2023, Sigfrids ran a gallery in New York as well. She is the second dealer in the city to announce a closure this week, after Simone Subal, who will shutter her 12-year-old Lower East Side gallery this month. News of the closure of Sigfrids’s gallery and her hiring by Canada was first reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet News’s “Wet Paint” column.

First opened in 2013 in Los Angeles, Tif Sigfrids showed artists such as Thomas Dozol, Mimi Lauter, and Becky Kolsrud. The gallery relocated to Athens, Georgia, in 2018. The gallery’s last show, a group exhibition called “Bedroom Furniture,” closed in May.

“I’ve been doing this thing by myself for 11 years now, and while some people would love to have all that autonomy, I miss being part of a bigger world, or something that feels bigger than myself,” she told Artnet.

Although artists that Sigfrids has shown will be integrated into Canada’s programming, her roster will not be entirely ported over to that gallery.

Canada’s stable includes Katherine Bradford, Katherine Bernhardt, Matt Connors, Samara Golden, Joan Snyder, and Rachel Eulena Williams. In 2018, the gallery relocated from the Lower East Side to Tribeca, which has become one of the central gallery districts in New York.

In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

Founded by Margaret Lee and Oliver Newton, the gallery, one of the most closely watched commercial art spaces in Chinatown, has been located at 291 Grand Street since 2014. It officially opened in 2011 on Canal Street, though the gallery grew out of a project space in Lee’s studio that predated the commercial operation by two years.

A range of star artists had some of their first shows with 47 Canal, most notably Anicka Yi and Josh Kline. Michele Abeles, Antoine Catala, Danielle Dean, Gregory Edwards, KAYA, Elle Pérez, and Trevor Shimizu have also held shows with the gallery.

The new address will be 59 Wooster Street, in a building that was once home to the now defunct gallery Alexander and Bonin before its move to Tribeca. The new location is just down the block from the blue-chip dealerships Jeffrey Deitch and Hauser & Wirth, and not far from Tribeca, where a range of galleries has sprung up in the past five years.

The Lower East Side and Chinatown remain thrumming art districts, with their residents including Maxwell Graham, Bridget Donahue, Ramiken, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Rachel Uffner, and a range of other outfits. But 47 Canal’s departure from Chinatown is notable, since the gallery is the most high-profile one to date to leave the neighborhood, which was once the go-to destination for experimental shows by young artists.

Others, such as James Fuentes Gallery and Chapter NY, have left the Lower East Side for Tribeca, where they remain. But still others, from David Lewis Gallery to JTT, have made the move to Tribeca, only to permanently shutter not long afterward. (Several notable Lower East Side and Chinatown galleries have also recently closed, including Foxy Production, Helena Anrather, and, most recently, Simone Subal Gallery.)

The gallery will open July 3 at its new location with “Summer with Friends and Family,” a group show curated by artist G. Peter Jemison. Its last in Chinatown, a solo show by Kazuyuki Takezaki, closes June 8.

Founded in 2011, the Lower East Side gallery currently represents artists such as Julien Bismuth, Baseera Khan, Anna K.E., Florian Meisenberg, and the late Brian O’Doherty. Its current show, a solo exhibition for painter Nova Jiang that closes on June 22, will be the gallery’s last.

“I personally came to the conclusion that this was the right time to end this chapter of my life, and I always believe it’s best to leave a party when it’s in full swing,” Simone Subal, the gallery’s namesake founder, told ARTnews in an email. “That’s what I’m doing now, leaving when I know I’ve had the best time and no regrets.”

Subal’s gallery specializes in art dealing with the body and is known for its cutting-edge shows of work by emerging artists.

Emily Mae Smith, a closely watched figurative painter, had two solo shows with Simone Subal Gallery before joining the blue-chip galleries Petzel and Perrotin. B. Ingrid Olson, an artist whose sculptures are currently on view in the Whitney Biennial, had her first New York gallery show with Simone Subal in 2015. Kiki Kogelnik, a famed Austrian painter who died in 1997, was the subject of three exhibitions at Simone Subal Gallery.

In addition to running her own gallery, with Chapter NY founder Nicole Russo, Subal also facilitated Condo New York, a gallery share program through which Manhattan dealerships turned over part of their respective spaces to their out-of-town colleagues. Condo, which was first staged by Vanessa Carlos in London, was envisioned as a less expensive alternative to art fairs. “It’s this belief in community, that we are stronger together,” Subal previously told ARTnews.

Alongside her New York gallery, Subal and a group of dealers from Berlin and Prishtina run a temporary Vienna space called Am Schwarzenbergplatz. She did not detail her future plans in her statement to ARTnews.

The closure of Subal’s gallery comes during a period when many commercial art spaces in New York are disappearing. Last week, Tribeca’s David Lewis Gallery said it would permanently shutter in July. In March, Helena Anrather, a neighbor of Simone Subal Gallery, closed. And last year, Foxy Production, Queer Thoughts, and JTT all ended operations. All these galleries were smaller and devoted to emerging artists, and had been around for more than a decade.

Yet it is not just young galleries that have closed: Cheim & Read ended its 26-year run last year, and Marlborough Gallery, which has been around for 80 years, will wind down operations this June.

Asked about the trend, Subal said, “Like many others, I’ve certainly seen the market wax and wane over the past decade or so. I’m proud that I was able to stay true to my original vision. Thanks to the strong support for the gallery’s artists, we’ve been able to accomplish so many of our goals.”

Correction, 6/6/24, 10 a.m.: A previous version misstated the last name of the artist with a show on view at Simone Subal Gallery now. That artist’s name is Nova Jiang, not Nova Kiang.

Vautier, who often worked under the artistic moniker Ben, was found dead in his home in Nice on Wednesday, less than a day after his wife died following a stroke. The Nice prosecutor’s office said that his body was discovered with a gunshot wound; the office said it would open an investigation to determine the cause.

Ben, along with other artists associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, set out to blur all boundaries between the everyday and the hallowed field of art-making. He succeeded in doing so, creating artworks that sometimes incorporated the detritus of life itself, helping to point art in a new direction in an era when high-minded abstract painting was still preferred by the establishment.

He is remembered for one aphorism in particular: “Everything is art,” a phrase that he wrote in paint over and over, with many different variations, during the course of his six-decade career. Yet he was fond of creating paradoxes as well, and would sometimes intentionally contradict himself in other artworks and writings.

“Art is not LIFE but life communicated by X,” he wrote in 1966. “My EVERYTHING is for me an EVERYTHING of sincerity and of contradiction. It wants to be a BOUNDLESS EVERYTHING CONTAINING ALL the other’s EVERYTHING. That is, therefore, a work of pretension.”

At the 1972 edition of Documenta, the famed art festival in Kassel, Germany, Ben put it more bluntly, hanging a gigantic banner over the Fridericianum museum that read “KUNST IST ÜBERFLÜSSIG,” or “Art is superfluous.”

Among his most famous creations is Le magasin de Ben (1958–73), an installation that started out as a functional shop in Nice. What began as a store for buying records and cameras soon became something more than that: a “total art center,” in Ben’s terminology, whose walls were scrawled with the artist’s cursive phrases and hung with overflowing wheels, hats, and knickknacks.

Although the installation is now considered an important artwork, Ben last year told Forbes that it was “not for the art crowd because the art school was 100 meters away and the students were forbidden from coming to my place.” Today, it resides with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which is currently showing the piece within its galleries.

Benjamin Vautier was born in 1935 in Naples, Italy. After his parents divorced when he was a kid, he led an itinerant childhood, moving with his mother from Egypt to Switzerland before finally putting down roots with her in Nice. He did not do well in school in that coastal French city, so his mother got him work in a local bookstore, where he aided in English translations. His first significant experience with art, he said, was not in a museum or a gallery, but in that shop, where he would excise portions of books he liked and collage them together at home.

“Then I developed a theory when I was 18 or 19: art must be new,” Ben said in the Forbes interview. “So I came to art like that.” He never attended art school.

His shop in Nice became known to members of the French avant-garde, including Yves Klein and Martial Raysse, who exposed him to the concurrent Nouveau Réalisme movement. Ben recalled showing Klein his drawings of bananas, which Ben took as his subject because he believed no other artist had ever done so. Klein, unimpressed with the bananas, said he was more interested in Ben taking up the written word and linking up with the Lettrists, who had enlisted text in visual forms. But Ben found Lettrist art to merely be “mannered graphics,” and instead sought a more truthful form of text.

Ben’s official introduction to the Fluxus movement came in 1962 through its founder, George Maciunas. Drawing on the Dada movement from a half century prior, Maciunas’s Fluxus manifesto, written the following year, called on artists to “PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art.” That spirit was already in the air, and Ben thrilled to it, heeding Maciunas’s advice to seek out works by John Cage and George Brecht.

In 1963, Ben organized a Fluxus festival in Nice, bringing over artists like Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson to perform there live. Ben would continue creating similar events with his own concept of total theatre, which was designed to bring performances off the stage, into life itself. A pesky prankishness pervaded Ben’s total theatre: he once convinced a theater that he was going to stage a production of a Molière play, then proceeded to smash pianos and fill a room with paper.

Though Ben’s paintings and related ephemera remain his most famous works, he also gained renown during the 1960s and ’70s for his performance art, which was deliberately crass. One piece consisted of urinating in a jar, then exhibiting the vessel as an artwork; another involved Ben repeatedly ramming his head against a wall. Anyone could’ve done these quotidian actions, but Ben performed them as art, so onlookers were forced to accept them as such.

Critics did not always respond kindly to Ben’s provocations, especially the ones produced during the ’80s and onward. “Tout est art? Maybe, but not all of it belongs on display,” quipped Quinn Latimer in Frieze in 2010, writing on the occasion of a massive Ben retrospective staged at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France.

Others were more charmed by Ben’s humor. In 1998, the New York Times devoted an entire review to Ben’s photography, addressing works such as Polaroids that were entirely blank. “‘I am not a good photographer,’ he confidently announced. That’s fair. No one will ever confuse Ben with Ansel Adams,” critic Vicki Goldberg wrote. “But whether in English or French, he poses more philosophical questions about the medium than Adams had time for, in a dry and even ridiculously naive manner, as if he were explaining Roland Barthes on ‘Sesame Street.'”

Whatever criticisms followed Ben throughout his career, they seemed to fade away on Wednesday as French officials mourned him. Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, called him a “legend,” writing in a post on social media, “We will miss his free spirit terribly, but his art will continue to make France shine throughout the world.”

Ben may have been accused periodically of egotism—allegations that were no doubt aided by the fact that he created a persona called Mister EGO. But he generally approached his art in a plainspoken way that befitted his project of reaching the general public.

He once told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “My definition of art is: astound, scandalize, provoke or be yourself, be new, create.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Kerry Walk left her post as president on Tuesday, just days before the university is set to shutter, leaving the future of many current students uncertain.

Walk had only become president of UArts in April of last year. A UArts spokesperson did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment on the Inquirer report.

Plans to close UArts were announced last Friday after the school lost accreditation. The university blamed its “weakened” financial state and said it had no option other than to close.

“This sudden resignation, announced via the media, continues the pattern of disregard and cruelty to which the University of Arts has subjected employees and students,” the United Academics of Philadelphia, a union that includes UArts teachers, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The union also said that the president and the board had “behaved disgracefully and irresponsibly” after calling off a town hall about the closure intended for students and faculty.

While it remains unclear what will happen to current UArts sutdents, at least three local schools—Temple University, Drexel University, and Moore College of Art and Design—have said they will bring them on.