Artist Tod Lippy has been following reports about art world figures who maintained friendships and correspondence with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—even after his crimes were public—and been left with the nagging sense that the consequences have been too mild. Billionaire collector Leon Black still sits on the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, as does Ronald Lauder. Some have stepped down—French museum director Jack Lang resigned his post, as did School of Visual Arts chair and former museum director David A. Ross—but for Lippy, the penalties haven’t gone far enough.

So on Saturday morning, as hordes descend on the Santa Monica Airport for the latest edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Lippy will send a mobile LED truck there, bearing photos and video of emails with art world figures, or that mention art world figures, that appear in the Epstein files. The title of the piece, All Of the Gang, comes from an email in which a redacted person asks Epstein if he knows megadealer Larry Gagosian. He’s the dealer to all of the gang, comes the reply, says Lippy.

Angry about the art world’s complicity, Lippy started searching for all the powerful art world people he could think of, and found plenty.

“The David A. Ross stuff is certainly the most repulsive and concerning,” said Lippy in a phone conversation. But he also found artist Andres Serrano’s coziness to the child sex trafficker troubling (including saying he would vote for Trump out of pique over the response to his “grab them by the pussy” talk), and talk of a visit to Jeff Koons’s studio bothered him. Koons, for the record, says he “did not have a relationship” with Epstein, but Lippy doesn’t buy it.

The truck will start out at Frieze, where traffic will be slow along Airport Avenue. “It’s like a parking lot,” says Lippy, “so hopefully there will be time for people to see these. I can’t find a better audience.” The truck will also head out to the Post Fair in Santa Monica, through Beverly Hills, and up Camden Drive through West Hollywood, where he’ll go by a number of galleries, says Lippy. “The idea is to hit as many art communities as possible.”

Diya Vij, a curator and current vice president of curatorial and arts programmes at Powerhouse Arts, has been picked to be New York City’s next Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) commissioner, sources with knowledge of the pick told ARTnews. The New York Times confirmed the news on Saturday.

Considered to be one of the most important jobs in the city’s arts ecosystem, the commissioner is a hotly watched role whenever a new mayor enters office. The DCA is the largest municipal funder of the arts in the US and provides funding to over 800 cultural organizations throughout the city’s five boroughs. Last fiscal year, the DCA provided $245 million in funding. Naturally, the ascension of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose wife, Rama Duwaji, is an artist, has intensified specualtion on who would be picked.

Mamdani described Vij in a statement to the Times as a “visionary and deeply thoughtful leader who understands that art is not ornamental to this city — it is essential to it.”

“Under Diya’s leadership, we will fight to keep New York a city where artists can afford to live and create, and where every New Yorker, in every borough, can experience the energy and inspiration that makes art possible,” the statement reads.

Vij, 40, will report to Julie Su, the city’s first deputy mayor for economic justice. Vij is the first person of South Asian descent to hold the commissioner role.

Giancarlo Politi, publisher, art critic, and founder of Flash Art, one of the most  influential contemporary art magazines to emerge from Europe’s postwar era, died on February 24. He was 89. News of his death was first reported in the Italian-language press. 

Founded in 1967 in Rome, Flash Art was among the first regularly published magazines dedicated exclusively to art criticism—and one of the earliest to circulate internationally. Over decades, it expanded to include editions in French, Polish, Chinese, Spanish, German and Russian-language editions. Yet each edition sought to map the art world as an interlinked entity, presenting it not as a scatter of far-flung scenes but as a constellation of overlapping centers, each in constant exchange. 

From its headquarters in Milan, Flash Art documented some of the most seismic art movements of the late twentieth century, including Arte Povera—meaning “poor art”—the radical Italian ideology defined by its use of everyday objects and organic ephemera. 

Politi, together with his wife, the art critic Helena Kontova, created a launchpad for artists and critics who continue on to shape the contemporary canon. Marina Abramović, Maurizio Cattelan,, and Jeff Koons were those featured in its pages, which likewise saw bylines by influential art world figures such as Germano Celant, the critic who coined “Arte Povera,” Francesco Bonami, curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale, and the American historian and writer Hal Foster. 

Kate Shanley, daughter of former Art in America publisher Paul Shanley and a Flash Art employee from 1980 to 2017, shared a remembrance of Politi on Instagram. She recalled picking up bundles of the magazine at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport—where customs once objected to an issue featuring artwork by Pierre Klossowski—and driving them straight to SoHo and the East Village to deliver to galleries.