Category: Новини

HONG KONG — Three of the world’s top auction houses are racing to expand in Hong Kong, eager to woo young Asian buyers even as the global art market retreats from pandemic-era highs.

In the span of two months, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams will each see the culmination of yearslong efforts to upgrade their regional headquarters in the southern Chinese city.

Sotheby’s on Thursday unveiled showrooms at an upscale mall in Hong Kong’s finance district, a two-story space previously occupied by fashion label Giorgio Armani.

“We envision for this state-of-the-art space in Hong Kong to be the epicenter of culture for global visitors,” managing director of Asia Nathan Drahi said at the opening.

“We are very confident in the prospect of Hong Kong because it possesses some strong fundamentals for our industry,” he told AFP, pointing to the favorable tax framework.

Nearby, Christie’s is gearing up for a September opening at a new skyscraper designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, with its total floor space doubling to 4,600 square meters.

“Asia has been the pillar of the company,” said Francis Belin, president of Christie’s Asia Pacific.

“But we didn’t have the physical tool, the infrastructure … to actually be at the level of our ambitions.”

The firms are “putting their bets down and saying Hong Kong is the center for Asia,” according to art adviser Patti Wong — but she said the expansions come with risk.

‘An ideal base’

Hong Kong’s biggest auctions of the year are held every spring and autumn at the city’s convention and exhibition center — an intense four months that build hype and draw visitors.

With new in-house venues, events will be more spread out.

“This is a big test for Hong Kong and whether we can develop into a more mature auction market [with] visitors throughout the year,” Wong said.

Global art sales have slowed since Christie’s and Sotheby’s first announced their Hong Kong expansion plans in the heady days of 2021 and 2022.

This year, Christie’s reported $2.1 billion in sales in the first six months — the second consecutive year of decline — down from its 2022 peak of $4.1 billion.

Wendy Goldsmith, a London-based art adviser and former Christie’s auctioneer, cited China’s real estate crisis as a major factor.

“[Asian collectors] are currently taking a bit of a breath buyingwise but the interest and appetite to collect is still there,” Goldsmith told AFP.

“Auction houses know that they’ll be back … and probably stronger than ever.”

Bonhams, which will move to a 1,765-square-meter location at a new office building in September, said it found success targeting transactions under 10 million Hong Kong dollars ($1.3 million).

“This segment has proven resilient despite broader economic uncertainties and represents a huge opportunity in Asia,” said Julia Hu, Bonhams’ managing director for Asia.

Hong Kong remained “an ideal base for tapping into other major Asian cities,” Hu added, citing its strategic location, efficient logistics, collector base, and tax and legal frameworks.

Young buyers

New York-based Phillips, another auction house, opened its regional headquarters next to Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture in 2023.

The companies are unfazed by Hong Kong’s political environment, even as critics say a crackdown by Beijing has chilled artistic freedoms, said cultural policy scholar Patrick Mok.

“The companies that operate in Hong Kong’s art market are rather apolitical … they know those [political] works can’t fetch good prices here,” Mok said.

Auction houses are now competing for younger buyers and embracing online bidding — a shift accelerated by the pandemic.

Christie’s said 29% of buyers in the first half of 2024 were millennials or Gen Z.

“Auction houses turned on a dime during COVID … [They] are marketing machines now,” said Goldsmith, adding that auctions have been spiced up to resemble Hollywood productions.

“[They] are more than willing to provide these events, lectures, dinners, viewings … all to conjure up the next bid.”

The opportunity — and challenge — of the Hong Kong venues will be to bring internet-native buyers into the real world.

But Hu from Bonhams was confident, saying that showroom auctions are irreplaceable.

“Our clients still crave the sheer thrill and excitement of being physically present,” she said. 
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NEW DELHI — The Charaideo Moidam royal burial complex and shrines, built by northeast India’s Ahom dynasty, has been inscribed as a new World Heritage Site, the United Nations’ cultural agency said on Friday. 

UNESCO experts, who are deliberating on a list of sites nominated for the World Heritage Site tag, announced the decision in Indian capital New Delhi, where they are holding their 46th session. 

The Charaideo Moidams, located in Assam state, are a mound burial system that served as a resting place for Ahom kings and queens. They were constructed by providing an earth cover over a hollow vault made of bricks, stone or earth. 

The designated site contains 90 modiams of different sizes, which were created over a period of 600 years, and include other cultural features like ceremonial pathways and bodies of water, said a spokesperson from ICOMOS, the advisory body of the World Heritage Committee. 

“The moidams are an exceptional example of an Ahom necropolis that represents funeral traditions and associated beliefs in a tangible way,” they said. 

The Ahom clan established their capital in different parts of the Brahmaputra River Valley between the 12th to 18th century, after migrating from China, according to the U.N. cultural agency’s website. They established the first capital at the Patkai hills in eastern India and named it Charaideo, which means “a dazzling city above the mountain” in their language. Even though the clan moved across cities, the burial site they built was seen as the most sacred place for the departed souls of the royals. 

Experts say the shrines showcase the architecture and expertise of Assam’s masons, comparing them to the royal tombs of China and the pyramids of the Egyptian Pharaohs. 

The site has the largest concentration of these vaulted mound burials, according to UNESCO, and reflects the sculpted landscape of the surrounding hills. 

India is now home to 43 World Heritage Sites. 

Other sites inscribed on Friday included the Colonies of the Moravian Church in Germany, the U.S. and U.K.; the Umm Al-Jimal in Jordan and the Badain Jaran Desert in China. 

The committee also inscribed the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, in the archeological site of Tell Umm Amer in the Gaza Strip, on both the World Heritage List and on the List of World Heritage in Danger. It said the decision recognized the site’s value and the need to protect it given threats posed by the conflict in the Gaza Strip. 
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico’s governor on Wednesday signed a law that prohibits discrimination against people wearing Afros, curls, locs, twists, braids and other hairstyles in the racially diverse U.S. territory.

The move was celebrated by those who had long demanded explicit protection related to work, housing, education and public services.

“It’s a victory for generations to come,” Welmo Romero Joseph, a community facilitator with the nonprofit Taller Salud, said in an interview.

The organization is one of several that had been pushing for the law, with Romero noting it sends a strong message that “you can reach positions of power without having to change your identity.”

While Puerto Rico’s laws and constitution protect against discrimination, along with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a precedent was set in 2016 when a U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed a discrimination lawsuit and ruled that an employer’s no-dreadlock policy in Alabama did not violate Title VII.

Earlier this year, legislators in the U.S. territory held a public hearing on the issue, with several Puerto Ricans sharing examples of how they were discriminated against, including job offers conditional on haircuts.

It’s a familiar story to Romero, who recalled how a high school principal ordered him to cut his flat top.

“It was a source of pride,” he said of that hairstyle. “I was a 4.0 student. What did that have to do with my hair?”

With a population of 3.2 million, Puerto Rico has more than 1.6 million people who identify as being of two or more races, with nearly 230,000 identifying solely as Black, according to the U.S. Census.

“Unfortunately, people identified as black or Afro descendant in Puerto Rico still face derogatory treatment, deprivation of opportunities, marginalization, exclusion and all kinds of discrimination,” the law signed Wednesday states.

While Romero praised the law, he warned that measures are needed to ensure it’s followed.

On the U.S. mainland, at least two dozen states have approved versions of the CROWN Act, which aims to ban race-based hair discrimination and stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.”

Among those states is Texas, where a Black high school student was suspended after school officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes, violating the dress code.

A March report from the Economic Policy Institute found that not all states have amended their education codes to protect public and private high school students, and that some states have allowed certain exceptions to the CROWN Act.

A federal version was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, but it failed in the Senate. In May, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the legislation.
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NORWICH, Conn. — Veteran diplomat Martin S. Indyk, an author and leader at prominent U.S. think tanks who devoted years to finding a path toward peace in the Middle East, died Thursday. He was 73.

His wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, confirmed in a phone call that he died from complications of esophageal cancer at the couple’s home in New Fairfield, Connecticut.

The Council on Foreign Relations, where Indyk had been a distinguished fellow in U.S. and Middle East diplomacy since 2018, called him a “rare, trusted voice within an otherwise polarized debate on U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”

A native of Australia, Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001. He was special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during former President Barack Obama’s administration, from 2013 to 2014.

When he resigned in 2014 to join The Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, it had symbolized the latest failed effort by the U.S. to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He continued as Obama’s special adviser on Mideast peace issues.

“Ambassador Indyk has invested decades of his extraordinary career to the mission of helping Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. It’s the cause of Martin’s career, and I’m grateful for the wisdom and insight he’s brought to our collective efforts,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said at the time, in a statement.

In a May 22 social media post on X, amid the continuing war in Gaza, Indyk urged Israelis to “wake up,” warning them their government “is leading you into greater isolation and ruin” after a proposed peace deal was rejected. Indyk also called out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June on X, accusing him of playing “the martyr in a crisis he manufactured,” after Netanyahu accused the U.S. of withholding weapons that Israel needed.

“Israel is at war on four fronts: with Hamas in Gaza; with Houthis in Yemen; with Hezbollah in Lebanon; and with Iran overseeing the operations,” Indyk wrote on June 19. “What does Netanyahu do? Attack the United States based on a lie that he made up! The Speaker and Leader should withdraw his invitation to address Congress until he recants and apologizes.”

Indyk also served as special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995. He served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State from 1997 to 2000.

Besides serving at Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations, Indyk worked at the Center for Middle East Policy and was the founding executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indyk’s successor at the Washington Institute called him “a true American success story.”

“A native of Australia, he came to Washington to have an impact on the making of American Middle East Policy and that he surely did — as pioneering scholar, insightful analyst and remarkably effective policy entrepreneur,” Robert Satloff said. “He was a visionary who not only founded an organization based on the idea that wise public policy is rooted in sound research, he embodied it.”

Indyk wrote or co-wrote multiple books, including Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East and Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, which was published in 2021. 
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LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. 

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement. 

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said. 

Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.” 

“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said. 

A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said. 

“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh. 

Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers. 

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. 

The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012. 

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union. 

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
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