Sacks and the City, Art’s $1.4B Question, The Scarlett Letter

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon bouquet of Puck’s freshest reporting.

Today, we lead with Marion Maneker’s elegant post-Gigaweek dispatch, in which he dissects the auction houses’ $1.4 billion haul and why the May sales offered glimmers of hope for an art market that has been wheezing along for several years.

Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe illuminates the Biden antisemitism paradox. Teddy Schleifer tracks the Trump-Biden fundraising circus. Julia Alexander chronicles the Netflix-NFL streaming romance and has a rollicking chat with The Traitors' Alan Cumming. On The Town, Matt Belloni wades into the Scarlett Johansson-OpenAI legal showdown. And on The Powers That Be, Marion and Peter Hamby discuss the biggest dramas surrounding Gigaweek, before examining Marion’s origins as an art market reporter.

MARION MANEKER

Exactly how rich are the rich feeling these days? Data from the May sales suggest some reasons to be cheerful—$35 million for Warhol, $28 million for Leonora Carrington, $22 million for Joan Mitchell—despite a 50 percent drop in auction house sales.

JULIA IOFFE

In a new poll, voters say Trump, the former antisemite-in-chief, would be better at fighting antisemitism than Biden.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

As Donald Trump traipses around the country on a fundraising expedition, an expensive podcast recording—a dinner, if you will—hosted by Silicon Valley’s loudest personalities has accumulated an air of mystery.

JULIA ALEXANDER

Dissecting a long-overdue streaming romance.