Pace's Glimcher Defends Losses; High Museum Ex-COO Gets Prison

By Tom Whitfield

Pace gallery CEO Marc Glimcher has publicly answered reports of financial losses, telling ARTnews by phone that "Everything is turning" — even as filings with Companies House last week showed significant losses in turnover for 2024 and 2025.

His explanation is accounting, not commerce. "We did a balance sheet shift, which appears to be a loss because we're changing around the way we invest money and take money from other units and let the money flow through each unit independently," Glimcher said. He cited a "record" Art Basel Paris last month and "sellout shows" he says are putting business back in the black.

What does the reshuffle change for Pace's artists?

The gallery dropped 50 artists in June. Glimcher's framing: those artists "were not artists that we had a super active engagement with," and "it wasn't benefiting them or us." A new European location is coming "fairly soon," he said, and a London move is in the works — venue undecided. "When we have the space and announce it, it's going to make a lot of sense to everybody," he said. The claim is his; no independent figures back it yet.

Who went to prison, and for how much?

The same day's harder number: one year in federal prison, plus one year of supervised release, for Brady Lum, former chief operating officer of Atlanta's High Museum of Art. Georgia's United States Attorney's Office announced the sentence for embezzling more than $600,000 through invoice tampering and approved personal purchases.

"Lum brazenly pilfered hundreds of thousands of dollars from a beloved civic institution to pay for his high-end guitars and other personal items," said US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. "His appalling breach of trust damaged not only the High Museum but also the larger art community."

Lum served as COO from January 2, 2019, to December 9, 2025. He has repaid the full $607,688 stolen, plus another $500,000 toward the museum's costs of uncovering his crime.

Restitution, in Italy and France

Italian lawmakers are examining, for the first time, a bill to create a committee that would research provenance and ease restitution of art and cultural items looted by Nazis and Italian police between 1933 and 1945, The Art Newspaper reports.

France offers a working model. A "WANTED" campaign by the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, aimed at tracing hundreds of WWII-era looted works, has located one painting: Willem Cornelisz Duyster's Le Buveur, found at a Swiss auction house, Le Journal des Arts reports. Its owner, who bought it in the 1990s unaware of the provenance, agreed to hand it over. In June 1940, Nazis burned an annex of the museum — the Musée Paul Fourché — which was then almost entirely ransacked, likely by people on both sides; some 350 European paintings dating to the 16th century were lost.

Also making news

• A New South Wales city council will not exhibit Phil Buehler's "Wall of Tears," memorializing children killed in Gaza, citing safety concerns (The Guardian).
• Jeff Koons, in an El País interview pegged to a Hublot collaboration, said: "I never think about price... I believe in the value that things have for humanity, in a conceptual way."
• The Kennedy Center Honors proceed despite institutional turmoil, honoring Paul Anka, David Mamet, Andy Garcia and Barbara Mandrell (The New York Times).
• Researchers preparing Tate Britain's forthcoming show on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant discovered an unknown intimate drawing by Grant of Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister (FAD Magazine).

Whether Glimcher's balance-sheet reading holds will show in Pace's next filings — and in whether the promised London space materializes.