CNN has a piece this week on the business behind removing and selling street art murals, and the legality that drives who can remove and sell a piece. “Generally, when you purchase a building, you own the fixtures within the building, whether they’re ceiling fans or [a] fine art mural painting on a wall,” says Paul Cossu, a partner at legal firm Pryor Cashman and part of the firm’s art law group. “Of course, what an owner can do with a fine art mural after acquiring the building will depend, in part, on whether the mural is protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act.”
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Two men have confessed to stealing the Gustav Klimt recently discovered in the wall of a Piacenza gallery, as well as to returning the work. “They said they returned the painting four years ago,” says Guido Gulieri, the pair’s lawyer. “But we don’t yet know the details of how it came to be [in the recess] and what exactly happened to the painting in the intervening years. They had confessed before but were not believed.”
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The inaugural edition of Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia has announced its artist list, including work by Lita Albuquerque, Wael Shawky, Superflex, and more. This edition of the event has earned strong condemnation for its part in the country’s push to rebrand itself as open and free after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.  “Unless artists are willing to make their host’s state control of expression an explicit subject of their work, those who participate cannot escape compromise from the polluted context,” says critic Christopher Knight.
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