Washington D.C.’s Museum of the Bible has found itself under scrutiny once again. The museum—which is run by the Green family, the evangelical Christian family behind craft store chain Hobby Lobby—has announced it will return allegedly stolen Bible fragments acquired illegally from a highly regarded Oxford University professor.

In 2017, the family opened the nearly $500-million museum a few blocks from Capitol Hill. Critics complained then that the museum represented only the Judeo-Christian perspective of the text, leaving out religions like Islam, which draw heavily upon it. That same year, the family had to forfeit some 5,500 objects that had been smuggled out of Iraq prior to opening the museum; the objects had been intended for museum display. Last year, it removed five Dead Sea Scroll fragments under suspicion that they were fakes. Prior to all this, the Green family was primarily known for the 2014 Supreme Court decision—dubbed the “Hobby Lobby decision”—that made it more difficult for their employees to access contraception and expanded the rights for a corporation to be treated like a person in the eyes of the law.

On Monday, the London-based nonprofit Egypt Exploration Society (EES) released a statement alleging that Dirk Obbink, a member of Oxford’s classics department, had stolen items from the EES’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri and sold them to Hobby Lobby between 2010 and 2013 for use in the museum. The Oxyrhynchus collection contains pieces of papyrus and parchment dating as far back as the third century BCE. According to the statement, Obbink sold 11 of the fragments that ended up in the museum. Two other items from the Oxyrhynchus collection were sold to the museum by an antiques dealer in Israel. A spokesperson for the museum told the New York Times: “The exact circumstances of how those items moved from Oxford to Israel are unknown to us.”

While Obbink has yet to respond to EES’s allegations, in a 2018 conversation with The Daily Beast, he denied selling a similar text, which dated back to the second or early third century, to the Green family. An Oxford spokesperson noted that Obbink is still employed by the university, though an internal investigation is underway. Though the Museum of the Bible stated that the objects were acquired “in good faith,” it is making arrangements to return them.

The Hollywood power broker Ron Meyer has filed a $10-million lawsuit against two art dealers he claims tricked him into buying a forged Mark Rothko painting. Meyer, who co-founded Creative Artists Agency and is a vice-chairman at Universal Studios, alleged in his complaint that in 2001, the art dealer Jamie Frankfort introduced him to another dealer, Susan Seidel, who sold him a work she presented as a genuine, signed Rothko, for $900,000. For his role in the deal, Meyer paid Frankfort a $45,000 commission.

The purported Rothko hung in Meyer’s house without being outed as a forgery for nearly two decades. But earlier this year, according to Meyer’s lawsuit, he learned that the painting had not been signed by Rothko, had not been acquired directly from the artist by its previous owners, and was not included in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. It was, in fact, “a total forgery.”

Meyer has claimed that were the work a genuine Rothko, it would be worth “at least $10 million.” He’s therefore suing Frankfort, Seidel, her company, and five John Does for breach of warranty and fraud, and seeking damages of $10 million. If the defendants claim they sold him the painting not knowing it was a forgery, the complaint states he will seek the return of his $945,000.

Though Meyer’s forgery accusation does not appear connected in any way to the Knoedler Gallery scandal, that case did involve a number of fake Rothkos. The final federal lawsuit stemming from the Knoedler forgery case, settled earlier this year, revolved around a purported Rothko painting that had been sold to a collector for $5.5 million.

Three more people have been arrested in connection to the gold toilet heist. Maurizio Cattelan’s fully-functioning, solid gold toilet—titled America (2016)—was stolen from Blenheim Palace in England on September 14th.

The police investigation led to the arrests of two men shortly after the robbery. Now, a 35-year-old man, a 34-year-old man, and a 36-year-old woman, all from Oxford, have also been arrested “on suspicion of conspiring to commit a burglary [in a building] other than a dwelling,” according to a police spokesman statement. Like the two suspects arrested last month, all three have been released under investigation. The toilet, valued at up to £4.8m ($6.1 million), has yet to be recovered.

Detective Inspector Jess Milne previously told Artsy that police suspect a group of people used at least two vehicles during the burglary. Cattelan’s exhibition at Blenheim Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the birthplace of Winston Churchhill, features a number of his other characteristically irreverent installations and sculptures. It continues through October 27th.

Christie’s is looking to build on the market momentum behind Sanyu, the Chinese-French painter who died in 1966. His large painting Five Nudes (ca. 1955) will star in the auction house’s 20th century and contemporary art evening sale in Hong Kong next month. A new record for Sanyu’s work was just set at Sotheby’s earlier this month, when his Nu (1965) sold for $HK 198 million ($25.2 million), but Christie’s is confident it can top that and expects Five Nudes to sell for at least $HK 250 million ($33 million).

The November sale won’t be the first time Five Nudes has appeared at auction. In 2011, the painting broke the record for any oil painting by a Chinese artist, bringing in $16.5 million. That record is now held by a Zao Wou-Ki work that sold for $65 million last year.

Banksy’s hotly anticipated online store is finally open, with the iconic street artist offering T-shirts, mugs, prints, and even tombstones at relatively affordable prices. The shop, called Gross Domestic Product, launched earlier this week, though shoppers’ requests to buy objects will be greenlit at random, based on each prospective buyer’s response to the prompt: “Why does art matter?”

Gross Domestic Product features some items typical of an artist looking to merchandise their work—custom shirts, a print inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat—while other objects would seem a bit out of the ordinary coming from any artist other than Banksy, like a baby mobile featuring 19 security cameras, or your very own tombstone, labeled “You Have Now Reached Your Destination.” (Neither the baby mobile nor the tombstone is available yet, according to the website, with the tombstone “currently still in the ground.”)

Prices for objects currently available on the site range from £10 ($13) for a mug to £850 ($1,100) for a bullet-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack (which may or may not be the same one worn by the rapper Stormzy when he performed at the Glastonbury music festival earlier this year). While that may be a lot to pay for a vest, it’s a far cry from the artist’s new auction record of $12.1 million, set at Sotheby’s in London earlier this month.

Many products are only available in a limited quantity, which is where the quasi-lottery system comes in. Purchasers can only try to buy one item, and successful applicants will be notified by email if they are chosen to buy a work. As for the existential art question, a random time period of requests will be selected and proceed to vetting by an impartial judge, who, according to the shop’s terms and conditions page, “is a professional stand up comedian.”

The online store follows a pop-up installation featuring some of the Gross Domestic Product goods in London’s Croydon neighborhood launched earlier this month and dismantled this week. Interested shoppers have until October 28th to register their request to purchase an object from Gross Domestic Product.

A small tab at the bottom of the shop’s webpage reading “BBay” suggests that Banksy may have plans to harness the thriving secondary market for his work. The BBay homepage professes it to be an “approved used Banksy dealership,” and “your first choice destination to trade in secondhand work by a third-rate artist.” Aside from his record-breaking Sotheby’s sale, the street artist has had a complicated relationship with auction houses, to say the least. His painting Girl with a Balloon (2006) famously shredded itself at another Sotheby’s auction. The allusions to a possible online marketplace follow Banky’s recent efforts to control the distribution, exhibition, and reproduction of his works via his authentication service, Pest Control.

David Hockney’s Sur la Terrasse (1971) will hit the auction block this fall at Christie’s. The painting, which has been in a private collection for nearly 40 years, will star in the auction house’s November 13th Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale. It is estimated to bring in between $25 million and $45 million.

The large-scale work features Hockney’s final depiction of Peter Schlesinger, his first love, during the decline of their relationship. In it, Schlesinger is turned away from the painter, gazing out over the wilderness beyond the couple’s hotel terrace in Marrakesh. The themes of longing and enstrangement depicted were revisited in Hockney’s 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which briefly made him the world’s most expensive living artist after it sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million in 2018. (Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986) broke this record at $91.07 million just six months later.)

Ana Maria Celis, head of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, said in a statement: