There’s rarely a dull moment in the boardroom saga at Artnet, whose founder, Hans Neuendorf, has spent the past several years trying to quell a brewing shareholder revolt. If you didn’t see yesterday’s headline in The Art Newspaper—“Major shake up at Artnet as founder retires”—my texts suggest everyone else did. After the story ran, I started getting notes like “Artnet news is interesting…” and “Is it happening?” I’m sorry to disappoint everyone, but nothing has happened yet. Even The Art Newspaper’s conjecture that the “two warring parties have kissed and made up” is directly contradicted by the article’s quotation from Artnet’s largest shareholder, Rüdiger Weng, who says he supports a board composed of three directors, not five, as the Neuendorf family had proposed. Indeed, the only real update is that the company has announced that an Artnet shareholder meeting will be held in Berlin on February 27, one day before the required deadline. There’s been no shareholder meeting to vote on the Neuendorf’s family proposal, much less to choose those directors. And for now, the 88-year-old Hans remains on the board, much to Weng’s frustration. (The Neuendorf family are Artnet’s second-largest shareholders, after Weng.) As the company enters an intense five weeks of politicking ahead of the shareholder vote, this isn’t a bad time to unpack what’s being proposed, what might happen, and what that would mean for the company. As I reported last year, the annual general meeting, which was originally scheduled for November, was eventually cancelled on the pretext that Artnet had lost its auditor and needed more time to find a new one. (The company’s release about the February 27 gathering doesn’t name the new auditing firm, just that one will be proposed at the meeting.) Another explanation for the delay is that the Neuendorfs weren’t confident last November that their slate of board members could win another shareholder vote. One of their own directors seemed to have jumped ship. Meanwhile, Weng believes that Artnet, a dominant brand in the art and auction space, has been hemorrhaging money for years because of the Neuendorfs’ self-interested management of the company—three of Hans’s adult children work at the firm and, until just recently, Hans himself was paid consulting fees. Furthermore, according to the most recent annual report, there are related-party deals between Artnet and family members, including C.E.O. Jacob Pabst’s wife. (Wall Power readers will recall that Pabst is Hans’s eldest son, and goes by the last name of his mother, Florentine Pabst, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Germany.) Weng is also unhappy that Artnet’s growth has stagnated and no profits have been disbursed to shareholders. The Neuendorfs, in turn, accuse Weng of being motivated by envy and malice, pointing to the plunge in Weng Fine Art’s stock price—from a high of €35 per share three years ago to a little more than €4 today—to question his fitness to lead the company. That said, both sides agree that Artnet needs to raise capital. Despite spending more than $5 million over the past two years on product development, according to the company’s financial reports, Artnet has implemented little in the way of upgrades to its technology or database. But the current management team, at least under the supervision of the current board, cannot be trusted to efficiently spend any new capital raised, Weng believes.

I can’t say that I was surprised (or shocked, or, even, saddened) when I read this bizarre climate crisis cri de coeur in The Art Newspaper imploring readers to travel by train, especially when traveling on art-related business, even though I’m definitely pro-train and anti-plane. TAN’s finger-wagging about air travel is, at best, a distraction—even if not on the order of the misguided protestors who vandalize art in the name of climate action while doing little to actually combat global emissions. The fight to effectively combat global warming, which remains a runaway-train problem, is better pursued in the realms where it might be effective. And that is most definitely not the pages of The Art Newspaper. Any cursory research into the subject would reveal that aviation is not the primary source of, or even one of the top contributors to, global warming. Heating, electricity, transportation, and agriculture are among the main drivers. It may be fun to shake a fist at the very rich and their private jets, but banning those conveyances would do far less to reduce emissions than all of us eating less meat, or getting rid of our oversized trucks and S.U.V.s that we use to get groceries. (I won’t even broach using the internet less, since that’s how most read The Art Newspaper.) Promoting veganism in the pages of The Art Newspaper, as incongruous as that sounds, would be more effective. I get that it is easier, in the context of the art world, to point fingers at the private jets. But even getting rid of all of the P.J.s in the world wouldn't make a dent, as hard as that is to believe. I also get that one of the main problems with our politics is the inability to translate effective solutions into clear and appealing political goals. As much as the art world wants to imagine that it is, to paraphrase Shelley, the unacknowledged legislature of the world—it isn’t. Please, let’s continue to decarbonize the art market. But let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we are presenting a real solution to a much bigger problem. On that happy note, I’ll see you on Friday with my take on Sotheby’s Thursday call. M