Get Out Your Checkbook, It’s Frieze Week-Month in Manhattan

Frieze New York arrived on Randall’s Island 11 years ago with great fanfare. Its 125,000-square-foot tent was billed as the biggest in the world; Gagosian quickly sold out its solo booth of Rudolf Stingel works; and Mark Ruffalo put on an apron and grilled sausages with Gavin Brown all day long out of a booth as part of a Rirkrit Tiravanija performance. A new singer named Lana Del Rey performed at a Frieze dinner sponsored by Mulberry, with Alexa Chung and Fabrizio Moretti watching on. It was, incidentally, the stretch of vintage 2012 New York City later depicted in the film Uncut Gems. And for Frieze, which the writers Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp started as a shoestring arts magazine in 1991, opening a New York fair was a stratospheric leap into the big leagues. 

Now Frieze is owned by Endeavor, the content behemoth that recently purchased a performance art enterprise known as World Wrestling Entertainment for the tidy little sum of $9.3 billion. In addition to its original London fair and the one in New York, Frieze has outposts in Los Angeles and Seoul. And what used to be called “Frieze Week” in NYC now consists of dozens of non-Frieze, must-hit entities: satellite fairs, fancy-schmancy galas, blowout gallery dinners, openings at The Met and the Whitney, $180 million arts facilities popping up in Brooklyn, and not to mention a few billion dollars’ worth of art up for sale at auction. But amid a trembling economic picture in 2023…would there be anyone to buy it all?

Another difference between 2012 and today: Frieze Week is really three weeks long, with many Europeans opting to rent apartments for weeks at a time in order to not miss a single event. Let’s recap the last few weeks, shall we? On May 4, Gagosian opened a show of photos by Richard Avedon, timed to drop right at the centenary of the late photographer’s birth, and asked a slew of luminaries—Hillary Clinton, Elton John, Kim Kardashian, Brooke Shields, Emma Watson, Chloë Sevigny, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada—to pick a favorite Avedon to install at its West 21st Street space. An after-party at the Boom Boom Room ensued. Vivi Nevo posed for pictures with Eve Jobs. 

The following evening, billionaire Peter Brant held a black-tie function at his East Village art foundation—formerly Walter De Maria’s studio, a gigantic gut-reno’d, century-old Con Ed substation—to celebrate a show of all his Warhol masterpieces, including Twelve Electric Chairs and Shot Light Blue Marilyn, a different version of the work that sold for $195 million last year at Christie’s. The show is sponsored by Tiffany, which opened its new Fifth Avenue flagship during Manhattan’s biggest art week of the year, revealing its “Tiffany blue” Basquiat and a slew of large-scale artworks courtesy of Tiffany’s owner, the mega-collector Bernard Arnault. Breakfast at Tiffany’s now comes with a view of works by Rashid Johnson, Jenny Holzer, Anna Weyant, and Damien Hirst.

The fairs began in earnest the following week. Independent used to act as a sister fair to the Armory Show, the traditional New York art fair before the British invasion, but now it’s opted to instead show adjacent to Frieze. Independent alights on multiple floors of Spring Studios in Tribeca, drawing collectors like Don and Mera Rubell, Shelley and Phil Aarons, and Jill and Peter Kraus. Globe-trotting museum directors Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach were on hand as well, and those who opted for lunch around the corner at Frenchette saw perhaps the biggest star in Gotham this spring: E. Jean Carroll, celebrating a certain legal victory.

Some 70 blocks uptown at the Park Avenue Armory, at exactly the same time, was the New York offshoot of TEFAF, the grand old fair held each March for an entire week in the ancient Dutch city of Maastricht. Billionaire space-exploring Basquiat buyer Yusaku Maezawa chilled in the booth of furniture dealer Patrick Seguin, while cool parents Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost circulated through the aisles. Current CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was there, and former CNN anchor Don Lemon was there. The works in the booths were a bit pricier than those at the fair downtown—White Cube sold an Alexander Calder for $1.1 million, and Almine Rech sold an untitled Günther Förg from 2008 that had an asking price of $1.4 million. 

A dozen blocks south, at the same time that TEFAF was kicking off the oyster-and-Champagne-washed gala portion of the evening, Christie’s was set to auction off 16 works from the collection of S.I. Newhouse, the late shepherd of this magazine and many others. In addition to running Vanity Fair parent company Condé Nast, Newhouse assembled one of the greatest art collections in America, spurred along by the pugnacious acquisition strategies of master dealers Leo Castelli and Larry Gagosian. Gagosian was in the room Thursday—leaving his team to man the booth at TEFAF, which included work by Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince—and watched as the bidding wars on works such as a small but punchy Francis Bacon self-portrait pushed the overall haul to $177.8 million. 

A few days later, the same crowd was back at Rockefeller Center for the Christie’s 21st Century Sale, a $100 million occasion dominated by the $67 million brought in for Basquiat’s El Gran Espectaculo (1983), safely over the high estimate courtesy of a few semi-covert bids from Gagosian, who ended up the underbidder, as Christie’s Vanessa Fusco secured the lot for a client. 

On Tuesday, across the island of Manhattan and way down the West Side—right as the world’s deep-pocketed dealers and collectors sat down at Sotheby’s to take in a leisurely three-hour sale of $427 million worth of art—the Whitney hosted an intimate dinner for its annual gala, where, in the small sixth-floor viewing room, CeeLo Green came out to surprise the members of the board of trustees, who dutifully jumped out of their seats to dance before heading downstairs to the bigger lobby party, which was DJ’d by The Dare, who performed his entire set while standing in the middle of a gigantic bucket of paint. 

Frieze finally opened this week at The Shed, the $500 million performance venue in Hudson Yards, which sits next to the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick’s $200 million structure that is closed to the public indefinitely after a series of suicides at the location. 

For all of the apocalyptic concerns about the state of the art market coming into the fair, it seemed that sales weren’t as dire as forecasted. If galleries brought good artwork that collectors wanted, it sold. Hauser & Wirth found a buyer for a historic Jack Whitten for $2.5 million, and Pace sold out its booth of Robert Nava paintings. Zwirner nearly sold out its booth of Suzan Frecon paintings on the first day; Matthew Marks sold large wall works by Alex Da Corte; and Gagosian’s booth of photo-collage pieces by Oscar nominee Nan Goldin wowed and sold works accordingly. And if we’re worried that people are terrified of spending money on things, a few hours into Frieze New York, across Manhattan on York Avenue, former Romanian ambassador Alfred Moses spent $38 million on what’s said to be the oldest Hebrew Bible in existence, which he will donate to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.