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  • It’s Fashion Week vs. an Art World Awakening in New York City

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    And I think you’ll be incredibly excited to know that the New Museum is also gifting downtown Manhattan with a new restaurant that is—I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s cool—accessible through Freeman’s Alley. It’s from Oberon Group’s Henry Rich and chef Julia Sherman, and there’s a number of artist collaborations at the restaurant, spanning the entire ecosystem of the dining experience—more to come on all that.

    Hop the F train to the 7, and you’ll find yourself at MoMA PS1—which this year is hosting another anticipated edition of Greater New York, only staged twice a decade—an event that aims to take the temperature of the five boroughs and its artists. Few details were released apart from the artist roster, and and some of the artists chosen stuck in my mind, including the only non-living artist represented: Jay Carrier, who died last year and had a show at 47 Canal in January 2025, which was truly one of the year’s highlights for me.

    It was also the week when the mega galleries started rolling out their first major shows of the year in Chelsea. There’s the intricately installed Michael Heizer show at Gagosian, really it has to be seen in person to soak it up, though no doubt you’ll get pretty heavy doses of it via Instagram. Matthew Marks on Thursday night opened three shows—Anne Truitt, Ron Nagle, and a three-person exhibit called “Plein Air”—and Hauser & Wirth opened a show that features, and only features, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s fantastic Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform).

    But the real news lighting up my group chats wasn’t about an art gallery, but an art magazine. On Wednesday, Artforum announced that editor in chief Tina Rivers Ryan, who had been at the helm for two years, would be stepping down, and in her stead, the new co-editors would be Rachel Wetzler, currently the executive editor at the magazine, and Daniel Wenger, who has worked at The New Yorker and Harper’s, and is also a practicing artist who has shown work at galleries such as Moran Moran, Paul Soto, and STARS. The news came as something of a shock—there was no indication that Ryan was about to head out, but at the same time, the general consensus was that she steadied the great ship that is Artforum for two years following the departure of former editor David Velasco, and set up the magazine for another era of greatness. I personally think that Wetzler and Wenger are excellent choices to lead the once-and-still reigning Art World Bible. I should probably disclose that I’ve known both of them for well over a decade, but, if I can speak objectively, they’re incredibly smart, well-respected people, who clearly love the magazine. Look no further than Wetzler’s excellent cover essay on the artist Banks Violette, chronicling a remarkable career that has included a number of Irish exits from the scene and an improbable comeback via Hedi Slimane and Celine. I devoured Wetzler’s story as one should: in the ad-stuffed print magazine, heavy on my coffee table at home, after the children were fast asleep.

    I would be depriving you of information if I didn’t let you know about the galas—like the wonderful RxART Gala that honored the adviser and collector, Glori Cohen, and the artist Mickalene Thomas. If you’re not familiar with RxART, it’s an incredible organization that commissions artists to make works for hospitals around the world. Another spectacular gala happened not in New York but in the glorified confines of Palm Beach. Yes, that would be the Norton Museum of Art Gala, which I attended last year and enjoyed thoroughly, resulting in a quite lengthy dispatch, which I recommend you take in, if just to soak in the weirdness that was Palm Beach after the inauguration.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • It’s The Met’s Second-Biggest Party of the Year. There’s Nothing Small About It.

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    Hollein then announced that the evening had raised $5 million, a new record for the event and a massive haul for any museum, though not quite in the same stratosphere as that of…the Met Gala, which raised $31 million this year for the Costume Institute. And then he pressed play on a short film made especially for the evening, featuring two living artists with work in The Met’s collection, Wangechi Mutu and Alex Katz. It was projected onto the gigantic walls that house the Temple of Dendur, everyone in their penguin suits rapt with awe. Each artist picked an object from The Met’s collection; Mutu homed in on a nearly 3,000-year-old statue of Osiris, while Katz chose an Edgar Degas drawing of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre.

    At the end of the video, Katz summed up the night’s whole vibe, saying, “In all my experiences in New York, the happiest day I ever had was when I came into The Met and saw my painting.”

    “What do you think about your art adding to The Metropolitan Museum’s collection?” the interviewer asked.

    “I think it’s a big asset!” Katz said, laughing.

    And just because we’re so excited…we have to mention…

    Across the country, another museum is announcing some big news: The Vanity Fair Oscar Party is moving to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

    That’s right—the best party on Hollywood’s biggest night will now be held at the brand-new campus for LACMA, a month before it’s set to open to the public. The Peter Zumthor–designed building is already winning over the hearts and minds of Angelenos, and it’s a great privilege to bring this historic event to perhaps the most anticipated new fortress of art constructed this century.

    “The idea of Hollywood has never been more expansive than it is today,” said Mark Guiducci, global editorial director of Vanity Fair, when announcing the new venue. “The film industry intersects with so many disciplines, and the silos between them are breaking down. Artists make films. Sports stars are producers. Movie moguls fund art museums. And technology is embedded throughout. We’re thrilled to capture that energy with a cultural institution that undergirds the importance of Los Angeles and the industry at a time when Vanity Fair and LACMA are both entering exciting new chapters.”

    Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com. And make sure you subscribe to True Colors to receive Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch in your inbox every week.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • The Winners and Losers of New York Auction Week

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    Courtesy of Alive.

    WINNER: BOOKSHELVES AND TABLES

    Christie’s had a somewhat controversial install of work from the collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. Specialists hung one gallery almost identically to their Chicago apartment (sans the wraparound lakeside views) with the Cindy Sherman way up high and a Warhol above a fake fireplace. Very prominently featured were the couple’s furniture pieces, including two bookshelves by Diego Giacometti and two ultrarare Giacometti coffee tables. And when they came on the block at the evening sale, the two bookcases, one after another, commanded fierce bidding wars, flying past their high estimates, the functioning furniture outselling the paintings. It was a bit mystifying to watch multiple bidders chase one of the chicer Giacometti design grails on offer, a low table with fox heads, to a final price of $4.5 million, more than the Princes and the Peytons and many of the Warhols. These things are just part of the game these days. Appropriately enough, I walked into a collector’s living room this week, and there was a Giacometti table.

    WINNER: LAUDER WORK ON PAPER

    Not just the Klimt—basically all of the Leonard Lauder collection was out of reach for even a mega-collector with a ton of money in the bank. Which makes it all the more charming that, in the day sale, there were a few choice works on paper offered for a cheap-sounding four figures. Lauder bought them from galleries in the ’70s and ’80s: Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro from Paula Cooper, and the Dorothea Rockburne from John Weber. This week, the works on paper all had an approachable low estimate of $5,000. They ended up selling for a lot more—nearly ten times that for the Murray as well as the Rockburne—but compared to the Klimt, still affordable-ish!

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Behind the Scenes of the $236 Million Gustav Klimt Sale at Sotheby’s

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    But when I was walking through the Breuer lobby, I thought, Who makes the cut? Sotheby’s on York Avenue had space for more than 500 people in the salesroom. In the new salesroom of the Breuer Building, simply due to the size of each floor, there were around 195 seats. It was a tight crew. Not everyone was getting in.

    So who did? I spotted, on an aisle a few rows back, Larry Gagosian, who’s had a gallery a block up on Madison since 1989 and will soon unveil a new space on the ground floor, right next to his still-great sushi joint, Kappo Masa. The adviser Philippe Ségalot was toward the front. The Nahmad family sat in the very front row—Joe Nahmad has a gallery at 980 Madison, and Helly Nahmad has a space at 975 Madison. Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan—they have a gallery off Madison, in the 60s, and were seated toward the center of the action. Emmanuel Di Donna, another local gallerist, was there as well.

    Ryan Murphy was there with his adviser Joe Sheftel, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the collector who in 2002 founded the Salon 94 gallery a few blocks up, sat toward the back.

    The Mugrabi family, dealers and collectors both, were right in the middle: David Mugrabi, Tico Mugrabi, and the patriarch, Jose Mugrabi. And there was the house diaspora, the alum who left the citadel to set up their own shops. Former Christie’s global chairman Jussi Pylkkänen, now a private dealer, arrived one lot late and hung out in the back until security whisked him to his seat. Former Sotheby’s rainmaker Amy Cappellazzo was in the front row, left flank; former Sotheby’s contemporary art chairman Gabriela Palmieri was seated in the center; and Patti Wong, the house’s former Asia chairman, was in a chair on the aisle. Noah Horowitz, who left Sotheby’s in 2023 to become CEO of Art Basel, was there as well.

    But it was a tight squeeze.

    “You know what I had to do to get a ticket?” said one collector standing by a man serving Champagne, free of course, by the back of the salesroom. “It was extraordinary.”

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Two Curators Put Gigantic Confederate Monuments in an LA Contemporary Art Museum. How Did They Pull It Off?

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    “They double-timed that,” Hamza told me. “The conservation of the one in Arlington Cemetery—this has a really high price ticket on it. And I would say the same with the Pike, I didn’t expect it to go back up so quickly—I think obviously it’s to make a statement, to send a message.”

    Simpson explained that it’s not as if we’re about to see any of the statues in “Monuments” go back up, since they were all acquired from local or state governments, unlike the Albert Pike statue and the Confederate Memorial, which are under federal jurisdiction. “I say jurisdiction and I say, Oh, there’s legal distinctions between these things…but you also know that he doesn’t give a fuck about legal distinction,” Simpson said.

    “Yeah, that’s right,” Hamza said, chuckling nervously.

    “So if it’s expedient or useful for him to say something about anything, he’ll do it, whether it’s real or legal,” Simpson said.

    Trump hasn’t weighed in on the show—yet!—but it’s already angered a few of his favorite outlets, with more invective surely to come. In a Fox News article helpfully labeled Opinion, David Marcus called Unmanned Drone “the most grotesque of the works,” and likened the exhibition to a middle finger to the right. The headline? “LA museum’s desecration of Confederate statues is pure barbarism.”

    Simpson noted that, for all his discussion of barbarism, Marcus—the author of Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed a Nation—did not mention the massacre in Charleston, the origin point of the show.

    “So the idea that, ‘Well, it’s, like, pure barbarism’…I think you might want to save that for that,” Hamza said.

    It’s unclear from the article whether Marcus visited the show in person. If he had, he might have noticed the subtle moments, the more low-key flexes. It plays with scale in an ingenious way. Statues that were once perched high on pedestals are installed on the ground, allowing one to fully grapple with their high-romantic kitsch.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Inside the Sotheby’s Takeover of the Breuer Building

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    On Wednesday afternoon, three days before Sotheby’s was set to open its new home in the old Whitney, the auction house’s CEO, Charles Stewart, was standing in the old-new lobby, snapping an iPhone photo of a color-popped Frank Stella painting from the ’60s. Then he took a picture of a giant Jean Arp sculpture, darting around in his typical natty suit, exuding his usual bucket-of-sunshine demeanor, peppering most sentences with, “Isn’t that amazing?”

    Sotheby’s Breuer building lobby, featuring Frank Stella’s Concentric Square (left) and Jean Arp’s Ptolémée III (right).

    Photograph by Max Touhey/Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

    It was, to be fair, kind of amazing: I was about to be one of the first outsiders to enter the iconic Marcel
Breuer building on Madison Avenue, after years of its lying empty. It was the Whitney, then The Met Breuer, then The Frick’s mid-reno waystation, and now the lobby is sporting a perked-up look, with its signature elements all intact: the bluestone floors, the dome lights, the concrete walls. Sotheby’s announced the plan in 2023, paid $100 million for the building in 2024, and waited as Herzog & de Meuron finished its tasteful, mostly imperceptible makeover. The wait is over. The Breuer is back.

    And for the first time, that Stella in the lobby will come equipped with a price tag. There’s been some pearl–clutching from those who can’t fathom that all 650 pieces of art on the Breuer building’s walls will be unambiguously for sale. After decades of wrangling over the legacy of Manhattan’s Brutalist fortress—including some wacky proposals from Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas—the Breuer house won’t be another collecting institution, but rather, the auction house that sold a $6.2 million banana to a crypto billionaire who gave millions to Donald Trump’s crypto venture and then watched as the government’s civil fraud charges against him got dropped (he denied the allegations).

    Others see it as a positive outcome—what if it had become a plutocrat’s mega-mansion, as it easily could have? Instead, there will be art in the Breuer. Lots of art, all year round, and most prominently before the evening sales, when Sotheby’s will install masterpieces consigned from collectors the world over and open the doors to all. No ticket necessary. As I approached on Wednesday, staffers were affixing a sign to the front of the building: “FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.”

    “It’s going to completely change how we engage with everybody,” Stewart said. “With our consignors, with collectors, with buyers, and people—the people are going to come.”

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Cecily Brown on the “Unsexy” Art Market and Her New Restaurant Mural: “It Can’t be Moved. It’s Not for Sale.”

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    “They came to me only about six months before it was due to open, saying, ‘Cecily, we’re doing this thing, and we would love, if there’s any chance, to get a painting for the restaurant,’” she said. “Well, I can’t make a painting specifically for you that you could hang. I don’t have anything that’s 30-feet long kicking around.”

    But Brown had always wanted to paint a mural on a restaurant, and was just waiting for someone to ask.

    “I did say, ‘Well, why don’t I just do something directly on the wall?’”

    She had painted a mural in Buffalo a few years back, through Stefania Bortolami’s Artist/City program, and found it liberating to make public work freed from the shackles of the price tag.

    “With the greedy, voracious art market, the minute you have a painting these days, the question of price starts swirling around, insurance, and all those unsexy things,” she said. “I don’t want people sitting there saying, ‘Oh, how much is it?’ So by doing it directly on the wall, it completely gets past all that. It can’t be moved. It’s not for sale. It’s never for sale. It actually belongs to me. It’s very freeing.”

    It’s also very Cecily Brown, very much in the thrust of her practice as a painter drawn toward the existential question of excess—excess sex, yes, a theme present in her work, but also culinary excess, which crops up quite often. Take Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries, and Pearls (2020), seen at her solo show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023—heaping platters of seafood spread across a table, begging to be masticated and savored. At Paula Cooper, in 2020, were a series of bravura paintings that dealt directly with gustatory bigness. A lush buffet supper with a woman, partially nude, imbibing. The Splendid Table is a massive triptych showing caught game—geese, ducks, rabbits, deer—ready for slaughter, flame, and feast.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Art Basel Paris Opened on Wednesday—Unless You Were Invited to the Secret Tuesday Opening

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    Mrs. Prada’s table was even more stacked: Govan and his wife Katherine Ross, Francesco Vezzoli, and the dynamic duo of Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, two of the great curators of their era, now two of the most important museum directors in Europe. Also present at her table: the great French actor Vincent Cassel, fellow actor Diane Kruger, Art Basel Paris director Clément Delépine.

    As dinner in this town tends to do, things went late, and even as I slipped out close to midnight, trays of Negronis were still being held by Maxim’s waiters and all the principals were still in attendance.

    “I can’t believe they’re still going,” said De Salvo, nodding toward Obrist and Biesenbach, deep in conversation with Mrs. Prada.

    There was much discussion of whether the Avant-Première gambit worked in everyone’s favor. It was designed to address the issue of overcrowding: too many hangers-on, not enough buyers. But one dealer at dinner was slightly concerned about the possibility that some collectors would think that everything had already sold to those who got early access and wouldn’t show up.

    But on Wednesday morning I dropped into the classic opening day of the fair, and it was just as crowded as any fair in recent memory. What’s more, stuff was moving. Rick Owens and his wife, Michèle Lamy, were on the scene, which was quite exciting to dealers in the booths. Zwirner had two editioned Richter prints, each in an edition of 12—by Wednesday it had sold 16 of them, netting $6.4 million. Pace had sold that Modigliani for just under $10 million, and by Wednesday White Cube had sold a Julie Mehretu for $11.5 million.

    But there was something much bigger—I heard on the ground of the fair that Hauser & Wirth had sold a 1987 Richter painting that had an asking price of $23 million. Not only that, it was not presold; there was no guarantee a deep-pocketed Gerhard-head would waltz into the booth. But someone came up to the booth during the Avant-Première, saw the picture, liked the picture, and paid something around $23 million for the picture.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Art Basel Paris Is Finally Here. Will It Upend the Global Art-Fair Order?

    Art Basel Paris Is Finally Here. Will It Upend the Global Art-Fair Order?

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    The first sign something unusual was going down at the Grand Palais in Paris was the small wooden house, plopped on the steps of the 150-foot-tall Beaux Arts dome. Things got stranger. The home was actually constructed in a matter of days, and it was no simple abode, but one of the demountable structures designed by Jean Prouvé that exists in the space between conceptual art, modern design, and a thing you can literally move into. The dealer Patrick Seguin was selling it for $2 million, which isn’t even that outrageous for a Prouvé house. André Balazs bought one in 2007 for just about $5 million. But it’s still a bit unreal to walk up to Art Basel Paris at the newly restored Grand Palais and be confronted with an austere Prouvé that was constructed overnight.

    And then out of the house stepped Owen Wilson.

    Why was the artist-loving actor in the City of Light, hanging out in a seven-figure design-object-slash-art-domicile? Well that’s just the magic of Art Basel Paris. Even before stepping foot inside the main event—the global fair company’s first edition at its permanent home in the Grand Palais, the fulcrum point of a week that is now a vital part of the collecting-as-lifestyle global tour—there are celebrities doing art stuff.

    At this moment, in this town, an art fair really seems to be seeping into the mainstream. Art Basel ads blanket the Métro stops on Line 1. Multiple Uber drivers googled “art basel paris tickets” on their phones while driving—eyes on the road, mon frere! All week, the city’s cultural offerings seemed logjammed and bustling, as if the surge in tourists never receded after the Olympics. In fact, a Paris resident told me that October in Paris is actually more crowded than it was during the summer games, when many Parisians retreated. Now everyone’s back and the art tourists are here too.

    It was so crowded on Sunday afternoon that Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner coincidentally ended up at the same tiny room for lunch: Bar Vendôme, the posh spot nested inside the warren of luxury that is the Ritz Paris. A cold war went down while each party pretended the other wasn’t there. It was so crowded that, the following night, Zwirner actually teamed with a third mega-gallery, Hauser & Wirth, to do a joint dinner at Loulou to avoid making their clients choose between bashes. Both global powers have outposts in Paris, of course. The French capital has risen as a gallery hub in the years after Brexit and all of the foreigners who planted flags here. And it was so crowded that they all opened on the same night, Monday. Gagosian offered a Harold Ancart show of gigantic landscape paintings, Zwirner new paintings by Dana Schutz, and Hauser & Wirth paintings, sculpture, and video by Rashid Johnson. The latter was the most in-demand show in town, according to private dealers trying to get their hands on some for clients.

    All the galleries took over a small strip of Avenue Montaigne. At a certain point in the evening, a mob had formed in front of the Takashi Murakami show at Perrotin—a group of fans were desperately seeking a selfie with the artist, one of the rare few who can spark a photo frenzy. But actually James Turrell whipped his fans into a similar fever right next door at Almine Rech, where he sat behind the desk and greeted gallery goers. White Cube had an opening next door, and I followed Eric Fischl and KAWS up the stairs to Skarstedt, where Per Skarstedt had a Warhol show up.

    Upstairs, the collector and music industry vet Josh Abraham introduced me to a friend he had brought along on the gallery hopping: the actor and musician Hilary Duff.

    “I’m here on a girls trip and I’m in Paris, and I wanted to make sure Josh shows me all the art,” she told me.

    So thank you, Hilary Duff, for making me realize something that’s central to the appeal of Art Basel Paris. Say you’re not a big collector but you buy things occasionally, and maybe you’ve been to Miami Beach for the fair but are kind of over it. The idea of traveling to Paris during Art Basel isn’t a daunting immersion into contemporary art symposia, but suddenly a great idea for a girls trip. Art Basel is just one of the things you do while you’re in town. You book a nice hotel, go to museums, go to an art fair, and have a primo bragging-rights reservation that your concierge or credit card can help you snag. Everybody wins. Art Basel can establish a world-class fair where the dealers bring A-plus work in line with Paris’s vast institutional and gallery landscape (something Miami Beach lacks), but also lure in wealthy folks who want to make an art fair part of a vacation lifestyle (impossible in Basel, Switzerland, with its institutionalized VIPs and dearth of buzzy boîtes and chic places to stay.)

    “They have hotels here, they have good restaurants, you can make a reservation, and that’s part of the whole experience,” said collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who’s shown at various Art Basel fairs and bought from all of them.

    Perhaps that’s why the Americans in Loro Piana ball caps and On sneakers seemed at times to outnumber the Europeans in designer loafers. Craig Robins, the Miami developer and collector who helped build the Design District, looked perfectly at ease sitting in a chair with Philomene Magers at the Sprüth Magers booth. The Rubells were there from Miami, and the Horts were there from New York. I spotted a quartet of museum directors—Melissa Chiu from the Hirshhorn, Jeremy Strick of the Nasher Sculpture Center, James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Max Hollein of The Met—all leading museum groups around. The NFL player turned collector Keith Rivers wasn’t just visiting for the fair; he’s fully moved to Paris.

    And the actor Natalie Portman was casually taking in a long tour of the Mariane Ibrahim booth from the gallery’s namesake, before a dealer from a booth over grabbed me for an introduction.

    “I’m really looking forward to getting to the Jeu de Paume, for the Tina Barney show,” Portman said, and she’s right to, because the Tina Barney show is really that amazing.

    Even at the Paris Internationale satellite fair, the venue was packed with collectors such as Prada cocreative director Raf Simons and the Paris-based Susanne van Hagen, plus directors from Gagosian, Lisson, and Zwirner, to see what the young galleries were showing. The Hotel Costes, the traditional after-hours hang for collectors such as the Mugrabis and the Nahmads, was jam-packed late Tuesday, hours before the opening of the fair. (Vanity Fair also had a little party that day, more on that later.)

    Rashid Johnson/Walla Walla Foundry.

    During the VIP opening day of the big fair, once I got past the Prouvé house, the $500 million renovation to the building really smacked me in the face, the fresh paint job popping and the golden banisters of the dome glistening in the light. Even James Murdoch, whose Lupa Systems has acquired a serious chunk of Basel’s parent company in the last few years, was spotted staring up at the ceilings of a palace so vast it looks almost fake, like AI-generated.

    There’s been endless bickering about Art Basel Paris versus Frieze London, and Art Basel Paris versus the original Art Basel, and that line of inquiry kept the chattering classes busy at the opening of the fair. “This is going to bury Art Basel in Switzerland,” one adviser told me. “The idea of London being replaced is pretty ridiculous, the museum shows are better there,” said a collector. And so on.

    But more relevant was the fact that right before our eyes, art works were selling for numbers that far eclipsed anything that went down in London, at least at the fair. Dealers brought serious stuff, and there was an appetite to buy. I saw collector Wendi Deng Murdoch and her adviser, the art dealer Xin Li, engaging in a chat with Jay Jopling at White Cube. A massive 2013 Julie Mehretu painting at the booth was eventually sold to another buyer to the tune of $9.5 million. (The gallery declined to comment on the purchaser’s identity.)

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Inside the MoMA Succession Sweepstakes

    Inside the MoMA Succession Sweepstakes

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    It’s generally thought of as the worst traffic fortnight in Manhattan: the weeks-long proceedings of the United Nations General Assembly, which ensnares all travel patterns on the east side of the island. Road closures, idling black cars, and battalions of cops and Secret Service agents make swaths of Midtown impossible-to-transverse hellscapes for a few days every September. By Tuesday evening, the construction around the JPMorgan supertall that’s taking over a full block on Park Avenue only added to the chaos, as did the flurry of e-biking meal couriers delivering sad desk dinners to still-working bankers. And that’s when President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled through.

    Amid the Midtown madness outside, a wonderful calm fell upon the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. A retrospective of the marvelously unclassifiable German artist Thomas Schütte had taken over the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, installed just in time for the opening cocktails. Met director Max Hollein, who told me he’s quite fond of Schütte and put him in several shows, walked into the room and marveled at the 12-foot-tall sculpture Vater Staat (Father State), on loan from the collection of Ken Griffin’s ex-wife, Anne Dias. A few floors down was a retrospective of the photographer Robert Frank—pics ranging from Beats goofing off to the Stones recording Exile on Main St.—and in the sculpture garden below, two full bars boozed up Gotham’s patrons of the arts.

    Something else was in the air too. It had been a few weeks since MoMA director Glenn Lowry announced that he would be stepping down from the role in September 2025, which was not a shock, exactly—the usual age of retirement at MoMA is 65, and Lowry’s pushing 70. But his widely acknowledged successes led him to stay on for an extra five-year term that expires next year. And now that it’s official, all people can talk about when they talk about MoMA is…who will be tapped to run MoMA.

    Understandably so. The job is arguably the plummest perch in all of museum-dom. Lowry’s had it for 30 years, reshaping the institution as the role of museum director itself shifted immensely across the field. Aside from a few dustups—various protests, a disgruntled ex-member’s alleged stabbing spree, the Björk show—Lowry’s a revered figure in the field. His departure announcement prompted a chorus of hosannas for his tenure followed by an inevitable question: Who can follow up a polymathic director beloved by both the budget teams and the curatorial teams, one who oversaw two renovation campaigns and is leaving the museum’s coffers fuller than they’ve ever been?

    Vater Staat (Father State), 2010 (detail). Patinated bronze. 149 5/8 × 61 × 55″ (380 × 155 × 139.7 cm).Collection Anne Dias Griffin, Photo by Steven E. Gross. 2024 Thomas Schütte / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

    “The thing that’s remarkable about Glenn—I’ve often been disturbed by how he has been framed as corporate, because he is immensely capable of using both sides of his brain. As I have often said to people, do you want a director who can’t count?” said Kathy Halbreich, who served as the associate director under Lowry for a decade of his tenure. “You must have a director that is able to be an equal in terms of financial planning, investment, and the financial side of the institution—and you want a director who is passionate about modern and contemporary art.

    And now someone needs to follow in his footsteps. Halbreich, like many others contacted for this story, did not want to go on the record naming names—out of respect for the process, of course, but also because there’s a chance that all the prognosticators are dead wrong. It’s unlikely that the art cognoscenti were able to predict, in 1995, that the board of the world’s most prominent postwar art institution would pick Lowry, who specialized in Islamic studies and was then the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Frieze’s CEO Talks Art in LA and the Future of the Fair Empire

    Frieze’s CEO Talks Art in LA and the Future of the Fair Empire

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    There’s never a bad time to be at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Last Wednesday at 3:45 p.m. the bar was full, and the producer Ilya Salkind—you don’t know him, but he did the original Superman movies—was eating an early dinner. He got the Polo Lounge McCarthy Salad, as everyone does, and was chatting with a pair of agents looking to make a Christopher Reeve documentary. Art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, who’ll open an LA outpost of Michael Werner Gallery this year across from Larry Gagosian’s spot in Beverly Hills, wandered through, early for a meeting. An elegant-looking woman in a coat insisted that her tea rest for 10 minutes before it was served to her. This is the classiest place to take a drink in Los Angeles.

    In strolled Simon Fox, the busiest man there—he’s the global CEO of Frieze, the art fair company owned by Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, and Frieze Los Angeles was set to open the following day. He’s British, once ran the publishing umbrella that owns The Mirror and OK!, and favors blue suits. He ordered a glass of Champagne and a bottle of flat water.

    “I have that worst and most obvious Los Angeles excuse: traffic,” he said, explaining his 15-minute tardiness, his English accent stretching out that dreadful word.

    I wanted to chat with Fox about the business of Frieze, which started out as an arts magazine in the ’90s and in a 10-year span starting in 2003 birthed extremely popular art fairs in London and New York. Emanuel’s Endeavor bought 70% of it in 2016, and then opened the first Los Angeles outpost in 2019. Fox was hired as CEO in 2020, and opened the fair in Seoul in 2022.

    Those fairs all face stiff competition from the Art Basel fairs on each of those continents, as they compete for blue-chip galleries to exhibit and collectors to attend. So last year Frieze bought up more fairs: Expo Chicago and the Armory Show in New York. The latter gives the group a big shindig to complement the boutique-ish Frieze New York, which takes place at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a downsize from the giant tent that it once occupied on Randall’s Island.

    Adding a fair in Chicago was a bit more surprising. I didn’t see it coming, even though I had a major inadvertent tip-off. I ran into Fox and Frieze fairs director Christine Messineo in line for the Chicago architecture boat tour in 2023, but it didn’t occur to me for a second they were doing anything other than admiring the skyscrapers by Mies van der Rohe and Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas—much less buying the art fair that was opening the next day.

    “Ari’s from Chicago,” Fox said, leaning forward. “So there is a corporate love for the city.”

    Fox is from England, and was educated at St. Paul’s School and then Cambridge. He moved to Los Angeles for his first post-college job, at a bank that was later bought by Bank of America.

    “And I had the funnest, best time. I mean, really, I nearly moved here,” he told me. “I kind of fell in love.”

    It’s fair to say he’s having an even more fun time now. Fox told me about the private homes he’s been in this week, spectacular homes with stirring architectural pedigree—some with real historical significance and some that are just really, really big. He wouldn’t say the names of the collectors who opened their doors to him, but I’d been to a few art-filled pads myself, and I’ll share my list.

    Walmart heir Sybil Robson Orr had her annual cocktail party for Serpentine at her eight-bedroom mansion in the Bird Streets, with Lana Del Rey showing up to hang out with Hans Ulrich Obrist under the James Turrell skyspace installed in the roof. Former NFL player Keith Rivers had a party at his place, and Jason Swartz opened up the Sheats-Goldstein house—the original Lautner house and the newer additions, which include a nightclub and perhaps the world’s first infinity tennis court—to various trustees of local institutions. (James Goldstein, the house’s owner, eventually popped up on Instagram in Milan for Fashion Week.) The Getty Villa started as J. Paul Getty’s private ranch house—Frieze threw its kickoff party there Monday night, and there’s plenty of Greco-Roman sculpture dotting the immense property. And filmmaker Lorraine Nicholson (recent Vanity Fair contributor, daughter of Jack) invited the curator Jed Moch to install a bunch of works in her historic midcentury-modern home in Laurel Canyon.

    “Frieze is just like an extremely important week for the city,” Nicholson said as the musician Beck and the artist Issy Wood and various Haim sisters filled the balcony of her home at the opening dinner. “I keep on going up to people and taking their hand and saying, ‘This is a very important week for the city.’”

    The most coveted home-tour invite was to Jimmy Iovine’s 10-bedroom stunner across the street from the Playboy Mansion, for a benefit auction to raise funds for his school with Dr. Dre, the Iovine and Young Academy. Attendees didn’t even mind that they couldn’t really see much of the Beats cofounder’s art holdings, as the event was confined to a cavernous room that Iovine had converted into a skating rink for his wife, Liberty Ross, who just really loves skating.

    “I’m glad you finally found a use for this room, Jimmy,” James Corden, the night’s emcee said drolly from the stage as Ed Ruscha, Benny Blanco, Brian Grazer, and the young music exec Justin Lubliner looked on.

    Iovine came on next to kick off the auction, proclaiming, with utter confidence, “The stock market’s going up 5,000 points tomorrow, so spend it tonight.” Corden tried another tactic, saying, “I want you all to point out the richest person in the room.” Many fingers were directed at Iovine. The auction was put together by Sotheby’s and the LA dealer David Kordansky, and several of his artists—Hilary Pecis, Austyn Weiner, Chase Hall, Jennifer Guidi—watched with a combination of fear and intrigue as auction house reps bid their works up and up, with some breaking records.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 Preview: An Unprecedented Spree of Brand Activations and Picture Buying…Just Like Every Year.

    Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 Preview: An Unprecedented Spree of Brand Activations and Picture Buying…Just Like Every Year.

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    And so on, forever.

    There is, of course, a lot of very good art on view in Miami next week. On Monday night the Bass Museum will open a sprawling survey of work by local hero Hernan Bas, followed by a fête for the artist by his gallery, Lehmann Maupin, at Casa Tua, the beloved Miami members club that’s set to open in New York in 2024. Nina Johnson, who’s held down a year-round gallery for over a decade, will open shows of work by Katie Stout and Yasue Maetake at her Little Haiti space, and then have friends over for barbecue at her Architectural Digest–approved, Charlap Hyman & Herrero–designed Craftsman in nearby Shorecrest.

    Let’s take the start of the calendar a day at time.

    Tuesday. A full day before the main fair opens and things are already hitting peak art insanity. Tuesday will see openings at the De la Cruz family’s home on Key Biscayne and the De la Cruz family’s private museum in the Design District. NADA, the longtime satellite expo for more emerging galleries, opens two days earlier than usual, leapfrogging the main fair. There’s all the museum openings at the ICA Miami, which still looks spiffy after launching its new building six years ago. And Larry Gagosian will team up with Jeffrey Deitch for another big-tent group show bound together by a big-picture theme—this year it’s “Forms,” as in artists who do cool stuff with shapes. Think Tauba Auerbach, Carol Bove, John Chamberlain, Albert Oehlen. Scoff all you want, but the Larry x Jeffrey shows always rule.

    And then, a neighborhood over in Allapattah, the Rubell Museum opens the shows of its most recent artists in residence, Basil Kincaid and Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, plus a show of LA artists in the collection. And then, after that, there’s—checks calendar—approximately one thousand dinners to attend, many of them on the beach, most featuring stone crabs and/or a surprise performer, all somehow absolutely essential to attend.

    Wednesday. The mob scene at the convention center. Billionaires in sunglasses waiting in line next to their frantic art advisers. Where to first? Perhaps to David Zwirner’s booth to see a pair of Robert Ryman works, as well as The Schoolboys, a canon-level painting by Marlene Dumas—it was in the collection of the Museum Gouda in the Netherlands until it sold at Christie’s for about $1.6 million in 2011. Or to Hauser & Wirth, which has on offer new paintings by Uman, which the mega-gallery now represents equally with Nicola Vassell, who started showing Uman in 2020. Van de Weghe will bring the expected mélange of 20th-century masters, including Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign (1981), which last sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $7.2 million. It is “one of the best large-size dollar-sign paintings,” the gallery said. David Kordansky Gallery will inaugurate its representation of Sam McKinniss, a remarkable painter of modern life, with a few works at the booth ahead of a solo booth at Frieze LA in February 2024 and a solo show at the flagship gallery in 2025. I’m quite excited to see the presentation of work by Sedrick Chisom at Matthew Brown’s booth, ahead of his New York solo debut in May 2024 at Clearing.

    But there are hundreds of booths across the various sectors of the fair, making it impossible to size up the entire fair in one go. And bear in mind, this is just the VIP opening—the fair doesn’t open to the public until Thursday. Which is why most of the hangers-on and brand activators show up not for the opening of the fair, but for the weekend, when most of the collectors are already back in Palm Beach or on Park Avenue. When one major airline announced it would be chartering its first-ever invite-only private flight, they set it to arrive not in time for the VIP opening, but for general admission on Thursday.

    Spending millions on art and design can work up an appetite. Thankfully, Miami has a way of sustaining an ever-churning hype machine that makes its hot restaurants impenetrably packed. A few years back, the Major Food Group guys had the bright idea to do a pop-up version of their New York hit Carbone at the Edition Hotel…despite the fact that they already have a Carbone in Miami, on South Beach. Mario Carbone, Jeff Zalaznick, and Rich Torrisi’s next big Magic City move is their first foray into Mexican food with Chateau ZZ’s, which I’m told will open its Brickell doors soon. If you must eat at an enormous clubstaurant to really get the full Miami Basel experience, maybe go to David Grutman’s new coastal Italian emporium, Casadonna, where Drake had his birthday party earlier this year.

    There’s a chance the art set sticks to what it knows—and what it knows is, quelle surprise, Estiatorio Milos, the seafood-heavy spot that flies in the fancy fish from exotic ports of call. Ordering from the cooler means we’re talking sea creatures that cost around $160 a pound—the stone crabs you ordered for the table could set you back two stacks, Chief. And it’s the same food, at the same prices, as the Milos in Dubai and the Milos in Hudson Yards and the Milos in London. Collectors spend all week asking for the Batphone to get a reservation like it’s the last place to break bread on earth.

    But there’s a new arrival on the scene, conveniently located in the Loews, where nearly every art dealer with their name on the door of a gallery books a room each year. (As I said last year, the place is a reality show waiting to happen.) Owned and operated by collector and hotelier-about-town Alex Tisch, the posh Collins crash pad has a new in-house boîte: an edition of the hallowed Harlem red-sauce temple Rao’s, the place that has appealed to power brokers of all stripes with its extremely clubby policy of only seating those who “own” a table.

    This Collins Avenue Rao’s facsimile—it’s referred to by regulars as “The Joint”— first seems like a relatively easy res to snag. For one, it’s way bigger. It’s got 160 seats, whereas the original has just four tables and six booths. And the “own a table” thing in Manhattan doesn’t apply here. The description on Resy notes that “the room is bigger than the Harlem original (and tables aren’t just for regulars and friends of the family).” So I plugged in my dates, desperate for anything, even just something at 10:30 p.m. in Siberia. But no tables appeared. I set a Notify.

    And then I reached Frank Pellegrino Jr., co-owner of Rao’s, and he told me that it’s not just Basel week that The Joint is booked. The tables are spoken for until next summer.

    “Presently, we are fully committed throughout Q1 and Q2, 2024,” he explained.

    Might as well give Frank a call and book the table for next December.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Paris Art Basel, London Frieze, and Scenes From the European Art Week Power Contest

    Paris Art Basel, London Frieze, and Scenes From the European Art Week Power Contest

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    Last Saturday in Paris, the global art enterprise Hauser & Wirth opened its 17th outpost, an expansive four-story space just off Avenue Matignon, in the 8th arrondissement. Until a few years ago, the move for a mega-gallery opening in the City of Light would be to open in Le Marais, the traditional gallery district in town. In 2019, David Zwirner, citing a need to transact in the EU post-Brexit, opened in that area, with a show of new work by Raymond Pettibon. The other mega-gallery, Gagosian, takes a different approach in Paris, supplementing its traditional gallery with a tiny space directly next to the Place Vendome and a gigantic hanger of space in Le Bourget, the city’s private jet hub, sitting there at the ready for those who hop off the jet stream itching to buy some art.

    Hauser & Wirth decided to take over the 1877 hôtel particulier in the warren of high fashion boutiques that spill out on and around Avenue Matignon. In order to get to the gallery, one must window shop past the global flagships of Balenciaga, Celine, Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta. With the crowd spilling out into the street, the storefront seemed from afar like another one of those boutiques, thronged with those willing to drop five figures on a coat. Instead, the crowd funneled into “From Sugar to Shit,” a show of new works by Henry Taylor, the artist whose retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum in New York earlier this month to rapturous crowds. The major paintings were on sale in the upper six figures, and they could have been sold several times over to the long list of collectors and institutions begging for the chance to buy.

    “Hey, how’s it going man, was just talking about you!” went a typical greeting from Taylor to a visitor as they walked in, surprised to be greeted by the artist. Inside the space, billionaire collectors mingled with artists such as Alvaro Barrington, who is so prolific he’s represented by six galleries on three continents and has had 12 solo shows in six cities in two years. The party continued at a cocktail dînatoire at Les Bains Douche, the once debauched home to many a night when revelers took a dip in the pool for a nightcap. It’s been cleaned up enough that it could play host to a number of Taylor’s collectors, including the artist Rashid Johnson, who lent a work to the Whitney show and has portraits of him and his wife, the artist Sheree Hovsepian, hanging at their Gramercy Park home. Another collector, who also lent to the Whitney show, said that the Hauser show was actually better than that retrospective: all work made here in Paris, on deadline, in reaction to the city, immediate, visceral.

    There was caviar, a lot of caviar, as well as tartare and duck and risotto, and eventually gallery founder Iwan Wirth bopped into the smoking section, where King Henry was holding court with Ewan Venters, the gallery’s global CEO who is making a big bet on opening up hotels and restaurants as part of their hospitality venture Artfarm. Revelers were making their way down to the dance floor, which still has a pool, albeit one more suited to admiring than wading. One question remained: What lucky collectors beat out the other billionaires and museums to score a work from Taylor’s show? The answer came later from a source. One of the buyers was, in some sense, the gallery’s neighbor: the owner of Balenciaga, Celine, Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta, a billionaire named Monsieur Francois Pinault.

    London and Paris hosted their annual art fair weeks this month, and despite the general sense of economic disarray and geopolitical turmoil facing much of Europe and the world, make no mistake: these two weeks were a battalion-force display of the impact of the soft power of the continent’s culture industries. Across the two eminent metropolises, political influence and capitalistic might combined to make art the main offer, for at least a few days, as Frieze London went down the second week of the month and Paris+ par Art Basel took over the City of Light the following week. Sure, these are art fairs, and each expo acts as an appendage of one master of the universe or another. Frieze is part of Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, and Art Basel is part of James Murdoch’s private equity juggernaut Lupa Systems. But the offerings of each days-long art-viewing spree went well beyond the works being sold in booths under tents. For a fortnight, the cities, a Eurostar ride apart, provided a deliciously rich offering of high-wattage museum shows, gallery openings, private collection views, studio visits, four-hour-long dinners, and, of course, more than a couple parties.

    “We are in a golden age for British arts and culture and the government will do all we can to continue to maximize the potential of our creative industries, which boasts talent the length and breadth of the UK,” the country’s culture secretary Lucy Frazer said in a statement.

    To prove as much, on the night before the opening of Frieze London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak invited a number of London’s arts personalities and power brokers to 10 Downing Street for cocktails and canapés, and to see what art from the government’s collection he had up on the walls. It was mostly old stuff, rather than contemporary, attendees reported. Not everyone was psyched to receive an invite. According to reports, the artist Ryan Gander, who had a show up at London’s Lisson Gallery, snubbed the Conservative PM, saying “There is only one way out of broken Britain and that is to not entertain these idiots whatsoever.” Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery in town, declined to attend the bash, and Sarah McCrory, the director of the contemporary gallery at Goldsmiths, cited Number 10’s pesky habit of cutting funding for the arts as a reason for skipping out. Among other reasons.

    “Also, did everyone miss the PM’s transphobic speech at the Tory party conference?” McCrory said in a statement first reported by The Art Newspaper. “There’s no way I’d eat his hors d’oeuvres.”

    By all accounts, the party was packed anyway, and the next morning, Frieze opened two fairs in Regent’s Park, with some big-sticker works selling despite the headwinds going against the art market at the moment. Hauser & Wirth sold a classic Louise Bourgeois for $3 million, and Spruth Magers sold a fresh-from-the-studio George Condo for an astounding $2.6 million.

    Outside of the fairs, it’s the institutions that need the funds to go forward, and they turn to those with means: the billionaires, the government, the wielders of soft power. The Serpentine board has long been chaired by Michael Bloomberg, whose Bloomberg Philanthropies has supported the Hyde Park institution for years. The Nicole Eisenman show at the Whitechapel Gallery was supported by her galleries—Anton Kern, Vielmetter, and Hauser & Wirth—but funds still ran out after a certain threshold. Under a reproduction of Eisenman’s masterful “The Abolitionists in the Park,” which has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since just after it was first shown in 2021, the wall text explained that, “When the costs of transporting the painting to Europe escalated, the curators decided to display this reproduction, fully acknowledging the compromise this entails.”

    “You can’t support these museum shows without serious support from the galleries, and the lenders,” said Alison Jacques, the longtime London gallerist who recently moved to Mayfair with a new big space on Cork Street. “So now, when someone gives a painting on loan, you have to say, ‘Can I get $10,000 too?’”

    Another major show was “Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas” at the Tate Britain—a major coronation moment for one of the more critically acclaimed but commercially undersung YBAs. It too needed help on the funding side. The lead sponsor visible upon entry, even ahead of Lucas’s galleries, was Burberry, the British luxury brand that does over $3.7 billion in revenue per year. Not that anyone minded, exactly. Burberry and Sadie Coles HQ hosted a dinner for Lucas at St. John, the Vatican of nose-to-tail cooking helmed by the pope of offal himself, Fergus Henderson. Matthew Barney sat across from actors Samantha Morton and Joel Edgerton, and Rita Ora and Barry Keoghan scooped marrow out of dinosaurian bones and onto butter-griddled toasts. My table mate was Bruno Brunett, the founder of the legendary Berlin tastemaking gallery Contemporary Fine Arts, who told story after story about Lucas’s Berlin shows back in the day, about London in the 90s, about dining at St. John with artists too scared to say hello to Lucien Freud the table over. When Brunett came back to his seat at one point, he mentioned he just met the most fantastic dinner guest. An artist? A new art-collecting client?

    “I just met Burberry designer Daniel Lee in the men’s,” he said, ecstatic.

    Upon arriving in Paris via the Eurostar, it became immediately clear that the display of soft power would not just match that in London, it would surpass it, by a notable amount. In the days before the fair opened, the French government allowed a select few art world insiders to come to the Musee d’Orsay on a Monday, when it is usually shut, well past usual business hours, to see a show of works by the perennial market darling Peter Doig installed in a breathtaking gallery immediately next to the state-held treasures, its Manets and Monets and Renoirs and van Goghs. Doig has no gallery representation at the moment, though several gallery honchos were there, David Zwirner among them. I spotted shipping heir Theo Niarchos staring at one painting, and French actor Clemence Poesy looking at another, and the Prada designer Raf Simons looking at another, and Henry Taylor and Alvaro Barrington looking at others yet. Sponsors to the show include the consultants Mazars, and the fashion conglomerate LVMH, which had more than $80 billion in revenue in 2022. It’s founder, Bernard Arnault, is the world’s second richest man.

    Across town, the mega-collector Francois Pinault, whose holding company Artemis recently purchased a majority stake in CAA for reportedly around $7 billion and has owned the auction house Christie’s since the 90s, has his own private museum in town, the Bourse de Commerce, and it’s hosting a major exhibition of work by American artist Mike Kelley, one that would be daunting for any American museum to stage.

    It’s the second year of Paris+ Art Basel, though it still won’t take over its permanent home in the Grand Palais until 2024, after the Olympics. And yet the whole operation already feels like an institution, and FIAC—the long-running Paris art fair that Basel displaced when it negotiated with the Reunion des musees nationaux Grand Palais for a seven-year lease on the mid-October slot—was at best an afterthought. It certainly was not mentioned during this year’s Art Basel press conference, which was hosted not at the fair, but at Lafayette Anticipations, the long-in-the-works permanent gallery space owned by the department store empire Galeries Lafayette, still run by the 96-year-old matriarch Ginette Moulin. Upstairs at the space, a show of work by Issy Wood took up multiple floors. An Akeem Smith show was in another exhibition space on the other side of the facility. While acknowledging the troubling news coming out of various parts of the world, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz stood up at the fair’s press conference and said that he was confident that the spirit of this city would allow for the Basel fair in Paris to be on par with its other fairs in Miami Beach, Hong Kong, and Basel Switzerland.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Kevin Love, Basketball Guy, Renaissance Man, Has Some Art He’d Like You to Buy

    Kevin Love, Basketball Guy, Renaissance Man, Has Some Art He’d Like You to Buy

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    During the NBA playoffs last June, Kevin Love, a veteran NBA power forward and Olympic gold medal winner, was having a serious glow-up. During the regular season, he reportedly clocked the worst on/off impact numbers of his career, and saw Cleveland pull him from the rotation before buying him out of his contract after nine years on the team. In February, he landed on the Miami Heat, who at the time were struggling to stay in the Eastern Conference playoff bubble, but by April snuck into the postseason via the play-in tournament. By June, they were in the finals against the Denver Nuggets—pulling off a nearly unprecedented run—and Love was coming off the bench and scoring double-digits while serving as an elder statesman in the locker room. The Heat knocked off one highly favored behemoth after another—the Milwaukee Bucks, the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics—and while they got crushed by Denver in game five, Love can claim an eye-popping stat: Each of the five times he’s played on a team in the playoffs, they’ve won the Eastern Conference championship.

    A few months after the season, after resigning with the Heat for two more seasons, Love found himself in a different kind of championship, another industry’s holiest of holies. It was the private-view opening of Ed Ruscha’s career retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a select few were allowed up to the sixth-floor Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions to take in the show before the unwashed masses. There, the artist was greeted by his dealer, Larry Gagosian; institutional power brokers like MoMA director Glenn Lowry and Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan; fellow artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Jeff Koons; the actor John Krasinski and a certain six-foot-eight superfan.

    “He’s a very near and dear artist to me, somebody I’ve been able to build a relationship with,” Love, who’s been to Ruscha’s studio several times, told me a couple weeks after the opening. “I got to say hello to him and then just take in his expansive work from the last six decades. That’s really special.”

    He owns two Ruscha’s drawings that display the text “The End,” and they hang at the apartment in Tribeca he shares with his wife, Kate, their nearly four-month-old daughter, and an utterly adorable vizsla named Vestry. The Ruschas were actually the first works of contemporary art that Love bought, and since then he’s amassed a collection that includes a sculpture by Antony Gormley, and Doug Aitken wall work displaying the word EXIT, a neon Dan Flavin installation, and a work on ceramic by Rashid Johnson, whom Love considers a friend.

    “Actually, it’s his birthday today,” he said, wishing Johnson a happy birthday on a rainy and cold Monday in late September. I was talking to Love at Sotheby’s York Avenue headquarters to discuss his most visible contribution to the art world yet: He’s the latest prominent bold-facer to be tapped to helm a Contemporary Curated sale for the auction house, and he’s selected a handful of works that reflect his taste and collecting history. Okay, fine—Love is not physically present at Sotheby’s. He’s FaceTiming on the phone of Haleigh Stoddard, the head of the Contemporary Curated sale, and Stoddard is bringing a disembodied, very-much-in-Miami Kevin Love around the sale he put together.

    “It’s about 85 degrees and sunny, and I’m sitting in the air conditioning right now, having a hot coffee, so I kind of feel like I’m in New York City,” Love said with a grin.

    He couldn’t get back to the city, as he’s in the midst of training camp in the Magic City—media day is exactly a week away, and preseason jousting starts the week after. After the shocking run at the end of last season, he knows that there’s some undue attention on the Heat and its star Jimmy Butler, but he said he’s cautiously optimistic. He isn’t beating himself up for losing the last game of the year.

    “On our side, obviously we felt like anything could happen, and we had enough talent to do it, but it was a special, special run,” he told me. “Probably the most special in terms of, again, what was expected of us.”

    So, yeah, he’s not leaving Miami, not for anything, not even for the two auctions that go down today. And so our tour consisted of Love’s perpetually grinning face floating through the galleries, with the shooter-curator speaking in paragraphs about each of the works that he chose. He’s bursting with his passion for this stuff. Cavs fans who followed his nine-year run in Cleveland know that, even if he acted as third banana to LeBron and Kyrie in his prime years, Kevin Love is an enthusiast—scrambling until the final whistle. And that’s both on and off the court. He’s developed a passion for fancy watches, for sleek interior design grails, for vintage cinema. He’s a complete wine snob, an elite oenophile in a league full of them—he even has his own brand, Chosen Family Wines, that apparently has some legit big tannin energy. He’s a passionate foodie, constantly posting to the ’gram shots with Lilia chef Missy Robbins and Hometown Bar-B-Que pitmaster Billy Durney. When he got married last year at the New York Public Library, Mario Carbone was in attendance, and he’s close friends with Carbone investor and art curator Vito Schnabel, who often helps Love source that one artwork he’s gotta have.

    He got into art collecting naturally, over time, and recalled that he started to have conversations with Carmelo Anthony about art when they played in the 2012 Olympics. The then New York Knick was developing a passion for painting that would lead him first to Kehinde Wiley, then to Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and beyond.

    “Melo and I spoke a lot about art, and I kind of initiated some of the conversations,” Love said.

    He would also talk to his Cavs teammate LeBron James, who led Cleveland to four trips to the NBA finals in four years. Like Love, James owns work by Johnson. He had the artist on The Shop, the HBO talk show that Love has also sat in on. James made it to Capri for the opening of Brice Marden’s show at Casa Malaparte in 2018, and snapped a pic of a studio visit to see new work by Spencer Lewis, with Schnabel in tow. When Vanity Fair stopped by the James residence last fall to check up on James, his wife, Savannah, and the kids, the house sported large canvases by Kareem-Anthony Ferreira and a sculpture by Roy Nachum.

    “Who do I talk to about art in the league? Yeah, I mean, LeBron is one of them just because we collect some of the same artists,” Love said.

    Several years ago, Love started working with art adviser Jane Suitor, and started upping his participation in the art world carousel—going to Frieze New York, taking trips to shows at the Drawing Center, and dipping into galleries like Hauser & Wirth. In 2020, Love moved into a posh Robert A.M. Stern–designed building in Tribeca, smack dab in the middle of the city’s new hip gallery district. By 2021, he was chummy with Charles Stewart, the Sotheby’s CEO, and in March of that year Love posted to his instagram Stories a picture of him holding an ’82 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, easily a four-figure bottle of Bordeaux.

    “A beautiful Mouton @Charles_Stewart,” Love said on his story.

    “Thanks for coming by, much better than what we drank last time,” Stewart said in a repost.

    By May 2022, Love was at Sotheby’s to celebrate Baz Luhrmann and the release of his new movie Elvis, during which guests—such as hotelier Sean MacPherson and actor Tessa Thompson and a smattering of Sotheby’s bigwigs—supped on dinner by Legacy Records at long tables set up in the York Avenue galleries, with Andy Warhol’s Elvis installed behind Luhrmann. (It sold for $21.5 million later that month.) And in 2023, Love was tapped to pick a few works for the annual Contemporary Curated sale at Sotheby’s. Each year the auction house brings in a ringer to add some sparkle to a sleepy off-season sale, and past guest curators included the likes of Robert Pattinson, Kelly Rowland, Skepta, Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Aoki—somebody put that crew together in a room!

    But the Contemporary Curated has never tapped an NBA star to helm a sale, and as I walked through the galleries while Kevin Love–on–a–phone hovered near artworks, we started talking about a small Gormley sculpture he picked for the sale. This one is a body made from a string of cast iron blocks facing down like, say, a power forward splayed on the court after getting fouled.

    “That relatability of trying to understand where you fit in the world, and the human body, and interpreting that as an athlete—I’m always thinking about that,” Love said.

    We walked by some of his picks, a painting by Issy Wood and a drawing by Cy Twombly— “One of the very first artists that I was drawn to, even before I started collecting, it’s poetry in motion,” he said of Twombly—until we stood in front of a painting by the late Ernie Barnes, whose work set the market ablaze when a bidding war for The Sugar Shack turned a lot estimated to sell for $200,000 into a $15.2 million juggernaut. This Barnes, a work commissioned by Motown Records to pay homage to Marvin Gaye, is expected to sell for up to $1.2 million.

    “I grew up listening to Marvin Gaye, and so I was introduced [to Barnes] at an early age,” Love said. “And it wasn’t until recently I actually had learned about his athletic background.”

    The Johnson work in the sale prompted Love to talk about his own works by the artist back at home in Tribeca, one of which is Untitled Anxious Audience. For Love, Johnson’s work reminded him of the mental health issues that he tries to combat with the Kevin Love Fund, and the anxiety and dread he detailed in an essay for The Players’ Tribune that talked about his panic attacks that would afflict him in the middle of games. And that prompted a conversation between power forward and painter about what their each getting out of a work of art.

    “I was kind of telling him my story and how a lot of my collecting is very intentional and autobiographical,” he said. “And those are two pieces that are very important within my collection, especially because with Rashid, it’s the subject matter, especially the anxious red pieces, the bruise paintings. Those are ones that really stick out to me just because I work in a lot of the mental health space. So that anxiety of the time that we’re in and the time that we’re getting out of, it’s really amazing. Oh, I love those pieces.”

    We walked past an early painting by Jennifer Packer that Love chose for the sale, and wound our way past Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #21, an iconic one, with Sherman photographing herself embodying what the catalog entry for the edition owned by the Met calls, “the guise of the Hitchcockian ‘career girl’ alone on the streets of the big city.”

    “Actually, I was just reading about Hitchcock this morning,” Love said, looking at the Sherman photograph. “I feel like I’m watching Vertigo or I’m watching The Birds or watching Rear Window. That level of suspense—I feel like it’s really shining through this.”

    After a beat, Love said, “What is the bid?”

    “I would love you to bid,” Stoddard said, shifting into sales mode.

    She walked up to the wall label to read the estimate.

    “That’s going to be four hundred to six hundred,” she said, meaning six hundred thousand.

    Love paused. He had three days to make up his mind on whether to bid in the sale, three days of practices for the reigning Eastern Conference champs who are paying him a reported $3.8 million for the season.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • The Armory Show Enters a New Era in an Uncertain Art Market

    The Armory Show Enters a New Era in an Uncertain Art Market

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    On Wednesday night, The Armory Show held a small, exclusive cocktail party for its collectors in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, one of New York’s more opulent venues for a party. For hours, guests such as the collector Nicolai Frahm, the actor and Meryl Streep–scion Grace Gummer, and Powerhouse Arts director Eric Shiner mingled, nibbling on fluke crudo and mini truffle burgers.

    On paper, it could be billed as the final touch of the fair’s glow-up, seeing as a few years ago, The Armory Show occupied a pier next to the stretch of West Side Highway, a location that forced visitors to enter as the Hustler Club floated ominously across the street. One year, the pier collapsed. Now, the fair is held in the shiny Javits Center, a few blocks from Chelsea. And the pregame is on Museum Mile.

    “Yeah, it’s just some little shindig right,” Nicole Berry, the director of The Armory Show, as she flung her wrists toward the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda.

    This little shindig had a surprising number of Europeans who chose this art hoopla over the trip to Frieze Seoul, which is happening halfway across the world at the same exact time. Brussels-based art-world fixture Alain Servais, a collector and investment banker known for his ever-present cravat affixed to his collar, shook his head thinking about the fact that an identical merry-go-round of gallery fêtes and fair vernissages was happening in South Korea.

    “I’m just so interested in the industrialization of the art world,” he said. “I invented the phrase ‘Grow or Go’ years ago and now I use it every day. The art world cannot stop growing. One day it might be the NFL.”

    And now the Armory itself has become part of the ever-expanding industrialization—earlier this year, Frieze scooped up the fair for $24.4 million, and last month, also acquired Expo Chicago. (The seller of Frieze was Vornado Realty Trust, the behemoth Gotham building company chaired by billionaire Steven Roth, while Art Expositions LLC sold Expo Chicago.) In the face of an Art Basel that quite successfully expanded its empire to Paris, Frieze is now aggressively expanding its footprint in the States by acquiring two solid fairs that had been somewhat lacking the hip factor of, well, Frieze.

    While the two events will retain their independence, Frieze’s chief executive Simon Fox said at the time the deal was announced, the expos in Chicago and New York are clearly thrilled to be brought into the fold by a fair group that seems to always burst with Mayfair chic at Frieze London and Hollywood glamor at Frieze Los Angeles. Tony Karman, the longtime Expo Chicago director who’s long acted as the Energizer Bunny of the windy city art world, has been telling people at parties that he recently got a phone call from Ari Emanuel, the cofounder of Frieze’s parent company Endeavor, and loved every second of it. The love is presumably mutual. The super agent grew up in Chicago, and his brother Rahm served as the mayor for eight years. Fox, the British media vet, was spotted in Chicago during this year’s fair, months before the deal closed, checking out the city’s famous architectural boat tour and basically having the time of his life.

    And after making my way through the reams of Europeans quaffing negronis under the rotunda, and enduring an Italian furniture designer who insisted I was an actor—“What is that show, with the attorneys? Suits? Are you on that show?”—I ran into Christine Messineo, the director of Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles, who stayed in New York to oversee Frieze’s new acquisition while her colleagues manned the ship in Seoul. She insisted that The Armory Show was going to operate independently under Frieze, but let slip that she had been given early access to the fair a full day early.

    “And I can tell you, honestly, it looks amazing,” she said.

    Amid all this, should one be concerned about, say, the ever-shrinking art market? Auction sales are down considerably in the last year compared to the relative boom times of the immediate post-pandemic. The collapse of China’s real estate infrastructure has led the country into a recession, eliminating the sell-side’s most reliable buyer of the last decade. And China isn’t just not buying, they are actively unloading—the announcement that Shanghai’s Long Museum would be selling off a large chunk of their collection has deeply spooked the market. The first wave of casualties has started. Jasmin Tsou made the shock announcement that she would close her gallery JTT just a little over a year after moving to a splashy new space in Tribeca. Across the pond, one-time triple continental powerhouse Simon Lee went into court-ordered administration (similar to bankruptcy in the US).

    But for those still standing, sitting out a fair week is not an option once the collectors return to New York after a long period of Hamptons obsolescence. On Tuesday, The Independent fair had a cocktail hour at Casa Cipriani, where, despite the sweltering heat, the bar room was filled with men in Loro Piana suits. There’s some great tennis happening in Flushing Meadows, and plus, lest we forget, it’s fashion week. J. Crew’s 40th-anniversary party featured a performance by The Strokes. I left after they played “The Modern Age,” which honestly sounded great despite the subtle hints of My Super Sweet 16 that came with the whole affair. After the band finished, Julian Casablancas said, “It’s been real… and a little bit fake.”

    There was also a dinner for the artist Chase Hall, in celebration of his exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, at Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant Altro Paradiso. Each table was studded with collectors from Miami and Dallas and Los Angeles, while Gagosian’s Antwaun Sargent was holding court at the same table at the same restaurant he sat at exactly a year ago to fête Rick Lowe. The following night there was another dinner hosted by Kasmin Gallery in honor of its shows for the artists Elliott Hundley and Bosco Sodi—and it was at the same restaurant, Altro Paradiso, as if the art world knows exactly one place to eat dinner on earth, and they happen to like it.

    On Thursday, I made my way to Independent’s fall fair, which has the advantage of taking place at the Casa Cipriani’s beaux-arts Battery Maritime Building, its windows framing perfect views of an endless stream of helicopters depositing banking execs on the helipad next door. In other words, a perfect spot for Vito Schnabel to stage a booth of Andy Warhol’s society portraits—Liza Minelli, Jack Nicklaus, Giorgio Armani—curated by Bob Colacello (a former contributor to VF), who wrangled many of the subjects while he was editor of Interview in the ’70s, when the magazine was the Pravda of the Factory. Painter Peter Nadin was at the Off-Paradise booth to guide one toward a landscape that’s off to join the collection of an important European institution. This booth’s view included no airborne rotor-churning “Succession”-like portraits of Manhattan power, but instead the modest vista of the Red Hook docks, the epitome of working-class Brooklyn. Nadin loved it. He’s from Liverpool.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • How David Zwirner Turned a Forgotten Block in LA Into Prime Real Estate

    How David Zwirner Turned a Forgotten Block in LA Into Prime Real Estate

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    Last Tuesday, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Melrose Hill, the once desolate stretch of Western Avenue right below Melrose had what could have been the biggest gathering ever seen by the area. Around 6 p.m., a wave of hundreds of people flowed to the block for the opening of mega-dealer David Zwirner’s first galleries on the West Coast. In one building were new paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, an LA-based artist fiercely in demand, partially because she makes only a handful of works per year. Despite the fact that she’s been showing at museums for a decade and has seen her work sell for $4.7 million at auction, this was her first solo gallery show in the United States—and her first with Zwirner since joining the gallery five years ago. 

    Despite the momentous occasion of an industry megalith touching down in Tinseltown, Angelenos in the art world have been talking less about the galleries themselves and more about their location. Every member of this ETA-obsessed populace seems to have an opinion about why Zwirner chose to be here, far from the downtown vibes established by the Hauser & Wirth gallery a decade ago and the West Hollywood hub where, well, there’s another Hauser & Wirth now. And if you’re driving from Larry Gagosian’s longtime West Coast HQ in Beverly Hills, it’ll take 22 minutes with zero traffic, but easily an hour in rush hour. 

    Zwirner, however, has a secret weapon: a young 30-something named Zach Lasry, an actor and filmmaker who happens to be the son of billionaire Marc Lasry. Zach Lasry first got involved with the neighborhood in 2019 and, despite his lack of experience in real estate development, started buying up buildings, intent on making a gallery hub in the City of Angels that would be that unimaginable thing: walkable. If he gets his wish, one day there will even be a hotel. 

    “It gives your body agency,” he said. “You’re like, Wow, I can just stay there and then use my legs to get to the interesting thing? I don’t have to become a bionic person in my car?”

    Just a few months earlier, the neighborhood was not exactly ready for prime time. It was a Monday afternoon in early September 2022, and Lasry was taking me around the dozens of Deco buildings lining Western or snaking around Melrose that he’d either bought outright or leased. Zwirner senior directors Alex Tuttle and Robert Goff were in the two preexisting structures they were leasing, both of which needed plenty of rehabbing and were reimagined by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. Another Zwirner structure was being built from the ground up by Selldorf on what before was nothing but a parking lot. In September, those on-site were dealing with the structure’s foundation, with the opening a year out. When I visited in September, the first spaces in preexisting Deco buildings were set to open in February, but the date was pushed back to late May. The Selldorf building will apparently open in the fall. When I saw it recently, I noticed it had sprouted a few stories, but it was still a construction site. 

    But Lasry wasn’t there to just show me the Zwirner spaces. Within three blocks, galleries including Morán Morán and Clearing were already open with exhibitions welcoming viewers. Nearby were near-complete spaces that were set to be inhabited by New York transplants such as Sargent’s Daughters, Shrine, a new gallery from dealer Emma Fernberger, and the second-ever space for James Fuentes. The acclaimed Filipino eatery Kuya Lord sat across the street from a space that will house the second location of Dimes Square pie-slinger Scarr’s, and the womenswear brand CO will have an outpost right next to the Zwirner spaces. 

    A block south, at the future home of the long-standing City of Angels nonprofit LAXART, director Hamza Walker was hanging in his empty space, mapping out for me the general layout: the offices, the galleries, the patio out back. We walked by a former furniture wholesaler—it’s being cleaned out to house Color Club, a Giorgio’s-inspired nightclub designed by the Haas Brothers that is said to count longtime Haas family pal Leonardo DiCaprio as an investor—and checked out Vitru, a gym where, on the morning Lasry and I were strolling around, Sam Rockwell happened to be working out with a personal trainer. On the south side of Melrose, west of Western, we walked by a strip of apartment buildings with retail occupying the ground floor. For these, Lasry had asked Miggi Hood—the architect and designer best known for restoring a Modernist house in Mexico City into the boutique hotel Casa Pani—to act as an architectural design consultant, so she could make sure certain building façades got the right treatment to honor Old Hollywood.

    A block later, we ran into Geoff Anenberg and Tyler Stonebreaker of the hotly in-demand design firm Creative Space, which specializes in taking old historic buildings and gussying them up for galleries and hip eateries. It makes sense that Lasry called them up to help get Melrose Hill ready for celluloid, but he didn’t expect them to fall so deeply in love with the area that they would move their own business to Melrose Hill. But that’s what they did. We walked through the building as workers poured concrete to create an open-plan urban design laboratory. 

    “We’ve worked on a lot of projects all over the city, but they never screamed out: We have to move our office here,” Stonebreaker said, walking through the space. “But with this, we saw the space and said, we have to move.”

    Lasry had never bought a building before when he started driving through this quirky part of town, going from his Silver Lake digs to his girlfriend’s place, which was nearby. On Melrose, clusters of Craftsman homes built as early as 1911 lay nestled in trees and back roads, hidden enough to bewilder the pizza delivery guy, according to the LA Times. 

    And he kept focusing on the strip of Art Deco buildings on Western, some of which featured striking period designs untouched since the ’20s. Many were built as prop warehouses for Paramount Pictures, which has its studio back lots a few blocks down on Melrose. After repeated visits, Lasry was infatuated enough to raise the idea of buying some with his father, who, like his son, had little experience in real estate, though plenty of experience in other arenas. Marc Lasry was at the time an owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, and he is still a significant donor to the Democratic Party; he and his sister Sonia Gardner are also the  cofounders of Avenue Capital Group, the investment firm with about $12.5 billion worth of assets under management. 

    “One of them went up for sale, so I went to my dad and my aunt and I was like, ‘I think we should buy one of these buildings. It’s really cute. I think this neighborhood has a lot of potential,’” Lasry told me. 

    At this point we had stopped to grab sandwiches at lunch spot Ggiata, featuring authentically New Jersey Italian subs, with the owners straight out of Montclair. 

    “And then three other buildings went for sale the next week, and it was just like, ‘Hey, seems like these are really good prices. Why don’t we just dip our toe in?’” Lasry said. “And it snowballed from there.”

    Then came the pandemic, a time when it was extremely difficult to lease storefronts, as it involved a lot of being in close quarters with potentially infected humans. 

    “Basically everything was done, but people couldn’t see any spaces,” Lasry said. “You weren’t even allowed to go inside the buildings. It was illegal.”

    Creative Space had signed on as the development partner, and the firm leaned on its long history of reinventing spaces for galleries—most famously turning an aging former flour mill in the arts district into Hauser & Wirth’s groundbreaking LA gallery that houses multiple viewing spaces as well as a bookstore, a 25-foot-tall tree, a wildly popular restaurant festooned with doodles by Henry Taylor, Paul McCarthy, and Rashid Johnson, a gift shop, and, just for good measure, a chicken coop. For galleries looking to relocate, taking a tip from Stonebreaker was always a safe bet. 

    “And then Geoff called me up and was like, ‘Al Morán was looking for a space, Al and Mills,’” Lasry recalled, referring to the Morán Morán owners. “So that was the beginning. The pandemic felt like it was waning a little bit, so I think people were excited and saying, ‘Oh, it seems the pandemic’s coming to an end.’”

    Stonebreaker also had another potential signee. He had become friendly with Goff, a director at Zwirner who for the last few years had been based out of Los Angeles, and showed him a portfolio of available spaces on either side of Western, right below Melrose. Goff liked the idea enough to pass it along to the guy with his name on the door, and Zwirner was intrigued. 

    “Tyler called me up one day and was like, ‘I think David had a very specific kind of space that he wanted’—he wanted to be on a certain latitude so that the light would hit the space the right way, so that corner was the only thing that fit for him,” Lasry said. “And we had it under contract at that point, but Tyler asked me if there was any interest in showing it to David. I was like, ‘Yeah, definitely, obviously.’” 

    Things escalated quickly, as Zwirner shared the news of the potential space with his son and daughter, Lucas and Marlene Zwirner, who both work at the gallery as head of content and a director, respectively. 

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    Nate Freeman

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

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

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    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.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • How a Pseudo-Secret, Celeb-Friendly Poker Game Became the Art World’s Playground

    How a Pseudo-Secret, Celeb-Friendly Poker Game Became the Art World’s Playground

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    On a Saturday in February, nearly 100 card players arrived at a nondescript event space in Hollywood for a poker tournament with a $500 buy-in. At first glance, it looked like your run-of-the-mill upscale gambling excursion, with outfitted dealers at the dozen tables, a full bar, burgers from Trophies, and pizza from Pizzana. But anyone who’s spent time perusing galleries in Chelsea or flying to Miami for Art Basel would recognize the bulk of the players. The fact that it was going down on the Saturday of Frieze Los Angeles was no coincidence. This wasn’t the World Series of Poker but the third edition of the World Series of Art Poker, organized by the megawatt LA artist Jonas Wood. Since the game started in 2021, it’s the first and only poker tourney where artists outnumber Hold’em pros and art dealers outnumber bankers. 

    As the tournament barreled toward the final table, Jack Black was still in the game, and Tobey Maguire had just been eliminated, finishing 17th, and was cheering on the art dealer Jeff Poe and Christie’s senior executive Alex Marshall, who had managed to stick out the game for hours. There were established mid-career artists such as Matt Johnson, Grant Levy-Lucero, and JPW3, and, of course, Wood, who got knocked out after hours of play. Parker Ito is a fiercely competitive poker player, as is the young artist Adam Alessi, who’s been playing in games for the last three years. Among the dealers, the cofounders of tri-coastal art concern Amanita (Casa Malaparte proprietor Tommaso Rositani Suckert, former Gagosian director Jacob Hyman, and Cy Twombly grandson Caio Twombly) all stayed in the game late. But one younger dealer told me he spent his commissions made at Frieze on three buy-ins, only to lose all $1,500. 

    For all the star power in the building, there was only one person whose entrance made the room stop: the world-famous artist Richard Prince, who has something of a reputation as Salinger-esque upstate recluse. 

    “Richard rolled up and he walked around, checked it out. He told me he was coming and I was like, ‘This is incredible,’” Wood told me a few days after the tournament ended. “I was like, ‘Oh, he’s not going to play.’ And then he hung out for 15 minutes and he was like, ‘Yo, I’m going to play.’ And then he jumped in the tournament.”

    Prince sat down next to Avant Arte cofounder Christian Luiten, who told him reverentially that he had just made a pilgrimage to the remote Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark just to see its Prince retrospective. By the end of the game, Prince and Luiten were discussing how Prince could collaborate with Avant Arte on an edition. The rest of the room craned their necks to get a look at Prince’s card skills. Few knew that Prince had long been playing in much more hush-hush poker games organized by Wood. Before the World Series of Art Poker, the Los Angeles art world had been clandestinely coming together for a series of card games going back decades. Since the mid-aughts, Wood has been hosting gaming nights at his studio, the tequila flowing and the smell of fresh paint wafting through the room, so his artist friends and his gallerists and his friends’ gallerists could gamble while gossiping trade secrets and making backroom deals.

    Then word got out, and the celebrities wanted in. 

    “And then Leo sees on his Instagram that we’re playing and he wants to come play with Richard Prince,” Wood said.

    “Leo,” in this context and perhaps any outside of the High Renaissance, is Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure enough, he came through and shared a table with Prince.  

    “It’s kind of nutty,” Wood said. 

    Along with DiCaprio, Black, and Maguire, Ellen DeGeneres was a regular player, Wood said, and billionaire collectors such as Peter Brant and Stavros and Theo Niarchos would get dealt in when they passed through town. Bruno Mars once dropped into a game with Wood and his wife, the artist Shio Kusaka, a serious player herself. Over the years, the art game started to mimic the art world as a whole, and went from being an insular, insiders-only bubble to one that is in frequent collaboration with the titans of other industries.

    “When we started playing with some of the celebrities, it was fun because there started to be some crossover,” said artist Mark Grotjahn, who has played in the game since day one. “That’s what New York had over LA: Writers and actors and fashion people and thinkers and dancers, all together. But that never really existed in the LA art world, where no one is walking. In New York, one friend meets another friend meets another friend and you’re all going back to an apartment. So with the game, we got a little bit of that here.”

    Perhaps we’ve collectively forgotten, but poker was really big in the late ’90s. Between the period that Matt Damon starred in Rounders in 1998 and Ocean’s Eleven in 2001, poker emerged from the dank underbelly of the casino lifestyle and entered the American home as a way to pass time in the suburbs. It also became an aspirational fantasy for aimless youngsters struggling to enter the workforce. This fantasy was embodied by a man named—and this is his real name—Chris Moneymaker. In 2003, Moneymaker, then 20-something working as an accountant near Nashville, entered an online poker tournament with $86 and emerged as the champion of the World Series of Poker, with a $2.5 million pot. Texas Hold’em tournaments were suddenly the stuff of late-night ESPN blocks and Bravo aired five seasons of Celebrity Poker Showdown shortly before going full Housewives. 

    “That was kind of a moment when poker really started to become popular, because people were like, ‘Oh, you can make a lot of money from not a lot,’” said aforementioned LA artist Matt Johnson, who went to high school with Wood in Boston and hired him as an assistant when Wood and Kusaka first moved to LA. “And Moneymaker was just some accountant. So [Wood]Jonas and I just sort of got into it and we were just playing on our own with pocket change just to learn how to play.”

    By the time the two of them got to town, a game had been going on for years led by Blum & Poe cofounder Jeff Poe, who told me he started playing poker in his early 20s while in and out of punk rock bands and working for the artist Chris Burden. By the late ’90s, Blum & Poe was going strong, and there was a game happening with fellow Santa Monica gallerists such as Robert Berman, Marc Richards, and the artist Angus Chamberlain, son of John Chamberlain. There was also a just-graduated artist new to the Blum & Poe program named Mark Grotjahn, who had paid for his BFA at UC Berkeley by playing blackjack in Reno. (He also was a successful ice cream salesman whose main conveyance was a tricycle.) 

    “I had my second show at Blum & Poe where I only sold one work for $3,500, and I got $1,750 for two years of work,” said Grotjahn, who has since seen a painting of his sell at auction for more than $16 million. “For the next 10 months, I kind of stopped making art and I went to the Commerce Casino in East LA, the biggest card club in the country. I was playing limit, where the odds aren’t stacked against you, you just have to beat the house’s take.”

    He made more money doing that than selling art, and then after stopping, he went back to the private games, where he could take money off his dealers rather than the casino owners. 

    “I mean, at the very beginning, in the early days, it was always Grotjahn,” Poe said. “He was by far the best player because he was playing a lot at the casinos and he was just…every time, he won.”

    In the early 2000s, Blum & Poe started showing Johnson, who got invited to the games out in Santa Monica, before the gallery moved to La Cienega in Culver City and the game moved with it. Johnson would invite his high school buddy Jonas Wood to come play, but the others had no idea Wood was an artist. One time Grotjahn and Johnson walked into Chinatown gallery Black Dragon Society, and Grotjahn realized he really liked these paintings of landscapes and interiors and sports heroes. 

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    Nate Freeman

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  • SBF, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the Spectacular Hangover After the Art World’s NFT Gold Rush

    SBF, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the Spectacular Hangover After the Art World’s NFT Gold Rush

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    We got on the horn with Benedict Evans, a tech thinker who had stints as a partner at Mosaic Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, which led the $450 million fundraising round for Yuga Labs—before the crypto winter. We wanted an outside read on the state of the art world’s soul, following its brief embrace of the crypto phenomenon. If an art dealer got in and out unscathed, how bad should they feel?

    “Does a real estate broker feel any obligation to tell you that you’re in a real estate bubble, and you shouldn’t buy this?” Evans said. “No. That’s not their job. Their obligation is still to the seller.”

    For more insight into how the sky-high prices of certain NFTs got built up, there’s an explosive lawsuit making its way through the US District Court in the Western Division of the Central District of California that takes aim at the founders of Bored Ape and their most famous fans. The 95-page complaint reads like an episode of Entourage set in the midst of the crypto-crazed early ’20s, starring a Mad Libs grab bag of rappers, zeitgeist hitters, and A-listers: Diplo, The Weeknd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, Post Malone, Future, Kevin Hart, and—last but not least—The Chainsmokers. The suit, which is seeking class-action status for buyers of Apes or ApeCoin, weaves a narrative of alleged crypto fraud, Hollywood machismo, social media spamming, celebrity worship, and a little bit of Bono. Ultimately, it alleges that the rise of the planet of the Bored Apes was nothing more than a scheme to make the monkeys look like assets that celebrities and art dealers were spending millions to obtain. Those transactions were staged, the suit claims: The famous and influential were getting their Apes gratis and were being paid to promote the stuff, a fact they failed to disclose.

    “These famous celebrities, they’re getting in, and they’re going to cause a spike in the price as they continue to interact in the ecosystem. They’re part of the club, and more people are going to want to be a part of the club with the celebrities to have these,” said attorney John Jasnoch, a partner at the San Diego firm Scott+Scott, which filed the case on behalf of a pair of aggrieved Bored Ape and ApeCoin owners named Adonis Real and Adam Titcher, as well as other plaintiffs yet to be named. “And so, ‘Oh, they’re unique and they’re scarce’—it drives that thought that it’ll be a successful investment for you.”

    Perhaps you noticed in early 2022 that nearly every celeb was on a crypto company payroll—Stephen Curry was making bank as the spokesperson for FTX and various celebrities were putting up Instagram Stories about their pricey NFTs. And there was that Larry David Super Bowl ad. According to the suit, the alleged scheme began when Yuga Labs partnered with music industry veteran Guy Oseary, who manages Madonna and U2. Oseary, who’s named as a defendant in the suit, brought in high-profile friends and clients to buy and promote their NFTs. 

    But what the lawsuit alleges is that Oseary and company used a consumer-crypto app called MoonPay—think Venmo or PayPal but for crypto—to allow the “transactions” to occur without money exchanging hands, so that the bold-faced names never had to actually spend money on the NFTs they said they were buying. In addition, the suit alleges that Oseary’s venture capital firm Sound Ventures (of which Ashton Kutcher, who is not named as a defendant in the suit, is a partner), along with several of the other celeb Ape endorsers named elsewhere in the lawsuit, were early investors in MoonPay, allowing them to “financially benefit from the cross-pollination and promotional efforts for the Yuga Financial Products.”

    “Together, Oseary, the MoonPay Defendants, and the Promoter Defendants each shared the strong motive to use their influence to artificially create demand for the Yuga securities, which in turn would increase use of MoonPay’s crypto payment service to handle this new demand,” the suit reads. “At the same time, Oseary could also use MoonPay to obscure how he paid off his celebrity cohorts for their direct or off-label promotions of the Yuga Financial Products.” 

    Asked for comment, a Yuga Labs spokesperson said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Oseary did not respond to requests for comment last week, and the court docket shows that he was granted an extension to respond to the suit. 

    While the lawsuit is in its earliest stages, it may have already some much-needed context to one of the more baffling exchanges of our entire pandemic-era screen consumption: the “I bought an Ape” back-and-forth between Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton on The Tonight Show in January 2022, in which the pair, Ape owners each, discussed the finer parts of NFT shopping. Fallon, with the somber tone of a man who has come to terms with the state of his soul, says he picked his Breton-striped Ape because he, too, likes striped shirts. Hilton, as if she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying, offered, “I saw you on the show with Beeple and you said you got it on MoonPay.” As the suit alleges, for all its unintended comedic gold, the exchange was helping to build up the idea of Bored Apes as investment pieces worth millions—a sort of Tinker Bell play—and attract more buyers. As the plaintiffs and their lawyers tell it, celebrities talking about their Apes on social media, or late-night TV, became the public-facing part of a plan in which their hundreds of thousands of dollars of NFTs translated to the popularity of ApeCoin. Which translated to a $450 million seed fundraise, and a $4 billion valuation.

    Neither Fallon nor Hilton responded to requests for comment last week. 

    “Did you watch the DJ Khaled one?” Jasnoch, the lawyer, asked me.

    He was referring to footage of DJ Khaled, aughts-era hip-hop’s walking exclamation point, standing on a yacht looking at multiple phone screens, various people telling him, “You bought an Ape! You bought an Ape!” as Khaled wobbles around confused.

    “Yeah, it’s pretty bad,” Jasnoch said. “He’s just like, ‘I don’t know what this is.’”

    In the auction world, the sale of the digital future was a relatively subtle proposition: The houses needed to incept the cultural cognoscenti and implant the idea that NFTs are art. Was Beeple’s Everydays—a series of tens of thousands of images and illustrations, some of which are sexist or downright puerile—actual fine art worthy of a downtown gallery opening and a celebratory private dinner at Frenchette, which Beeple really had thrown for him last March? In retrospect, is it a bit crazy to say things such as “I look at life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple—like the world thinks about before Jesus Christ and after,” as Noah Davis, who arranged the $69 million Beeple sale at Christie’s as the house’s head of digital, really did once say. (Davis has since left Christie’s and now works, as it happens, as a brand lead at Yuga Labs for CryptoPunks, another of its NFT offerings. They look kinda like the Apes, if they were punky-looking cartoon guys.)

    But it doesn’t quite matter if it’s art—auction houses sell wine and constitutions and sneakers and watches and first editions. If it’s selling, you sell it.  

    “It’s like Hollywood making movies about how Hollywood sucks. You actually embrace it,” Evans, our crypto sherpa, said. “Like, yeah, I’ll take that money.”

    The auction houses have their boilerplate explanations of why a certain NFT should be contextualized as art, making sure that they remain as devoted as ever to the seller, not the buyer. Did Beeple really “achieve something historic” when Christie’s slotted his NFT-cum-walking-man-sculpture, Human One, into its evening sale between paintings by Issy Wood and Stanley Whitney? 

    Jasnoch, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the Yuga suit, attempted to thread this needle by comparing the Bored Ape NFTs and their crypto complement, ApeCoin. The former can, in the broadest sense, be argued to be an artwork. The latter is purely a unit of currency with no artistic value whatsoever—making it, in his estimation, a viable thing to be regulated. The linking of the two entities so closely is where things get tricky—and the lawyers get involved.

    “I think the concept of an NFT can have intrinsic value, and that a token can represent value in some fashion, and I think there’s value in people liking the look of the artwork,” he said. “But in terms of it being a financial product and how they were marketed and how they were sold, it really is an unregistered security and it needs to be subject to proper disclosure. And once you get into generating all that hype around the Bored Ape itself, they release the ApeCoin token, which doesn’t even have the pretense of a piece of art or anything. And that’s just a straight-up unregistered security that is used for speculation and for trading.”

    Evans offered another conundrum. When a market offers something for sale at a large sum, there is, at a base level, an understanding among the public that it has some legitimate importance. Perhaps the artwork is not to one’s liking, but it has a provenance and the artist is in museum collections—or there’s historic relevance to something that makes it at the very least a curio.

    “When you are buying vintage vinyl, or rare sneakers, or Marilyn Monroe’s shoes, or a Salvador Dalí print, or whatever it is, you’re getting something that has no tangible physical value, but cultural value,” Evans said. “There’s like a deep cultural base that thinks Jordan sneakers are worth something, early Sex Pistols vinyl is worth something. And the challenge with all of these NFTs was you didn’t really know that there was that broad, deep cultural base. It was just: ‘Oh, my gosh, somebody just bought one for 200 grand.’”

    For the time being, some in the art world are still acting as though the devotion to NFTs could result in some kind of windfall. Sotheby’s Metaverse has a sale up right now. It’s offering the first NFTs by the artist Sebastião Salgado, but they aren’t exactly lighting the place on fire. They cost $250 each. Back in 2021, the Natively Digital sale netted Sotheby’s $17 million, with $11 million paid for a single NFT from the series of CryptoPunks. 

    But in February 2022, Sotheby’s set up a special sale where it expected a set of 104 CryptoPunks to go for as much as $30 million, only to see the thing collapse minutes before the gavel-in when the consignor backed out, reportedly due to a lack of interest from bidders. By last December, the Natively Digital sale seemed to have lost its luster entirely. Sotheby’s offered the first-ever Keith Haring NFT as the star lot of the sale, but it sold for $25,000, well below the $80,000 high estimate. 

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Mega-Billionaire Ken Griffin Has Moved His Masterpieces to the Beach

    Mega-Billionaire Ken Griffin Has Moved His Masterpieces to the Beach

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    In 2015, the hedge fund titan Kenneth C. Griffin became the first person to spend half a billion dollars on art in a single transaction. David Geffen made a deal with Griffin to sell him Willem de Kooning’s boldly colored abstract masterpiece Interchange for $300 million, and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A—the splatter painting Life magazine plastered in its pages in 1949, minting Jack the Dripper an American celebrity—for $200 million. 

    Griffin could have scurried away with the masterpieces to one of his homes: a $238 million apartment at 220 Central Park West and a $120 million London mansion near Buckingham Palace, the most expensive apartment in Chicago history, getaways in Aspen and Hawaii, a large chunk of Miami’s Star Island. Instead he let them go on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, placing 20th-century masterworks next to the museum’s iconic impressionist and postimpressionist holdings.

    “My art collection is almost all at the Art Institute of Chicago, it’s been there for years,” Griffin said to David Rubenstein in March 2019, while appearing on his show Peer-to-Peer Conversations. “For me, the fact that 700,000 or a million people a year will have a chance to see some of the greatest works of art of our culture, that I’m fortunate enough to own? I have great satisfaction in that.”

    But at some point over the last few years, those two works, the Pollock and the de Kooning traded in the biggest art sale ever, were quietly taken down from the museum. Their whereabouts were unknown. 

    The Saturday after Art Basel, I took a Brightline train from Miami to Palm Beach to attend openings and cocktails parties that make up the New Wave Art Weekend. At one point I swung by the Norton, the West Palm Beach museum that houses the collection of Ralph Hubbard Norton, a 20th-century steel magnate from Chicago who summered in Florida. I had seen the permanent collection twice in the past two years and thought I knew it pretty well, but after walking out from a gallery of top-notch work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Edward Hopper, I saw a work made the year Norton died, something I had presumed would have been well out of the museum’s acquisitions budget: Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue) (1953), which exploded the artist’s market when it sold at Sotheby’s in 2000 for $11 million, or about $30 million accounting for inflation. 

    As the wall text explained, it was at the Norton on loan from a private collection, after having been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago from October 2020 to June 2022. Also new was a peak Roy Lichtenstein masterwork, Ohhh…Alright… (1964), which set an artist record when it sold for $42.6 million at Christie’s, consigned by Steve Wynn, who bought it from Steve Martin. It too was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, and belongs, the wall text said, to a private collection. And across the hall, an untitled Robert Ryman that was on the walls of the great Chicago museum as recently as 2017 was hanging at the Norton, thanks to a private collection. 

    Sources confirmed that all three came from Griffin. 

    And then, around a corner and installed with little to no ceremony, were two works very much in a private collection, but a collection that everyone knows: Interchange and Number 17A, owned by Griffin. 

    Without fanfare, at least a billion dollars of Griffin’s art departed the second-biggest encyclopedic institution in the country and ended up in Palm Beach. The Norton declined to comment when asked about the new works in its collection, as did the Art Institute, but Griffin provided a statement to True Colors on Thursday. 

    “The Norton is one of our country’s most significant and beautiful museums,” Griffin said. “I hope South Florida families, students and visitors will enjoy and be inspired by these pieces and the thousands of works of art from all over the world displayed at the museum.”

    Griffin was very public about moving Citadel, his hedge fund with over $50 billion in assets, to Miami earlier this year. The prodigal son of the sunshine state—Griffin’s a Boca Raton native and a graduate of Boca Raton Community High School—returned in after decades of support for Chicago, the city he lived in since graduating from Harvard in 1989 and immediately crushed it with his own fund. 

    In departing the Windy City, Griffin left behind the Illinois governor (and fellow billionaire) with whom he publicly feuded over raising taxes on the wealthy and what he claimed was a rising crime rate (JB Pritzker); a hedgie ex-wife who claimed in a yearlong divorce battle that she was forced to sign a prenup that only gave her a $1 million a year (Anne Dias-Griffin); and a gubernatorial candidate that Griffin bankrolled to the tune of $50 million only to see steamrolled in a Republican primary by a Trump-backed candidate (Richard Irvin). 

    At the outset of the pandemic, Griffin rented out the entire Four Seasons in Palm Beach, parked off-duty cops outside, and restricted entry to anyone but his employees. He made Citadel’s move official in August, taking space in a building owned by fellow art-collecting billionaire Vlad Doronin, until a new HQ can be built. He’s spent weekends on Palm Beach, where he’s bought up sizable contiguous chunks of the south part of the island. 

    Griffin has also gone all in on Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who, in his successful reelection campaign in November, became the first Republican in decades to carry the once-hard-blue Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. Griffin told Politico in a rare interview that his deep pockets would back the heir to MAGA-dom if he ran for president in 2024. Griffin’s already started to flex his political sway, in Florida and elsewhere. He donated more than $100 million to Republican candidates in 2022, and is very much over his next-door neighbor at Mar-a-Lago.

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    Nate Freeman

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