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.
That night the scene at the home of Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was an irresistible blast of critics and curators and artists, all pressed together drinking Casa Dragones tequila, a marvelous scrum more akin to a party at a kunsthalle than an Upper East Side cocktail. I spotted Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, New York Times art critic Jason Farago, Bard CCS director Lauren Cornell, the philanthropist Allison Berg, and artist Jeffrey Gibson, who is representing the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Gibson, who lives in Hudson, wanted to talk about the Soho House opening in the Hudson Valley. Is that terrifying? Or are we gonna…kind of love it? Gibson asked Hollein if he had a place upstate. He doesn’t, he said, but visits Hudson often.
And the shindig had to compete against the Ed Ruscha opening at MoMA, where the massive crowds downstairs made it hard for many to actually make it into the show, which opened to the press the day before. Up in the inner sanctum were Larry Gagosian, actor John Krasinski, Pamela Anderson, David Byrne, and artists Jeff Koons and Jonas Wood. MoMA director Glenn Lowry and LACMA director Michael Govan paced around overseeing the festivities—the show will go to Los Angeles, Ruscha’s hometown and forever-muse, next year.
If the VIPs at the MoMA party couldn’t even see the show, perhaps they took a spin up to the Met, where Nairy Baghramian is the latest contemporary artist to be chosen for the facade commission, where the artwork lives above and around the Fifth Avenue entrance.
“These are sculptures you can see 24 hours a day,” said the collector Robert Soros, as he shimmied through the crowd at Hollein’s house.
And then on to The Armory Show. Despite the few months of Frieze’s ownership of the fair, it looks pretty much the same as it has in the last two editions at the Javits Center. The enormous scope of the fair means there’s always plenty of filler to waltz by without stopping, but there were at least a few major sales: Jessica Silverman placed a Woody De Othello sculpture for $400,000, and Victoria Miro brought a suite of works by María Berrío, selling all nine of them for as much as $200,000.
And despite the fact that gushing dispatches from Seoul indicated that the entire art world was in Korea, there was somehow another entire art world that showed up for The Armory Show, as collectors Estrellita Brodsky, Larry and Marilyn Fields, Glenn R. Fuhrman, Susan and Michael Hort, Jeffrey Loria, and Bernard Lumpkin all made the rounds. If you go to art fairs to spot some gallery-friendly celebrities you can do that here too, as Venus Williams, Beck, Paul Dano, and Anderson Cooper were all out and about.
Sebastian Gladstone, the owner of the eponymous LA gallery, is doing Armory for the second year in a row. Although he sometimes has to deal with unfamiliar passersby who ask whether his shop is a spin-off of Gladstone Gallery via its founder, Barbara Gladstone—“Mary Boone came up to Lauren Marinaro’s booth and asked her if I was Barbara’s nephew,” Sebastian said, noting that there’s no relation. He told me that all of the works by Chad Murray, a young painter who spent time working with the great Los Angeles artist Friedrich Kunath, had sold ahead of the opening of the fair. Even if there’s work to be done to give the rehabbing Armory Show gravity enough to hold down its own week in Manhattan, selling out a booth is an impressive result.
“We’ll see what happens with Frieze owning it,” Gladstone said.
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
Gagosian is the world’s largest art dealer, but rarely does an announcement from Larry Gagosian’s empire really truly shock the collecting cognoscenti and gossiping reporter corps. Such an announcement came last week, however, when the outfit issued the following dictum: “Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Cady Noland at the gallery’s Park & 75 location in New York.” That was it, but that was enough. Cady Noland’s spare but gut-punch installations skewering the American id have enraptured billionaires and critics alike for years, and only looked more insanely prescient during the era of Trump’s America. But the artist herself has, since the 90s, been a bit of a phantom. That she would come out of retirement for a blockbuster show is tantalizing enough, but I went out in search of more info. To wit: Gagosian director Andrew Leslie Heyward has known Noland since he worked at Matthew Marks Gallery in the 90s. Robert Gober put her in a group show, and Heyward and Noland clicked. After hearing that Noland was making new work, Heyward invited her to take over the Gagosian space on Park Avenue for a few months this summer. Behind wheat-pasted windows, she went about making 15 new sculptures. Noland came and went as she pleased, working as Upper East Siders walked by, none the wiser. There was no promise that she would end up actually presenting the work at Gagosian’s Park & 72 gallery, but at a certain point, she felt the timing was right. “To me, this is the most important thing happening in the New York art world this season,” Heyward said. It opens on Tuesday, September 12. It is not clear whether the artist will be present.
…There are a number of prominent lenders to the epic Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA, including institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn, not to mention billionaires like Larry Gagosian and Francois Pinault. Fun fact: Ruscha’s work Spread was purchased by MoMA with funds provided by Dick Fuld in 2006, two years before Fuld became the very last CEO of Lehman Brothers and ran out of town post-bankruptcy. But the best wall label in the exhibit has to be for Wolf, a work on paper from 1964. Its provenance is listed as “Collection Jack Nicholson.” The museum couldn’t provide any information about how it convinced the actor and Lakers fan to let them put the work in the show. And there’s little info online about Nicholson’s collection, though Ruscha did compliment the assemblage in Vanity Fair in 1995.“I think Jack Nicholson has one of the best collections out here,” adding that he has “some pretty good Impressionists, a few nice Surrealists, and a bunch of Tamara de Lempickas left over from [the] Anjelica Huston days.”
…A bittersweet mood wafted through John Cheim’s Gramercy Park apartment midday on Labor Day. While the place was studded with the highlights of a collection built during Cheim’s decades as a dealer and gallery owner in New York, everyone present knew that, in a few hours, the art handlers from Sotheby’s would be there to pick them up—Cheim has decided to part ways with some of the masterworks in his collection to install new things in the place, with the works being sold at a Sotheby’s evening sale this fall. He’s even putting his prized double-canvas Joan Mitchell painting, Sunflowers, which was given to him as a gift by the artist just before her death in 1992. “She knew she was dying and asked that I select a painting that I would like,” Cheim told me. “Joan was extremely generous and strong, passing at the early age of 67. A truly great artist and still underrated—she is equal to De Kooning, Twombly, Kline.” It is expected to sell in excess of $20 million, which would be a new record for her at auction. Other works he’s selling are by Ron Gorchov, Lynda Benglis, Alice Neel, and Louise Bourgeois, but he explained that it’s just a fraction of his entire collection, and he’s selling just to shake things up, explaining that “I would rather see them transition to a new home while I am still alive as opposed to a postmortem sale.” When I asked what artists he would choose to take their place, Cheim mentioned Matthew Wong, Maureen Dougherty, Bill Jensen, Peter Shear, Sue Williams, and said he’d recently bought a 60s black ink drawing by Philip Guston.
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
