Every Thursday afternoon, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original scoops reported and written by Nate Freeman. If you have a tip, email Nate at nfreeman@artnet.com.
MR. PRINCE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
After years of declining ratings for the Oscars, the award show’s board of governors moved the ceremony up a few weeks this year in an attempt to drum up some additional excitement. Which means… Larry Gagosian’s annual blowout Oscars show is moved up a few weeks too! Held the Thursday before the February 9 ceremony, the opening at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space is by far the biggest art-related event of the starriest week of the year, when Tinseltown is stuffed to the gills with celebrities big and small. And following the opening, there’s an extremely tough-to-crash dinner at Mr. Chow, with Hollywood and art-world royalty sprinkled among the fattest wallets on the gallery’s client list. The seating chart is wild. Think hard about who Larry usually puts next to himself, and you’ll realize the answer is obvious. That’s right, it’s the richest man on earth, Jeff Bezos.
Richard Prince and Pamela Anderson during Richard Prince Check Paintings at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, United States. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)
Now, we can reveal that the artist who will nab the coveted exhibition slot is Richard Prince, making him the first artist to get the Gagosian Oscars show for a third time. In 2005, he unveiled his “Check” paintings, canvases full of canceled checks, at the space, and in 2013, he had a show of of his “Cowboy” paintings there. It’s unclear what Richard will be doing this time around, though word has it that it’s a radical departure from his last show at Gagosian in 2018, “High Times,” which presented pot-laced hippie paintings. Regardless, expect a star-studded affair at Mr. Chow—and then, for the select few, a bash at Larry’s Holmby Hills pad afterward.
REGRETS, WE’VE HAD A FEW
Alissa Bennett, the Gladstone director who also hosts a podcast with Lena Dunham, launched an Instagram account that you will not regret following, even if it brings to mind evenings you aren’t exactly proud of. Called Regret Counter (@regret_counter_) it consists of pictures of lists of things people regret consuming. Some are litanies of different types of liquor, beer, wine, and, um, more extreme substances. One submitter topped off a night with “a lot” of molly and “quite a bit” of cocaine. (Quotations theirs.) Another with a strong stomach lists, precisely, 375 ml of Jack Daniels, 6 Lone Star beers, and 1 tab of acid. Sounds like a hell of a night! And while Bennett won’t name names, she did say that 70 percent of the submissions have been from people in the art world. Start the guessing game now.
TAKE MY ART! PLEASE!
If you were trying to find a definitive end of the Post-Internet art movement—a trend for art made about the internet, though not necessarily with new media, that peaked in the early- to mid-2010s—it has arrived in the form of an alarming thread on Twitter. Michael Manning, a Post-Internet artist whose work once regularly sold for around $25,000 at auction, is now simply giving away the material that his galleries can’t sell in order to avoid paying storage fees. “I have been storing several shows of inventory for a while and it seems a complete waste to hide away works based on the idea of not hurting the value of already circulating works when in all reality there is no real market for them,” he wrote on Twitter. “These should be out in the world with people, not sitting in a closet somewhere.” And that’s not all! If you want to personally meet the artist who is trying to get rid of work that is, by his own admission, worthless, he’ll deliver it personally—if you Venmo him $250.
FADE TO BLACK FRAME
One of New York’s most influential art and fashion PR firms has abruptly shut down operations. Black Frame, which once did all press for Frieze New York and repped art-adjacent fashion brands such as Eckhaus Latta and Opening Ceremony, is no more as of 2020, its founder Brian Phillips announced in a long email. Though he didn’t give a full answer as to why he was shutting down the business, which had employed 100 people in its 15-year history, he hinted at a future as a “a creative director and as a producer.”
POP QUIZ
Readers! Can you figure out what painting is in the background of this video of mega-collector Yusaku Maezawa wishing his fans a happy new year? The winner will be rewarded with fame and fortune, also known as a mention in Wet Paint.
WE HEAR…
That Vanessa Carlos, the co-founder of the deeply influential London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, is looking to open a gallery in New York … Andrew Russeth, formerly the executive editor of ARTnews, has taken a job as deputy editor of Surface magazine … Emily Alderman, formerly a director at Blum & Poe, is now at Gagosian, based in Beverly Hills … Artnet scribe Kenny Schachter has been named best writer in the Baer Faxt reader poll for the third time—and the best Instagram, beating out meme machine Jerry Gogosian … Zoe Kestan—also known as @weed_slut_420, the Instagram celeb and lingerie designer who Wet Paint revealed had a special relationship with Hunter Biden—also had a “thing” with Mark Grotjahn.
SPOTTED
Nicole Eisenman at Lucien, where the employees of art world’s favorite restaurant moved around some diners so the Hauser & Wirth artist could be seated at table nine, the best see-and-be-seen table *** fellow Hauser newbie Avery Singer at the dinner for painter Issy Wood at Balvanera on Wednesday, following the opening of her wonderful new show at JTT *** Alex Israel at the star-studded W magazine Golden Globes party at the Chateau Marmont penthouse *** Kylie Jenner revealing on Instagram that there’s a Richard Prince painting hanging on her wall—though she could have been visiting her sister, Kendall Jenner, who is starting to become a contemporary art collector herself.
PARTING SHOT
