Every week, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original scoops. If you have a tip, email Annie Armstrong at aarmstrong@artnet.com.
MEET THE NEW KIDS ON THE COLLECTING BLOCK
If you’re behind the Artnet News paywall and reading this column, you already know that the art market has seen better days. Well market correction, shmarket shmorrection, says I! As I’ve written in the past, these down moments in the art market are when it’s most important to look at what’s new and exciting coming down the pike.
Sure there are several beloved galleries closing, but there’s also a handful of very exciting new spaces cropping up! Silke Lindner in Tribeca! Sara’s Worldwide in Chinatown! In fact, I write this very column from GEMS NYC, which I am gallery-sitting while its owner, James Cardoso Shaeffer, has jetted off to wheel-and-deal in Paris. From the inside of his Gedi Sibony show, I can say that foot-traffic is high (though that may also be because many people are curious why a giant inflatable wave is taking up an entire storefront).
Anyhow, I won’t bore you with my natural inclination towards optimism. Instead, I’ll prove it’s validity! Last night, a group of art patrons under forty congregated at the Met’s Temple of Dendur for their annual young members party (or the Apollo Circle, as they are officially called), and as I was walking around and chatting with everyone, I was pleased to find many enthusiastic young collectors who are eager to get more involved with the scene.
Julia Schloss, the 27-year-old associate director of development for the Apollo Circle, caught the collecting bug from her grandmother. “I’m starting in prints and photographs, that’s my entryway in. On the more modern side with a flair of Japanese influence,” she told me, and explained that Sally Mann and Cy Twombly’s working relationship plays a large influence in her taste, but that a William Wegman photograph would be the ultimate dream addition her burgeoning photography collection.
Emma Lasry. BFA/Madison Voelkel.
Schloss’s recently acquired photographs hang salon-style on her bedroom wall, around her pièce de résistance, a Marilyn Minter painting she inherited from her father. “That will never go anywhere! It’ll be with me until I’m dead!”
Josh Campbell, the 32-year-old founder of digital art-education network and marketing platform Eazel, has been a member of the Apollo Circle since 2015, when he moved to New York wanting to get involved in the art world after studying art. “The evening receptions with the Apollo Circle are the best,” he said of his decision to join, adding that at one such reception, he found himself speaking with an older stranger about an early gelatin print, only to find out later that he was speaking with David Rockefeller. “As a kid from Kansas City with no clout in the art world, it was so amazing to get to speak to someone like that just about art,” he said.
Indeed, the experience informed his collecting practice. “My rule of thumb is that I like to know the artist personally before I buy a piece,” Campbell explained to me. “That way when you look up on your wall, you see people! It’s great.” He describes his own collection as “all over the place,” spanning emerging to established artists, but is proud of his recent purchase of a John Zurier work from Peter Blum Gallery.
Upstairs in the Manet/Degas exhibit, I ran into Emma Lasry, who works for Beaumont Nathan Art Advisory and recently kicked off her own collection. “I studied impressionism, so this show is super important to me,” she said with glittering eyes. “But of course, I can’t quite afford to collect impressionism yet, so I do focus more on young and contemporary art. I recently bought an Anne Buckwalter painting from Rachel Uffner that I love.”
As for her dream purchases, she has her eye on work by Lynette Yiadom Boakye. “She really jives with my personal interests,” she said. “But my dream dream dream would be to have a Matisse painting. I’d sell all of my belongings for a piece by him.”
FALSE ALARM AT FRIEZE
To be fair, this work looks pretty convincingly realistic to me. Marco Brambilla, Burning Down the House, 2023.
Any other Ben Lerner fans in the house? Every now and then when I go to an art fair or a museum, I think about that incredible opening chapter to “Leaving the Atocha Station” wherein the museum guards at the Prado are conflicted over whether a man having a “profound experience of art” in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights was posing an actual threat to the artwork, or just intensely emotional. Lerner’s protagonist then wonders, “What really is a museum guard?”
That was perhaps the thought-process of a certain art collector last week in London, who, at a party at the ultra-swank five-star hotel Chiltern Firehouse, perceived a piece of video art by Marco Brambilla to so convincingly convey the feeling of a staircase on fire that he called the fire brigade.
According to Page 6, the fire alarm was pulled at around 2 a.m. during a Frieze week celebration. Sources at the party revealed to Wet Paint that the alarmed attendee, who almost literally yelled “Fire!” in a crowded theater, was in fact an art collector.
“The work had the unintentional effect of bringing some much-needed excitement to the fair,” Brambilla joked to Wet Paint, whose commissioned work for the hotel, Burning Down The House cast computer-generated smoke and flames on the former firehouse’s walls (oh, the irony!). He added, “Good to see art that’s not for sale can still persuade.”
After this year’s somewhat dispiriting Frieze London, I’m inclined to agree with him. It’s time the art market heated back up—if not literally, then at least enough to fool some collectors. You catch my drift?
WE HEAR
This from the Department of Far Reaches, a new capsule collection from J.W. Anderson and A.P.C., claims to embody “Joseph Beuys’s abstract concepts through subtle design elements”… Anat Ebgi is the latest gallery to expand to the East Coast, opening in Tribeca next month… On the topic of fashion, Otto 958, the joint-venture between artist Kiko Kostadinov and Morán Morán Gallery (the esteemed purveyors of the pink Wet Paint hats) got the profile treatment by Sam Hine in this week’s “Show Notes” in GQ… MoMA PS1’s director of individual giving, the always keenly-dressed Jonathan Gardenhire, is joining Hauser & Wirth as a director next month… Larry Gagosian was conspicuously absent from Anna Weyant‘s opening in Paris, with rumors swirling around over a possible bout of Covid…
SPOTTED
Aspiring bro-ramicist Austin Butler posing at the John Giorno Foundation for his new Interview magazine shoot *** Alan Cumming, Padma Lakshmi, Will Cotton, and Eileen Guggenheim celebrating Salman Toor at the New York Academy of Art’s benefit gala, which is now once more called “Take Home a Nude”, following a few years where they dropped the saucy title (sex still sells, I suppose!) *** Owen Wilson and Bill Pullman both made it to the Hammer Museum‘s “Made in LA” survey, perhaps upon the realization that it would be Ann Philbin‘s last ***