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.
RIP WHITE CUBE’S MIAMI PARTY, 2011-2023
What’s that smell? It’s faint, but it smells kind of like, hmm… a combination of melted butter sauce for crab legs, fake tanning lotion, cheap cleaning products on linoleum motel floors, and ocean spray. Top notes of bar tar and ropa vieja. Ah, it must mean Art Basel Miami Beach is coming soon!
In just over two weeks, the traveling circus touches back down in the Magic City. Many are speculating that this year’s fair will be an indicator of whether the market is back, following the success of Paris and the finality of the election. I can offer at least one hint about how things might go: Do we think it’s a recession indicator that White Cube will no longer host their annual bash at Soho Beach House this year?!
“After 10 years of hosting a signature event in Miami, we have decided to not have a large party during this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach,” the blue-chipper’s press officer, Irene Del Principe, told Wet Paint. “Since opening White Cube New York last September, our programme of parties, dinners, talks and other events designed to celebrate our artists in the U.S. has evolved significantly.”
Shoes come off on the beach. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
I suppose that’s only fair. But in an art market that has been changing drastically over the past couple of years, I am having a hard time accepting this. Perhaps I took it for granted! So for those who haven’t been, or for those who have never effectively been able to sneak in, let me recall what this party was.
On the Monday of fair week for 13 years straight, the party would happen in the sweet spot where everyone was fresh off the plane and didn’t yet have too much work to do. The gallery invited mainstays of the convention center, the celebrities known to be trawling around Miami that week, and high-end collectors, to eat crab legs and drink champagne while Chaka Khan or Giorgio Moroder played a live set on the beach (2016 and 2015 respectively). It was a difficult invitation to get, but there was a robust trade in tips about sneaking in: if you couldn’t snag a wristband from someone leaving, then go around and approach from the oceanside on the right where there was a small terrace that you could sneak onto… I can stop gatekeeping that information now that it isn’t useful anymore.
A photo of the sacred wristband black market outside of Soho Beach House for White Cube’s party in 2022. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
The event was notorious for letting the more buttoned-up patrons of the art world let their hair down. Marc Spiegler, former director of Art Basel, waxed poetic to me over WhatsApp, about the vibe: “Feeling the wind come off the Atlantic thirty feet away, dancing to a real band, sensing the market’s kinetic energy build, luxuriating in the last relaxed moments before the tumult engulfs us.” Power brokers like artist Damien Hirst, White Cube founder Jay Jopling, and Art Intelligence Global founder Amy Cappellazzo could be caught casually talking shop while shoeless on the beach (one year I spied 56 Henry’s Ellie Rines airdropping a checklist to whoever was present under the tent). “Jay draws a great crowd, not just core art world. One year, I met Lee Renaldo from Sonic Youth, another year the K-pop star Eric Nam!” mused Spiegler.
On its fringes, the party would detonate into debauchery. I’ve seen gallery directors, slurring their words, pass out on the beach, dares to go skinny-dipping in the ocean eagerly accepted, and mischievous antics around the poolside cabanas that often ended with someone getting pushed in. I’ve often described it as the kind of party that feels exactly how outsiders might imagine a luxury art soirée in Miami might be.
Artist Lucien Smith among the crowd at White Cube. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
To gallerist Bill Powers, the genius of the party was in its consistency. “The Monday before Art Basel opens was always the one-two punch of the Rubell Museum opening, and then White Cube’s party,” the veteran of Miami said. “It had the same kind of feeling of coming home from college for Thanksgiving, and on the first night all your old high school buddies would all go to the same bar.”
“One year I did go skinny dipping… maybe it’s a gift that the party isn’t happening this year. It’s great, but I usually end up wrecked the next day,” said advisor Daniel Oglander, who estimates that he’s attended the storied soiree at least five times. “They used to always serve crab legs, then that stopped. Maybe that was the real recession indicator.”
Indeed, I do recall the clock striking midnight at the party two years ago, and the carriage-turning-back-into-a-pumpkin moment of the open bar closing. Two previously free glasses of Ruinairt? Now $80. Needless to say, there’s a swing away from opulence in the industry right now as galleries tighten the belt on gourmet dinners and champagne-drenched openings. “Luxury doesn’t take you to a higher place, but art does,” said party veteran Cappellazzo. “If you conflate the two, art will lose out.”
The view from the beach at White Cube’s annual party during Art Basel Miami Beach. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
Her advice for how to successfully hobnob in Miami in a post-party world? “Go sit with a small group and eat a bad bowl of pasta and talk about art, talk about meaning.”
So make your reservations at Carbone now, or else I’ll likely see you at Mac’s Club Deuce. There, we can pour one out for White Cube’s shindig. For over a decade, it got our spirits high before one of the most spiritually taxing weeks on the art fair circuit. Farewell, sweet prince!
WE HEAR
The cast of cult classic Kids—Chloë Sevigny and former gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick—reunited with its director Harmony Korine at the Swiss Institute’s glamorous gala, which honored Korine and Rita Ackermann… Speaking of Amy Cappellazzo, isn’t it sweet to see how the art market has become the family business? Her son Ben is a current intern at Phillips… Gavlak has closed its space in Palm Beach to relocated to West Palm… Anonymous art critic Diva Corp has created a print publication boasting contributors such as artist Emma Stern, director Peter Vack, writer Sammy Loren, and has stocked it in the bathrooms of every scene-y bar in Los Angeles you can name…
GRIEVANCES
This week’s grievance felt a bit inevitable, given the current, er, moment. Behold, an anonymous dealer’s grief with how galleries that are shuttering often cloak the language of their closure…
Galleries provide important infrastructure for the art-world. If you are no longer running a gallery because it didn’t work out, or you don’t want to do it anymore, that’s ok and it’s great to do a roving curatorial project, but that’s not a gallery. The main thing a gallery has is a physical location that is static—you can’t be a gallery when you literally don’t have one. It’s not subversive to do shows in random spaces and call it a gallery—it’s avoiding the costs of running one while still profiting off artists and taking half the sale.
What has been bothering you? Send your contribution to me at aarmstrong@artnet.com with the subject line “GRIEVANCES.”