Collectors and dealers from around the world, I hope you enjoyed a week of freezing temperatures and oppressive snow! It’ll be better weather when you’re here for Frieze, promise. Let me tell you, it’s just the highest pleasure to walk around a convention center for 9 hours and then trek through the snow after a few hours of sleep to make it to a breakfast with art world influencers. And because we just had so much fun, here’s a few things that we were told or overheard or saw.
- At 8:45—the height of The Armory Party, where men in suits passed around truffle-heavy dishes galore—a pizza guy rolled up up to the entrance of the MoMA with big bag full of a few pizzas. “Delivery!” he shouted to the security guard. “Not here!” the security shouted back. “it’s a private party!” This went on for a while until the pizza guy gave up and left. Klaus, did you get a few pies or something? Eating away the bad review blues?
- “Noah’s comment is that as the son of a dentist, he has always enjoyed elevator music and the like.” —Audrey Rose Smith, communications manager for The Armory Show, on why Noah Horowitz seemingly chose to play some really intense Kenny G-level smooth jazz after the Armory Show press conference.
- “He was the number one lawyer for Oracle—you know, Larry Ellison—and now he does nothing!”—man in line for “Bjork,” passing the long wait with a meaningless anecdote.
- “But when are you going to open in Los Angeles, I’ve been waiting!” John Waters to an incredulous Sprüth Magers assistant, who had no opening date for him.
- Most ubiquitous fairgoers: a tie between Maurizio Cattalan and Michael Stipe. They didn’t, like, go anywhere together, but there were both everywhere.
- Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig got stopped going into The Armory Party because a MoMA staffer didn’t recognize him. He finally convinced her that he had to DJ the party, then went up to the giant island in the museum atrium to plays tunes in a perfect oversize super-pretty cardigan. He spun “Energy” by Drake and the kids loved it.
- “You know Matthew Barney’s not really dating Sheryl Crow. He is dating someone interesting, but I can’t say.”—a source associated with Matthew Barney’s gallery, having read my story where I note that Bjork got a MoMA retrospective before her ex. I was really pulling for that to be a thing, though!
- The following conversation occurred at a breakfast at the New York Studio School, the building in the West Village where Gertrude Vanderbit Whitney first opened the Whitney Museum: “I went to that club after The Armory Party, is it Boom something?” “The Boom Boom Room.” “Right, and I was talking to this guy who really liked jazz, and claimed to have founded PayPal, and mentioned something about Tesla, but he said his name was Elon, so he couldn’t be—” “—You were talking to Elon Musk at the Boom Boom Room?”
- “But don’t you art reporters only write about the fairs so you can report on bogus sale prices and then gin up the value of the work?”—an art advisory at the Pace Gallery dinner at Cherry in the Meatpacking District.
- There was so much French being spoken at the Empire Diner on Thursday afternoon, it was as if we were at FIAC or something. The French people at Independent, man, they just seem to love that place. Which is interesting, because…
- “TERRIBLE FOOD BUT EMPIRE IS AN INSTITUTION AND WE LOVE IT.”—Olivier Zahn, perhaps the Frenchest Frenchman of all, speaking about the Empire Diner.
- And since the reviews of “Bjork” started coming out, curator Klaus Biesenbach has only Instagrammed pictures of the window in his apartment, looking out. Klaus, order a pizza, it helps.
