Something else was completely different. Behind the counter one may purchase a black hat with the next written in gold cursive: “Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach.” And there have been additionally packs of breath mints emblazoned with a bloody Trump rising up after being shot, in addition to different packs of mints with Trump’s face and the textual content: “Make your breath great again.”
“Aren’t they fantastic?” mentioned the cashier.
Ahead of the Norton Museum’s gala on Saturday evening, John and Amy Phelan gave a tour of their assortment in Palm Beach on Friday afternoon for choose gala-goers, led by Lindsay Taylor, the director of the Phelan Collection. The home, on the southern a part of the island and a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, has Jeff Koons’s portray Saddle within the kitchen, a Willem de Kooning over the fireside, and a large Lawrence Weiner put in on the doorway to a freestanding discotheque they constructed on the property. (That’s gotta be a primary for a potential secretary of the Navy.)
It was solely the beginning of a full-on artwork tour of exhibits all through city. Sure, most of the snowbird outposts of main NY galleries have closed up store in recent times—adieu to the places of White Cube, Lehmann Maupin, Pace, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, and others—however Beth Rudin DeWoody nonetheless has the Bunker Artspace, and it’s nonetheless some of the unimaginable locations to see artwork in South Florida, or anyplace. Every yr she and her workers stage as much as a dozen exhibits throughout two large flooring of a West Palm warehouse, that includes tons of of artworks—all culled completely from her 10,000-piece-strong private assortment.
She’s such a voracious collector that the frequent New Yorker cartoonist Guy Richards Smit submitted a drawing in 2023 by which a gallerist is exhibiting her group a method slideshow on a projector, with the PowerPoint “summing up the gallery’s entire business plan in one easy-to-remember phrase…‘BETH RUDIN DEWOODY.’” The authentic is now on view on the Bunker, together with exhibits devoted to snakes, work from the ’60s, and surveillance.
Also in West Palm Beach is a pop-up by Paula Cooper Gallery—the Chelsea mainstay that had an area on Worth Avenue from 2020 to 2023—that runs by the excessive season. Down the road, Sarah Gavlak moved her gallery into a brand new house off-island after years of exhibiting on the Royal Poinciana Plaza, whereas Acquavella, the gallery run by the eponymous, Palm Beach–dwelling household, nonetheless has its house in an open-air shopping center.
The most vital artwork concern within the Palm Beach neighborhood is definitely the Norton, which has gone from native curio to established artwork powerhouse in lower than a decade. In 2018, Citadel CEO and mega-collector Ken Griffin introduced that he would make a $16 million donation to the museum, the most important single reward in its historical past, for use for, amongst different issues, the development of the house designed by Lord Norman Foster. Then in 2022, he moved his hedge fund, Citadel, from Chicago, the place he’d feuded with Illinois governor JB Pritzker, to South Florida—and, as we revealed on this column in 2022, yanked his assortment off the partitions of the Art Institute, as an alternative putting in the works on the Norton.
Walking by the museum this weekend, I discovered that just about all the masterpieces in Griffin’s assortment—de Kooning’s Interchange, an untitled Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko’s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue), and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A—have been in an area that abutted the modern galleries, nonetheless listed as belonging to a “private collection.” A room away, there was a large Cy Twombly portray, Untitled (Camino Real), that was proven by Larry Gagosian as a part of an exhibition of Twombly’s final work, staged at his Beverly Hills gallery in April 2012. The work belonged to financier Donald Marron, and when the collector died in 2019, the $450 million trove of artwork the UBS chairman had amassed over six many years was bought off by Gagosian alongside William Acquavella and Marc Glimcher. Now the Twombly work is hanging within the Norton. According to a supply, it’s Griffin’s. (Griffin was not instantly obtainable for remark.)
The first signal that the museum’s Saturday night fundraiser was not your typical gala was the sight of Fox News host Bret Baier, whom, it’s protected to say, I’ve by no means encountered on the artwork circuit earlier than. He walked in previous the considerably extra anticipated company, collectors with properties in South Florida: Neil and Kimberly Bluhm, Don and Mera Rubell, Steve and Lisa Tananbaum, Ronnie Heyman, DeWoody, and Jane Holzer, the previous Warhol celebrity who was raised on the island and maintains a giant chunk of its priceless actual property. Sotheby’s had despatched a battalion of deal closers from New York and London, amongst them: former public sale home CEO Tad Smith, who’s now a giant crypto man. I’ve by no means been in a room with so many diamonds, with so many faces tastefully augmented, with so many overheard conversations about whether or not they had simply come again from Paris for the exhibits, or whether or not the jet was flying again to the town or the Hamptons.
The evening’s honoree, Rashid Johnson, launched me to Mariët Westermann, the director and CEO of the Guggenheim, the place the artist could have a present later this yr. Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith, who oversaw the present, was there as properly.
“Look at this structure!” mentioned Bruce Gendelman, the chair of the Norton board, as he took to the stage, gesturing to the environment.
The gala was being held in a tent to accommodate the 800-person shindig, a primary. The construction was constructed and designed by David Monn, the occasion designer behind Trump’s preinaugural dinner in 2017.
“I think this thing could rival the Sphere!” Gendelman mentioned.
Norton director Ghislain d’Humieres launched Johnson, who gave a speech after which proceeded to work the room, fortunately chatting with the museum’s donors and curators. Apart from Johnson, one of many extra celebrated artists of our time, the most well-liked man on the gala needed to be John Phelan, nonetheless awaiting affirmation. Several tables known as him over for group photos, and he took unsolicited recommendation from those that normal themselves politicos. Some simply needed to supply their help for Trump’s choose to guide the Navy.
“I’m excited for me—and for my country,” mentioned one older gentleman.
“Well, I’m excited to hear that,” Phelan responded.
As the gala was winding down, with an 85-year-old and deeply tanned George Hamilton beginning to dance to a band taking part in Earth, Wind & Fire songs, Lindsay Taylor, the curator for the Phelans, led me over to the couple. Amy met her future husband in 2000, when he was investing tech billionaire Michael Dell’s huge fortune at MSD Capital—and she or he was a couple of years faraway from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad. I requested her husband if he was planning on getting a spot within the capital for the brand new gig.
“You know, I’ve just been staying at hotels,” he mentioned.
I informed him I used to be a Washington native and that I had simply written a narrative about new DC scorching spots in the course of the transition—possibly he needed some restaurant suggestions?
“Oh, that would be amazing, thank you,” Phelan mentioned.
And then Taylor had a restaurant advice of her personal, an area place.
“I wish I could have taken you to Mar-a-Lago. It’s just a little tough because he’s in town, so it might be tough to schedule,” she mentioned, without having to specify.
“The cheeseburger by the water is…” she mentioned earlier than performing a chef’s kiss. “It’s the best cheeseburger.”
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings within the artwork world this week and past…
…After all that’s gone down in Washington this week, you’re most likely considering to your self: Does Elon Musk purchase any artwork? The reply, successfully, is not any, he doesn’t! The extent to which he’s concerned within the artwork world principally facilities round who and what’s getting shot to the cosmos on SpaceX rockets, as the primary paying buyer of his industrial shuttle service was Yusaku Maezawa, who purchased a Basquiat cranium portray for $110.5 million in 2017. The Japanese collector needed to carry a couple of artists with him, however since he pushed the lunar voyage to 2024 after which canceled that outing, it’s unclear whether or not the journey will occur. Musk did handle to launch 125 Jeff Koons sculptures into house final yr on his Falcon 9 rocket. But in relation to paintings that Musk truly owns, the one trace now we have is an image from the depths of the COVID lockdowns, when Kanye West visited what gave the impression to be Musk’s former Bel Air pad and Grimes snapped an image of the lads in entrance of Hajime Sorayama’s Sexy Robot Floating. At the time the pic went viral, sources identified that, the earlier November, a present at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery in LA had six editions of the identical sculpture, with the identical cage round it.