Frieze LA diary: “Who the fuck is [name redacted]?”

Monday

It’s around 10:30 pm when I get to the Edition Hotel lobby for cocktails hosted by the boys of podcast Nota Bene—that’s collector Benjamin Godsill and journalist Nate Freeman, an ex-coworker of mine from the now-defunct artinfo.com. (Trauma bonding is the experience of being siblings, I realise, which is why everyone who’s ever worked for Louise Blouin is my forever family.) Still, there’s a low-frequency tension in the room, where the New York advisors and gallery partners in my sightline radiate a self-importance that I do not understand. They don’t seem to grasp that in the entertainment capital of the world, the bar for celebrity is set at Justin Bieber. No one really cares that you sell art. Below the air of condescension and rivalry is the palpable stress of the overworked. “Who the fuck is [name redacted]?” a friend says, reenacting a recent conversation with his boss. He works at a beloved blue-chip gallery, and the owner wants to know who the fuck they’ve given all their VIP passes to.

By contrast, the vibe at the Autre x Deitch party in the basement is amazing. It’s artists rather than art world; local fashion enthusiasts; a ceiling of disco balls and sex appeal. Performance artist MPA asks eight-time Grammy winner Beck why he looks familiar, and he says that people mistake him for Michael Cera or David Spade all the time. Mykki Blanco spins a Y2K pop set—ironically or nostalgically? We’re not sure. But Dave Hickey once wrote that the chorus of a good pop song creates a dopamine rush like no other, and the crowd collectively loses their shit each time Kelly Clarkson says “since you’ve been gone.” We’re spiritually set loose. Everyone is here to have fun. I drive home completely sober and wonder: am I actually fine without alcohol as a social lubricant? Should I try to rawdog my way through Frieze?

Tuesday

An art advisor emails Autre complaining about their party – apparently humiliated that she and her guests were charged for drinks. I love that for her. She’s made herself the main character of a movie that no one will ever see. In the late afternoon, I meet with a PR director from New York to talk shit—the most satisfying, deep-cut, off-the-record kind. At Make Room, Terence Koh boils coffee over a makeshift campfire in a cave of earthen walls, and the audience is just me, MPA and one other person. We also like Nora Turato’s performance at Sprüth Magers; she’s got the pathos to make 50 minutes of spoken word feel like 30. Dinner is at Republique, where Tina Kim and Gyopo celebrate Mire Lee’s forthcoming installation at Tate Modern. My table speaks of absence—there’s no Gagosian party this week, they discuss, but there is a Gagosian Basquiat show opening after the fair is over. “Larry Gagosian doesn’t give a shit about Frieze,” one gallerist notes. “He’s saving it all for the Oscars.”

Wednesday

God shimmers on the surface of the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where so many of my friends are scattered around the perimeter, drinking and swaying to the music. This is VIP day at Felix, an art fair of incomparable vibes. Nothing puts dealers at ease like a booth that is actually a poolside cabana that charges an exceptionally low fee. I get very good intel on the shifts in collectors’ buying habits from Sara Hantman at Sea View. I like Christopher K. Ho’s sculptural stack of encyclopedias at 56 Henry. I tell a gallerist her fair presentation compares favourably to the safe show of landscape paintings at her gallery, which I now realize is an insult.

I am however disappointed by a few of these rooms, where the paintings strike me as fast fashion—more affordable and less memorable versions of Agnes Pelton’s transcendentalism, for example, or Hilma af Klint by way of Loie Hollowell. These trickle-down works generally have what painters describe as “no touch,” that is, no physical presence; like fast fashion clothing, they also look better online than in real life.

The Serpentine party is once again on the Bird Streets of the Hollywood Hills, up the cypress-lined driveway of Sybill Orr, cousin of Walmart’s Walton family, in a pool house capped by a James Turrell Skyspace. A Skyspace is for the contemplation of light against the frame of unnatural colours, and a good cocktail party is all chatter and flattering lighting. Each unfortunately denatures the other, producing a party with no discernible vibe at all. The real party is Kasmin’s in Hollywood, where I meet up with two artists, my partner Joe Reihsen and our very good friend Tony Lewis. I congratulate vanessa german on her new body of work and everyone smokes the fat elegantly rolled joint that Kenny Scharf gifted the gallery president. (In California, marijuana 100% still counts as sober.) The vibe is excellent; good music and good people who do not pass the joint in a fixed order but hold it outstretched for whoever’s ready to take it. The one momentary lapse where some New York dealer/writer calls LA a third-world country. I decide to let it go; the goodwill from Felix is still coursing through my veins. I learn that last year, countless art people coming straight from Zona Maco to Frieze LA suffered from explosive diarrhoea as they touched down. I wonder out loud if that’s why the two fairs are now two weeks apart. Everyone has the giggles.

Thursday 

No sleep. Frieze. Booth. Another booth. Another booth. I’ve filed two articles today and I’ve come to the fair to bang out a third which has very little to do with art and everything to do with money.

San Francisco gallerist Micki Meng remains genuinely upbeat about the market despite the looming collapse of Chinese luxury real estate. When I moved to LA a decade ago, unwavering California optimism like this initially shocked me. New Yorkers by contrast have both the practical bluntness and low-simmering anxiety to straight up tell me “the market is slower.” TriBeCa dealer David Lewis bristles when I ask how the slowdown affects his presentation because, he says, the calculus of booth planning should run on intuition rather than capitulations to the market. I ask if he didn’t come to Frieze LA with even a little apprehension:

“Oh, I’m always apprehensive.”
“Did you speak to any institutions today?”
“Does Leonardo di Caprio count?”

Since its launch in 2019, Frieze LA has been continuously changing size and shape, fluctuating between 70 and 124 exhibitors and moving through four different locations. Things seem stable this year, perhaps having landed the right venue at the Santa Monica airport and ideal size with 95 galleries. Once again, I am not here to look at art, but an untitled 2011 Ed Clark painting draws me into the Hauser & Wirth booth from many aisles away. It doesn’t push beyond the abstract expressionism of the 1960s, but its physicality is so distinct compared to the bloodless paintings produced today in competition with digital pictures. Clark did not paint in pursuit of an image or an audience, but communion with his medium. An announcement comes through the speakers: “Frieze is now closed.”

At the Polo Lounge, Pilar Corrias fetes Sabine Moritz with an intimate gathering of mature collectors, Hans Ulrich Obrist and seven-time Golden Globe-winner Jane Fonda. The vibe is American country club meets European generational wealth. I text one friend to join me, and she brings four more, one of whom tries and fails to chat up HUO. At some new Hollywood club called Mars, art scene queen Annie Armstrong’s party with PR agency Cultural Counsel is sexy—low amber lighting, bottle service at velvet sofas, good-looking junior gallery staff. This is my perfect mix of business and pleasure: we’re talking potential book projects and flights to Venice, and an associate director tells me her gallery sold work to an “academy-award-winning actress.” (She’s not being coy; she actually doesn’t know which one.) A New York advisor tells me that after seeing the works in person at the fair today, his client bought neither of her holds, including one small-scale, $300,000 Lisa Yuskavage. “There’s just no urgency to buy anymore,” he says. The dance floor is garnished with different modes of dissociation. My friend who just took a K-pop hands his poppers to the DJ, who’s wearing a giant plush panda head. A New York person offers me ketamine in powder form and an LA person offers me capsules of magic mushrooms. I politely decline both, flying high on my own sobriety and the adrenaline from the fair. Ew, I say to myself. Who have I become?

Friday

I write in circles, moving vaguely coherent paragraphs around the page. At 5 am I decide to rest my eyes and set an alarm for 8. I blink and suddenly it’s 10:30. God damnit. Through the sheer force of human will, I resume writing while my most extremely wonderful partner irons my shirt. I file an hour past deadline and arrive 40 minutes late for lunch with NorCal artists Woody de Othello and Lacey Lennon. Chicago gallerist Jim Dempsey DMs me thanks for our chat at Felix, but he asks if I could make a correction. Although I wrote of “the late Philip Hanson,” he says, the Chicago Imagist is very much alive. We have already gone to print. I die a little inside.

Saturday

“This the real satellite fair,” says friend and fellow art writer Jen Piejko. We’re at the Beverly Hills Erewhon where various art world types are grabbing lunch and Hailey Bieber smoothies. This is going to be a restorative day. In the checkout line, Ellie Rines of 56 Henry asks me if I went to [name redacted]’s sick house party last night, annually the highlight of the week. Sadly no, I say. I slept through everything. Last night I had nothing left to give.

At MOCA, Jen and I lie down on the stage of a darkened auditorium for Optimal Vibration Alignment, a sonic collaboration by artists FriendsWithYou and Roc Nation producer James Fauntleroy. As cinematic music whips around the stage, vibrations press into my body like a weighted blanket. On the way out, we’re gifted star-shaped amulets, and I walk through the museum’s permanent collection. I start to cry at the sight of a Robert Irwin installation next to drawings of his student Vija Celmins, and it occurs to me I might need more sleep. At home, I watch a bit of the World Series of Art Poker on Jonas Wood’s Instagram Live. I put my phone down. I sleep forever.