The days before the Oscars are a particularly heady time to be in Los Angeles. The movies have their biggest bash of the year in the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, one of the world’s great mix-and-match events, with guests from art, tech, fashion, music, and media—a room charged with the electricity of different industries mingling.
For its own Oscar spectacle, though, Hollywood’s art scene has the Gagosian Oscar opening. Last night, as the opening peaked, there was a whole host of fellow Los Angeles artists there to support, including Mungo Thomson and Sayre Gomez, huddled on the top floor near a masterful studio painting. LACMA director Michael Govan was there, as was Whitney director Scott Rothkopf. Local collectors, too: Benedikt and Lauren Taschen, who walked in with the artist Albert Oehlen, near where Laurent Asscher was huddled with David Zwirner director Alex Marshall, near where Nicolas Berggruen was with Alex Israel.
The exhibition itself was a showstopper. The tennis courts, when seen in full, add a conceptual dimension to Wood’s intricately conjured landscapes. At one point, the artist brought a group of us up to the rooftop, then down through the labyrinthine office space to a window through which his tennis-ball wallpaper, a real treat for Wood-heads, was installed down the double-story atrium. At one point, the art adviser Meredith Darrow announced that she had to let in her client Kendall Jenner.
Was Hollywood in attendance? CAA’s Joel Lubin, a major LA collector, was making the rounds upstairs, and Brian Grazer walked in after artists Chloe Wise and Jordan Wolfson. I spotted Tobey Maguire, and Jeff Goldblum stopped by as well. Rock stars? Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were there, both taking in the new work.
It’s a public opening when anyone can show up—where anyone could show up. Even Gagosian isn’t entirely sure how it became such a ball of energy each year.
“I really don’t know what to tell you, Nate—just the fact that there’s a lot of people in town, and I’m just happy to be part of those few days leading up to the Oscars,” he told me on the phone, shortly before we both left for LA. “And it definitely gives the artists that are showing at that time exposure to an audience that they might not normally get, particularly in Los Angeles.”
But even as the cinema gods come to joust for Oscar glory, he still wants to foreground the art—at least for one night—against the backdrop of the busiest weekend in town.
“And it’s good to put the art world on equal footing, though it’s not, obviously. It’s a whole, totally different world than the film world,” Gagosian said. “The film world is an enormous world, and we’re like little mice playing between the cats—but I kind of like that.”
For some context on the complicated relationship between the art world and Hollywood, here’s the opening of a 2011 “Scene and Herd” column from Artforum:
