\n<\/p>\n
Something else was different. Behind the counter one could buy a black hat with the following written in gold cursive: \u201cMar-a-Lago Palm Beach.\u201d And there were also packs of breath mints emblazoned with a bloody Trump rising up after being shot, as well as other packs of mints with Trump\u2019s face and the text: \u201cMake your breath great again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAren\u2019t they fantastic?\u201d said the cashier.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the Norton Museum\u2019s gala on Saturday night, John and Amy Phelan gave a tour of their collection in Palm Beach on Friday afternoon for select gala-goers, led by Lindsay Taylor,<\/strong> the director of the Phelan Collection. The house, on the southern part of the island and a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, has Jeff Koons<\/strong>\u2019s painting Saddle<\/em> in the kitchen, a Willem de Kooning over the fireplace, and a massive Lawrence Weiner installed on the entrance to a freestanding discotheque they built on the property. (That\u2019s gotta be a first for a prospective secretary of the Navy.)<\/p>\n It was only the start of a full-on art tour of shows throughout town. Sure, many of the snowbird outposts of major NY galleries have closed up shop in recent years\u2014adieu to the locations of White Cube, Lehmann Maupin, Pace, L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan, and others\u2014but Beth Rudin DeWoody<\/strong> still has the Bunker Artspace, and it\u2019s still one of the most incredible places to see art in South Florida, or anywhere. Every year she and her staff stage up to a dozen shows across two massive floors of a West Palm warehouse, featuring hundreds of works of art\u2014all culled exclusively from her 10,000-piece-strong personal collection.<\/p>\n She\u2019s such a voracious collector that the frequent New Yorker<\/em> cartoonist Guy Richards Smit<\/strong> submitted a drawing in 2023 in which a gallerist is showing her team a strategy slideshow on a projector, with the PowerPoint \u201csumming up the gallery\u2019s entire business plan in one easy-to-remember phrase\u2026\u2018BETH RUDIN DEWOODY.\u2019\u201d The original is now on view at the Bunker, along with shows dedicated to snakes, paintings from the \u201960s, and surveillance.<\/p>\n Also in West Palm Beach is a pop-up by Paula Cooper Gallery\u2014the Chelsea mainstay that had a space on Worth Avenue from 2020 to 2023\u2014that runs through the high season. Down the street, Sarah Gavlak<\/strong> moved her gallery into a new space off-island after years of showing at the Royal Poinciana Plaza, while Acquavella, the gallery run by the eponymous, Palm Beach\u2013dwelling family, still has its space in an open-air shopping mall.<\/p>\n The most crucial art concern in the Palm Beach vicinity is unquestionably the Norton, which has gone from local curio to established art powerhouse in less than a decade. In 2018, Citadel CEO and mega-collector Ken Griffin<\/strong> announced that he would make a $16 million donation to the museum, the largest single gift in its history, to be used for, among other things, the construction of the space designed by Lord Norman Foster.<\/strong> Then in 2022, he moved his hedge fund, Citadel, from Chicago, where he\u2019d feuded with Illinois governor JB Pritzker,<\/strong> to South Florida\u2014and, as we revealed in this column in 2022<\/a>, yanked his collection off the walls of the Art Institute, instead installing the works at the Norton.<\/p>\n Walking through the museum this weekend, I found that nearly all of the masterpieces in Griffin\u2019s collection\u2014de Kooning\u2019s Interchange,<\/em> an untitled Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko\u2019s No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) (Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue),<\/em> and Jackson Pollock\u2019s Number 17A<\/em>\u2014were in a space that abutted the contemporary galleries, still listed as belonging to a \u201cprivate collection.\u201d A room away, there was a massive Cy Twombly painting, Untitled (Camino Real),<\/em> that was shown by Larry Gagosian<\/strong> as part of an exhibition of Twombly\u2019s last paintings, 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 art the UBS chairman had amassed over six decades was sold off by Gagosian alongside William Acquavella<\/strong> and Marc Glimcher.<\/strong> Now the Twombly work is hanging in the Norton. According to a source, it\u2019s Griffin\u2019s. (Griffin was not immediately available for comment.)<\/p>\n The first sign that the museum\u2019s Saturday evening fundraiser was not your typical gala was the sight of Fox News host Bret Baier,<\/strong> whom, it\u2019s safe to say, I\u2019ve never encountered on the art circuit before. He walked in past the somewhat more expected guests, collectors with homes in South Florida: Neil<\/strong> and Kimberly Bluhm,<\/strong> Don<\/strong> and Mera Rubell,<\/strong> Steve<\/strong> and Lisa Tananbaum,<\/strong> Ronnie Heyman,<\/strong> DeWoody, and Jane Holzer,<\/strong> the former Warhol superstar who was raised on the island and maintains a big chunk of its valuable real estate. Sotheby\u2019s had sent a battalion of deal closers from New York and London, among them: former auction house CEO Tad Smith,<\/strong> who is now a big crypto guy. I\u2019ve never been in a room with so many diamonds, with so many faces tastefully augmented, with so many overheard conversations about whether they had just come back from Paris for the shows, or whether the jet was flying back to the city or the Hamptons.<\/p>\n The night\u2019s honoree, Rashid Johnson, introduced me to Mari\u00ebt Westermann,<\/strong> the director and CEO of the Guggenheim, where the artist will have a show later this year. Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith,<\/strong> who oversaw the show, was there as well.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at this structure!\u201d said Bruce Gendelman,<\/strong> the chair of the Norton board, as he took to the stage, gesturing to the surroundings.<\/p>\n The gala was being held in a tent to accommodate the 800-person shindig, a first. The structure was built and designed by David Monn,<\/strong> the event designer behind Trump\u2019s preinaugural dinner in 2017.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this thing could rival the Sphere!\u201d Gendelman said.<\/p>\n Norton director Ghislain d\u2019Humieres<\/strong> introduced Johnson, who gave a speech and then proceeded to work the room, happily chatting with the museum\u2019s donors and curators. Apart from Johnson, one of the more celebrated artists of our time, the most popular guy at the gala had to be John Phelan, still awaiting confirmation. Several tables called him over for group pictures, and he took unsolicited advice from those who fashioned themselves politicos. Some just wanted to offer their support for Trump\u2019s pick to lead the Navy.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m excited for me\u2014and for my country,<\/em>\u201d said one older gentleman.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I\u2019m excited to hear that,\u201d Phelan responded.<\/p>\n As the gala was winding down, with an 85-year-old and deeply tanned George Hamilton<\/strong> starting to dance to a band playing 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<\/strong>\u2019s vast fortune at MSD Capital\u2014and she was a few years removed from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad. I asked her husband if he was planning on getting a place in the capital for the new gig.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve just been staying at hotels,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I told him I was a Washington native and that I had just written a story about new DC hot spots during the transition<\/a>\u2014maybe he wanted some restaurant recommendations?<\/p>\n \u201cOh, that would be amazing, thank you,\u201d Phelan said.<\/p>\n And then Taylor had a restaurant recommendation of her own, a local place.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I could have taken you to Mar-a-Lago. It\u2019s just a little tough because he\u2019s in town, so it might be tough to schedule,\u201d she said, with no need to specify.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cheeseburger by the water is\u2026\u201d she said before performing a chef\u2019s kiss. \u201cIt\u2019s the best<\/em> cheeseburger.\u201d<\/p>\n Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u2026After all that\u2019s gone down in Washington this week, you\u2019re probably thinking to yourself: Does Elon Musk buy any art? The answer, effectively, is no, he does not! The extent to which he\u2019s involved in the art world mostly centers around who and what\u2019s getting shot to the cosmos on SpaceX rockets, as the first paying customer of his commercial shuttle service was Yusaku Maezawa,<\/strong> who bought a Basquiat skull painting for $110.5 million in 2017. The Japanese collector wanted to bring a few artists with him, but since he pushed the lunar voyage to 2024 and then canceled that outing, it\u2019s unclear whether the trip will happen. Musk did manage to launch 125 Jeff Koons sculptures into space last year on his Falcon 9 rocket. But when it comes to artwork that Musk actually owns, the only hint we have is a picture from the depths of the COVID lockdowns, when Kanye West<\/strong> visited what appeared to be Musk\u2019s former Bel Air pad and Grimes<\/strong> snapped a picture of the men in front of Hajime Sorayama<\/strong>\u2019s Sexy Robot Floating.<\/em> At the time the pic went viral, sources pointed out that<\/a>, the previous November, a show at Jeffrey Deitch<\/strong>\u2019s gallery in LA had six editions of the same sculpture, with the same cage around it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nThe Rundown<\/h2>\n