\n<\/p>\n
Just after 10 p.m. on primary day in New York City last week, loud applause erupted spontaneously out of d.b.a., the dog-friendly dive-pub on First Avenue. Young people spilled out into the streets, passersby surreptitiously jumped in for high fives, and a crush of people bellied up to the bar to begin the carousing. Those refreshing the New York Times<\/em> app on their phones discovered that Andrew Cuomo<\/strong> had conceded the race for the Democratic nomination for mayor to Zohran Mamdani.<\/strong> The East Village exploded.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did it!\u201d said a young man, beer in hand, bursting out of the bar, which was hosting a watch party for Mamdani, who for months was widely expected to lose to the former governor. Instead, the 33-year-old\u2019s lead was so enormous, the contest was essentially done and dusted days before expected. When the official counting finished a week later, Mamdani won by 12 percentage points. Four years ago, current mayor Eric Adams<\/strong> eked out a win in the same contest by barely 1%. A bright light burst on the scene\u2014the news camera crews had arrived.<\/p>\n Flashback to early March, when Mamdani made an appearance at another East Village establishment, at a party thrown in his honor by a bevy of downtown personalities. The host committee consisted of entities more associated with an Artists Space after-party or the front row at an Eckhaus Latta runway show than the orbit of mayoral politics. Those on the invite included Dimes Square boutique Caf\u00e9 Forgot, downtown galleries such as Theta Gallery and Derosia, the art dealer Carol Greene,<\/strong> writer and podcaster Noah Kulwin,<\/strong> vinyl purveyors Ergot Records, artists such as Ser Serpas<\/strong> and Martine Syms,<\/strong> the designers Gauntlett Cheng, and more.<\/p>\n \u201cMost of them are people I\u2019ve never met,\u201d Mamdani told me<\/a> as we stood shaking in the unseasonable freeze snap outside. It was chilly on Avenue A, but he was heading somewhere that was, literally and figuratively, colder: Albany. When I asked if he was looking forward to going back to the city where he currently serves in the New York State Assembly, he rolled his eyes. He wanted to be here.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cFrankly, I got here at about 6:45, and I saw a line around the block\u2026which is something that is not typical,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Inside the party, the vibe hardly reflected any kind of unfamiliarity; the Oscars were being live-podded by the Chapo Trap House bros downstairs, and Ergot Records founder Adrian Rew<\/strong> was DJing. Generally, there was an optimistic feeling in the air that, hey, maybe this guy could do it. Or, more likely, maybe he could make a little noise. At the time, the wager-on-anything site Polymarket had him at around a 7% chance to win, a virtual impossibility.<\/p>\n In the months that followed, Mamdani went on many, many podcasts, including the slightly niche but beloved menswear podcast Throwing Fits<\/a>,<\/em> and of course went on Subway Takes<\/a>,<\/em> the deliriously popular subterranean Reels\u2013based talk show. He did TikTok man-on-the-street vids and talked<\/a> to Knicks fans outside Madison Square Garden. He did the \u201cPolar Bear Plunge\u201d<\/a> and appeared in a video<\/a> with Emrata<\/strong> as she wore a \u201cHot Girls for Zohran\u201d T-shirt. He walked<\/a> from Battery Park to Inwood as the Zoomers filmed along. He appealed<\/a> to the \u201cNintendo Switch heads\u201d and engaged<\/a> in some colloquy with Crackhead Barney<\/strong> while walking through the Meatpacking District. By primary day, he had overtaken Cuomo on Polymarket odds.<\/p>\n Then he actually won.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really beyond all expectations,\u201d said Aria Dean<\/strong>\u2014an artist at the event in March, who back then was hoping for the impossible\u2014in the hours after the race was unofficially called.<\/p>\n But not all in the art world were pleased. One of Mamdani\u2019s signature messages\u2014along with the very popular \u201cfreeze the rent\u201d and \u201cfast free buses\u201d\u2014 is \u201cbillionaires should not exist.\u201d<\/a> And many of the people who support the New York contemporary art marketplace, the most robust art-selling infrastructure of any city on earth, are, well, billionaires.<\/p>\n Take hedge fund behemoth Dan Loeb.<\/strong> The billionaire started buying art along with his wife in the early 2000s. He tussled with the late Barbara Gladstone over a Matthew Barney<\/strong> that she sold him, then unsold him, prompting some fire-and-brimstone emails to Gladstone Gallery staffers\u2014only for Gladstone and Loeb to become friendly later on. Larry Gagosian<\/strong> invited him to gallery dinners, and Loeb decked out his Third Point offices in Lever House with Richard Prince<\/strong> work. That turned into mornings spent surfing with Montauk neighbors Adam Lindemann<\/strong> and Lo\u00efc Gouzer<\/strong> (Loeb\u2019s fund\u2019s name comes from a legendary break<\/a> in Malibu). He went deep<\/a> into the Martin Kippenberger market, at one point owning 60 works before offloading many of them to art-mad British ad man Charles Saatchi. He bought Jeff Koons<\/strong>\u2019s Baroque Egg With Bow (Turquoise\/Magenta)<\/em> and then consigned it back to Gagosian in 2008 when the market crashed. The gallery brought<\/a> it to Moscow in an attempt to find a Russian buyer at an oligarch-ready price of $20 million, but Loeb ended up consigning it to Sotheby\u2019s, where it sold<\/a> for a much more reasonable price of $5.7 million to\u2026Larry Gagosian, who a few years later brought it to the Art Basel Miami Beach in 2013, priced<\/a> at $9 million.<\/p>\n Loeb is best known in the industry for his attempted poison pill take-private of Sotheby\u2019s, which was initiated in 2014 and ended with a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/a> of a CEO and three hard-fought board seats<\/a>. By the time telecom magnate Patrick Drahi<\/strong> leveraged the funds to take over the house in 2019, Third Point owned<\/a> 14.3% of the company. Loeb personally netted<\/a> hundreds of millions in the deal.<\/p>\n Loeb\u2019s kept a low profile since then. He\u2019s consigned<\/a> some paintings by Gerhard Richter<\/strong> and Jonas Wood<\/strong> here and there, and occasionally shows up at the odd auction-week art world shindig. In the week since the primary, though, he\u2019s been very visible once again. On the day before the election, he tweeted<\/a> a link to a listing<\/a> for a $44.6 million home in Greenwich, Connecticut.<\/p>\n \u201cWouldn\u2019t be surprised to see a bidding war on trophy Greenwich, Palm Beach and Miami properties if the communist wins,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n After Mamdani shocked the city and snagged the primary within hours of the polls closing, Loeb kept on posting. The morning after the election, he changed<\/a> his profile picture to that of the character Snake Plissken\u2014a not-so-subtle reference to John Carpenter<\/strong>\u2019s Escape From New York.<\/em> In another posting, he called<\/a> Mamdani \u201cLittle Fidel.\u201d<\/p>\n And then he made a declaration<\/a> that was soon picked up by tabloids across the city: \u201cIt\u2019s officially hot commie summer.\u201d<\/p>\n In the days that followed, several billionaires publicly decried Mamdani, pledging their support to anyone else who might win. Gristedes supermarket\u2019s owner, John Catsimatidis,<\/strong> promised to decamp to Connecticut. Bill Ackman<\/strong> swore to start a write-in campaign. Mere millionaire<\/a> 50 Cent<\/strong> promised to give Mamdani \u201c$258,750 and a first-class one-way ticket\u201d to drop out and leave town.<\/p>\n There seemed to be a lingering sentiment among some of the art world regulars as well. At lunches and cocktail parties, some expressed to me their doubts about Zohran, though I would describe their tone as relatively muted.<\/p>\n Not so much with the art adviser Elizabeth Margulies,<\/strong> the daughter of Miami collector Martin Margulies.<\/strong> She posted to her Instagram story a screenshot of a since-deleted X post by the wealth management professional and TV personality Douglas Boneparth<\/strong> in which he said, \u201cNew York City downgraded to San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n To that, Margulies added her own commentary.<\/p>\n \u201cA terror-apologist lunatic who despises the police is about to run NYC,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHope everyone\u2019s down with open air psych wards and unanswered 911 calls. Good luck out there.\u201d<\/p>\n But all week, the main question on everyone\u2019s mind was: What does Keith McNally<\/strong> think about all this? The restaurateur with the most talked about memoir of the year\u2014at least in Manhattan, where his book has been perched<\/a> at the top of the McNally Jackson bestseller list for months\u2014has historically displayed a fairly freewheeling set of personal politics. One could imagine him falling on either side of the mayor debate. The suspense lasted until Monday, when the Balthazar owner went on-grid<\/a> with a big picture of the Democratic nominee.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Zohran Mamdani is fantastic,\u201d he said. \u201cMore so, when my affluent, paranoid friends tell me Mamdani\u2019s dangerous. More so, when those over 50 say Mamdani\u2019s too young and inexperienced to be mayor. More so, when the perceptive among are unable to see what a decent and principled man Mamdani is. I\u2019m sure Mamdani won\u2019t be perfect, but anyone labeled by Trump as a \u2018Communist Lunatic\u2019 can\u2019t be all bad.\u201d<\/p>\n The response was, as to be expected, mixed. Real estate developers, who aren\u2019t exactly pleased with the whole \u201cfreeze the rent\u201d thing, went especially hard against McNally. Philip Scheinfeld,<\/strong> the luxury real estate adviser at Compass, commented<\/a> simply, \u201cYour food tastes like dog food!\u201d Matt Bilinsky,<\/strong> the attorney and frequent Fox News guest, said, \u201cYou have nothing to offer the world but a solid steak frites and war stories from hitting quaaludes at Blondie shows in the village in 1982.\u201d (The comment appears to have been deleted sometime this week.) Evan Beard,<\/strong> the former head of Bank of America\u2019s Art Services Group who now runs the gallery Level & Co., said<\/a>, \u201cYou\u2019ll love the produce section of his city-run grocery stores.\u201d<\/p>\n But also very much in the comments section were the new generation of content creators who claim the Instagram-famous McNally as one of their own, just another New York\u2013obsessed resident mining the city\u2019s rich cultural offerings for feed fodder ready to go viral. In other words, the comments section is full of the people who got Mamdani elected. Kareem Rahma,<\/strong> the host of Subway Takes,<\/em> said<\/a>, \u201cOne of the many reasons we love @keithmcnallynyc<\/a>.\u201d Kaitlin Phillips,<\/strong> the downtown PR maven who was brought in to secure press for the March event (a strategy<\/a> that seems<\/a> to have worked<\/a>), dropped<\/a> a bunch of heart emojis. And Substacker Emily Sundberg<\/strong>\u2014who titled<\/a> a March newsletter about the Avenue A event \u201cThe hottest party in New York this weekend<\/a> was a Democratic Socialist fundraiser\u201d\u2014said<\/a> simply, \u201cKeith for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n Since then, McNally has posted about Mamdani at least three<\/a> more<\/a> times<\/a>. The general election\u2019s just a few months away.<\/p>\n Content never sleeps.<\/p>\n Have a tip? Drop me a line at<\/em> nate_freeman@condenast.com<\/a>.<\/em> And make sure you<\/em> subscribe to True Colors<\/em><\/a> to receive Nate Freeman\u2019s art-world dispatch in your inbox every week.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n