At LACMA, Dia, and Creative Time Galas, the Art World Awaits the End of Election Season

Last Wednesday, Creative Time held its annual gala at Skylight, the penthouse venue in the not-quite-finished office building in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg. As guests looked out on Manhattan and the East River, Creative Time ended cocktail hour with a project by artist Pedro Reyes informing attendees to take their seats at dinner. Reyes had performers walk around wearing sandwich boards that said “The End Is Here.”

If that wasn’t enough references to America’s current “situation,” Creative Time director Justine Ludwig was introduced by self-described “performance clown” Alex Tatarsky, who riffed on the title of the organization’s 2008 project in New York’s Armory building, “Democracy in America: The National Campaign”—as though one could take it for granted that one thing would always be inside the other!

Later on that evening, Reyes staged another project, this one to benefit Creative Time: anyone willing to pay more than $500 would get a can of Artist’s Air. Leaving aside the fact that a significant number of people in the room might not even have gotten the art historical reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 50cc of Paris air: What might portions of this great country of ours make of the fact that here on the 14th floor of a Brooklyn building we were paying $500+ for a can of air?

Anyways!

At dinner, guests had precisely the same view of the Manhattan skyline as Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sphinx, 2014’s A Subtlety—perhaps the greatest project in Creative Time’s half-century history. Indeed, those views were partially obscured by the old Domino sugar sign, the last remnant of the old factory where Walker’s sculpture was on view.

Rashid Johnson, one of the evening’s honorees, took the stage and said he could understand why a number of us were “worried about”—pause—“the [Yankees] game…” which indeed was happening that night. But he then seemed to address the election in far more poignant terms with the last line of an Amiri Baraka poem, an excerpt he used in a video debuted at Hauser & Wirth in Paris a couple weeks ago:

“Such intellectuals as we is baby, we need to deal in the real world, and be be in the real world. We need to use, to use, all the all the skills all the spills and thrills that we conjure, that we construct, that we lay out and put together, to create life as beautiful as we thought it could be, as we dreamed it could be, as we desired it to be, as we knew it could be, before we took off, before we split for the sky side, not to settle for endless meaningless circles of celebration of this madness, this madness, not to settle for this madness this madness madness, these yoyos yoyos of the ancient minorities. Its all for real, everything’s for real, be for real, song of the skytribe walking the earth, faint smiles to open roars of joy, meet you on the battlefield they say, they be humming, hop, then stride, faint smile to roars of open joy, hey my man, what’s happening, meet you on the battlefield

They say, meet you on the battlefield they say, what I guess needs to be discussed here

Tonight

Is what side yall gon be on”

—Sarah Douglas

At the LACMA Art + Film gala on Saturday, the actor Colman Domingo came on stage after dinner and invited the 650-person crowd outside; tiny desserts and a special performance by Charlie XCX were waiting for us in the courtyard. But first, he had one request.

“Before next week—an extraordinary week,” he said, “look around the room and fill yourself with all the art, the love and the hope and the faith, the grace and the joy that we can to make this world a better place.”

“Next week” was the closest anyone on stage had come to saying the word “election” all night, which a cynical person might read as pandering equivocation. Afterwards, when I spoke to artist Derek Fordjour, he explained the logic he saw in the museum maintaining its neutrality. “Maybe it’s naive, but I do believe art plays a very critical role in making space for all people, all beliefs and all political views,” he told me. With a dose of pragmatism, he added, “There is no way to court the wealthy for their donations and oppose them politically.”

The star-studded, Gucci-sponsored gala took place at the museum and, as usual, it was undeniably indulgent but also very fun. Each edition honors one artist and one director—this year Simone Leigh and Baz Luhrmann—setting off a series of improbable collisions between the art world and the entertainment industry. It’s what a cinematic crossover would feel like in real life.

Cocktail hour featured meet-cutes between the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio—a co-chair of the gala with Eva Chun Chow—Jonas Wood, and Shio Kusaka, Viola Davis and Shinique Smith, and Chase Hall and Nicholas Hoult, among others. I waited in line for the bathroom with Blake Lively, who told me her dress was very heavy. I waited in line for drinks with Fordjour, who told me that, at a previous gala, he and his wife Alexis Hoag-Fordjour were misidentified in their red carpet photos as fellow Ghanaian-East African couple Idris and Sabrina Dhowre Elba. (Alexis, a law professor, cites the incident in her lectures on misidentification.)

The $10,000-a-plate, 650-person dinner sat DiCaprio between Luhrmann and Laurene Powell Jobs, the businesswoman, philantrophist, and widow to the late co-founder of Apple. Simone Leigh sat next to Troye Sivan, Charli XCX’s co-headliner on the Sweat Tour. At the end of the night, the Charli XCX’s performance marked many collectors’ first encounter with the pop star. Disoriented by the fog machine and strobing lights, plus Sivan’s guest appearance, many of them uttered the same pressing question: “Who’s she?”

This was LACMA’s “most successful gala ever,” museum director Michael Govan announced before dinner, with the event raising a total of $6.4 million. Still, there were signs of extenuating economic circumstances in the room. There were very few art dealers in attendance, with one of the few exceptions being Tim Blum. Where guests previously might have left the event with a new $400 bottle of perfume, Gucci had no parting gifts for attendees this year.

At the bar, LA dealer and curator Dominique Clayton told me she couldn’t wait for the election to be over, confident that a win for Vice President Kamala Harris would return market conditions to normal: “A more optimistic mood means we can all start shopping again,” she said. In the event of President Donald Trump’s reelection, she added, she was willing to overlook the LA-Toronto beef that hip-hop stars Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef fomented earlier this year; she and her Toronto-born husband, sculptor Mustafa Ali Clayton, were fully prepared to move their family to Canada.

During dinner, I sat next to my friend Shinique Smith and her friend Jeff Vespa, a photographer and founding investor in LA art gallery The Hole; plus artist brothers Kohshin and Delfin Finley; Los Angeles Times reporter Jessica Gelt; and comedy writer Russ Armstrong, a very nice guy and husband to Golden Globe-nominated actor Greta Lee. It was a fun group. Two-time Grammy winner Ricky Martin paused on his way to the bathroom to say hi to Shinique. Per museum protocol, I said I was there on assignment to detect signs of pre-election jitters, which the table roundly received as a damper to the party.

—Janelle Zara

The mood at Dia Art Foundation’s gala on Monday night, just hours before the polls opened in New York, was a mix of dazed, confused, bemused, and defiant, among other emotions. During the opening reception, in the front of an event space in Chelsea, more than one partygoer likened the waiting-stage aspect of the evening to that before a medical procedure, in skittish and stoic terms. “It’s like surgery—you try to get through it, and after that life goes on,” one prominent artist said by the bar, where bourbon and candied bacon offered anesthesia of a sort.

Inside the enormous dining room, after Ed Ruscha delivered a tribute to Larry Bell that was heavy on hammy one-liners and decidedly election-free, Dia director Jessica Morgan took the podium and acknowledged the moment. “I’m fairly sure that Dia’s 50th anniversary is probably not the thing at the top of your mind tonight,” she said. “So an extra thank you to all of you for being with us tonight. Thank you for offering a moment of distraction or, perhaps better, a moment of focus.”

Then came writer Hilton Als, on hand to pay tribute to artist Senga Nengudi. Inching close to the microphone, he said, “This looks like something familiar, so I don’t want it too close to me”—a lewd allusion to a recent Donald Trump remark that many of us would love to forget. Then came what he called a preface to what he had composed to read.

“We have a lot on our minds tonight and, in our gut, the world feels unreal because it is,” Als said. “I don’t know how to reorient us, because I’m not a candidate for president. But I am a voice for the artist Senga Nengudi, who is being honored tonight, and I think one way we can win ourselves back this evening, just for a little while, is to think about those people who are trying to affect change in the world, and Senga is one of those people worthy of our attention, frazzled or not. Maybe if we turn our attention to hope and freedom, both of which Senga’s art represents, we will engender hope and freedom for ourselves.”

After dinner, as dessert was put out in another room, the French-born, U.S.–based artist Camille Henrot said she felt unsettled in the country she currently calls home. “I can’t even vote, which makes it more scary,” she said. “I feel like I’m walking away from my own shoes.”

Pondering what the future might look like, she said she feels artists need to keep raising their voices, as many have. “I saw someone saying we should all stop posting about politics, but it’s necessary and healthy,” she said. “I like what I’m seeing now. I’m just wondering if it’s going to be enough.”

—Andy Battaglia