Scenes From an Ari Emanuel–Level Overhauled Armory Show

The Armory Show started as the Gramercy International three decades ago in the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was far from fancy then. At the time, the hotel was a pseudo-bohemian squat, full of slumming musicians. Cameron Crowe set scenes there for Almost Famous, and it wasn’t hard to make it look like the ’60s in the late ’90s. The elevator often went out, leaving guests to walk up 12 flights of stairs.

The hotel was already 70 years old when the fair started. Each gallery had a room to use as a booth, a far cry from today’s tents and convention centers, but the results were kind of legendary. Lisa Spellman of 303 Gallery hung Karen Kilimnik in the bathroom, and a young Jay Jopling was offering works by an unknown artist named Tracey Emin, who stayed in the hotel bed during the fair’s run.

By 1999 the fair had moved to the 69th Regiment Armory building, and by 2006 the Gramercy Park Hotel was an Aby Rosen– and Ian Schrager–owned luxury villa-plex with an interior designed by Julian Schnabel and a bar with works by Damien Hirst. Now it’s empty again, after the landlord sued Rosen’s RFR Holding post-pandemic for eviction and asked for nearly $80 million in back rent. RFR Holding was ultimately evicted, and there was a liquidation sale in September 2022 with a line that stretched around the block. (“Due to the impact of COVID and the terms of the lease, the tenant found it was no longer economically feasible to operate the hotel,” a lawyer for Rosen’s RFR Holding said at the time.) Two years later, the lights at the building are still out, the lobby abandoned like an inn in a ghost town. (The hospitality group behind the High Line Hotel and the TWA Hotel at JFK purchased the asset in 2023 and tentatively plans to open it for guests next year.) The palpable lack of Rose Bar glitz leaves the National Arts Club as the last gin joint facing the famously locals-only Gramercy Park—and that’s where the Armory Show decided to hold a cocktail party on Wednesday to honor its distant past, and its new future.

“Is that…Tiffany glass?” one European art dealer in town for the show asked at the gathering.

Not quite—it was a glass ceiling dreamed up by Donald MacDonald, the master glassmaker of the mid-19th century. We were inside the longtime home of the National Arts Club, the Samuel J. Tilden House, built 125 years ago for the former Democratic New York governor who narrowly lost the 1866 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes. Which is pretty cool if you’re into Electoral College mishaps of the 1860s, but the main draw at Governor Tilden’s pad was probably new Armory director Kyla McMillan, recently tapped to run the fair after little more than a decade in the gallery world, rising up from working for Gavin Brown and David Zwirner to starting her own Brooklyn gallery, Saint George Projects, in 2021.

This was a new kind of Armory show party. Also among those in attendance: the artist Florian Krewer, probably the most acclaimed contemporary artist with face tats. He’s opening a show this week at Michael Werner Gallery in Beverly Hills. Rashid Johnson’s galleries, Hauser & Wirth and David Kordansky, haven’t shown in the fair since the 2000s, but there was Johnson with his wife, the artist Sheree Hovsepian, acting on the host committee. (It may help that they are park key-holders as well.) Spencer Sweeney, also at the party, is actually a chairperson on the Fine Arts Committee at the National Arts Club, and he also has a show at Gagosian, opening this Friday.

“You know, I’ve never actually been to the Armory Show. What’s it like?” said the artist Tyler Mitchell, who currently has a show up at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. “I’ve never been before, but Kyla’s the homie.”

There’s a reason the Armory has until now never made a visitor out of Mitchell, whose work has been up at Gagosian and Jack Shainman, an Art Basel mainstay who last showed at the Armory in 2019. Mitchell can pull thousands of fans to a gallery opening in Berlin and shoots movie stars for glossy mags (including this one!). The Armory Show doesn’t scream “kunstwerke.” In addition to its cosmic connection to Gramercy Park, the Armory Show is kind of like the National Arts Club compared to the peak of Aby Rosen’s Rose Bar–era Gramercy: ancien régime, august, historic, but a little fusty. And on the tippy-top end, blue chippers have mostly sidestepped the fair, positioning themselves within the Basels and Friezes of the world.

That Frieze also happened to be hosting a big-draw fair last week halfway around the globe in Seoul presented something of a problem for the art world, which has never solved that pesky annoyance of how to be two places at once. The mega galleries—Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Gladstone, and Paula Cooper Gallery—had all dedicated serious effort to selling in South Korea last week. It makes sense. The sales are big. According to ArtNews, a Nicolas Party sold for $2.5 million at the Hauser & Wirth booth, a Lee Ufan sold for $1.2 million at the Pace booth, and a Georg Baselitz sold for $1.1 million at the Thaddaeus Ropac booth. According to my Instagram feed, artists such as Alex Israel and Alvaro Barrington made the trek, and Pharrell Williams hosted a dinner for his own auction house, Joopiter. KAWS was in Korea. Pusha T was in Korea. So many K-pop stars were in Korea.

You would think that the Armory would be a little miffed that it coincides with a week that many people think is the most important art week in Asia. But here’s the thing: They love Frieze—Frieze is the Armory. It’s the same company. The Endeavor-owned Frieze bought the older show last year and has been systematically Frieze-ifying it since then. Most art world denizens I spoke to agreed this is a good thing for both outfits. It’s just that Endeavor chief Ari Emanuel now has to deal with the fact that he has two immovable fairs at the same time.

And no, it’s not quite so simple that you can just move one fair and keep the other. Both the Javits Center and Coex are booked out through the year, with the weeklong slots grandfathered in sometimes decades earlier. If you only go to art fairs in convention centers, you might not realize that the gatherings that come before and after don’t draw in aesthete billionaires and cultural heavyweights and flaunt things like VIP lounges.

For instance, after the Armory Show, the Javits Center plays host to the Plant Based World Expo North America: “Network with professionals who have successfully embarked on both personal and professional plant-based journeys.” If you ran the Art Basel of the vegan-foodstuff world, would you go moving your expo for anybody?

But maybe the Frieze-Armory overlap is a false conflict anyway. These are very different fairs, with different audiences. Throughout the week, McMillan strode through dinners and cocktail parties with the self-assurance of someone who’s been at the helm of art fairs for years. In reality it’s been months—she started in July, and admitted to me that it’s hardly accurate to say that this edition of the Armory, in the works since the last one closed in September 2023, should be solely credited to her at the helm. (Though she did take credit for bringing Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray to program the food for the VIP room.)

“I just wanted to get the excitement up the night before, get the vibe right, and I think we did a pretty good job?” she said in the middle of the National Arts Club, music blasting. “All the friends came through.”

And the next morning before the fair officially opened its doors, there was the first-ever VIP breakfast for the Armory. Such Champagne-soaked boondoggles were previously the purview of the Eurocentric fairs rather than the proudly Gotham-born Armory—but here we are, with the Armory subsumed by a British art fair that’s owned by a company helmed by an LA-based, Chicago-bred billionaire. The Pommery was flowing. No lesser eminence than Agnes Gund was in attendance, along with the collectors Don and Mera Rubell and their son Jason and his wife, Michelle. Swiss Institute director Steffani Hessler was on hand, as was the powerful Frieze VIP coordinator Brooke Kanter, as well as Art Production Fund cofounder Yvonne Force Villareal and Casey Fremont, its executive director.

Near a table where the curator Jed Moch and the LA gallerist Carlye Packer lingered over Gray’s banging egg sandwiches, McMillan took a second to take stock of the week before heading out to perform the ambassadorial duties of a director on the morning of her art fair—even if the first one she really gets to plan in full will be in 2025.

“Frieze has done such an amazing job in bringing its expertise, but the Armory Show is its own thing,” she said. “It’s a great canvas.”

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…LA artist Thomas Houseago, the man responsible for making Brad Pitt a sculptor, can be counted on to bring more than the usual celeb heat to the gallery vernissage. Houseago has a show that opened Monday at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, his first in New York in a decade, and the night before there was a screening of a new film by Andrew Dominik, a full-length documentary about the artist called I Don’t Work for Peanuts, I Work for God. Leonardo DiCaprio and Pitt were in attendance, plus there was an after-party where Jason Momoa and Adria Arjona stopped by. The next night, the show opened at the marble opulence that is the Wildenstein Mansion at 19 East 64th Street, and this time Pitt was joined by Robert De Niro and—apparently unrelated to Bob and Brad—Anne Hathaway. Don’t they have to be at film festivals?

…Speaking of Los Angeles, so, so many openings that first week in New York were for artists based in the City of Angels. Mark Grotjahn bows tonight at Gagosian’s 980 Madison galleries, Ryan Preciado opened last Saturday at Karma, Hilary Pecis opened at David Kordansky Gallery last Tuesday. More: Teresa Baker at Broadway Gallery, Thomas McDonell at Europa, Jason Mason at the Journal Gallery, Liza Lou at Lehmann Maupin, and Srijon Chowdhury at PPOW. Hope you enjoyed a break from the 110-degree weather, visiting Angelenos.

…One more Los Angeles artist to note: a new show by painter Tristan Unrau opened last week at LA dealer Sebastian Gladstone’s pop-up space on the fourth floor of 291 Grand Street. It’s a historic setting. Starting in 2014, the building became the epicenter of Lower East Side gallery culture, with Nathalie Karg on the fourth floor, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise on the third floor, and 47 Canal on the second floor. (James Cohan was and still is in the storefront space.) Now it’s having a revival—in addition to Gladstone taking the top floor for a few months, Gratin Gallery, on Avenue B, is taking over the former 47 Canal space. Most intriguing, though, is the tenant of the third floor. Sources say that it’s being leased by a very secretive, very famous low-output musician, to use for all the many aspects of their multihyphenate practice.

…Plenty of art folk in the good seats at the US Open: collector and Away cofounder Jen Rubio, Met director Max Hollein, artists Nicole Eisenman and Rashid Johnson and Grotjahn, and the collector and museum benefactor Nancy Nasher, who happened to have the suite night next to Taylor Swift.

…If you’re wondering why a few of your favorite galleries won’t hold their fall shows until later in September, the answer is, as it almost always is: It’s Fashion Week, baby! Pace gave up its Chelsea gallery to Loewe and Saks for a dinner on Saturday on the rooftop, and in the Salon 94 space on East 89th Street, Zegna opened Villa Zegna, a no-expense-spared recreation of founder Ermenegildo Zegna’s palace in the Italian Alps. Plus, Alaïa staged a showstopper of a show at the Guggenheim’s main rotunda, perhaps the first time Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp has been used as a runway. Also, Luhring Augustine was nearly overtaken by the Prada Beauty Paradoxe Virtual Flower Lab, which covered its outside façade with the green tile after taking over the event space next door, and the lines down West 24th Street were absolute madness—though the shows at the gallery remained open.

And that’s a wrap on this edition of True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected].