Wet Paint: Richard Prince Has a Surprise for Oscar Week, a New Tell-All Instagram Feed Debuts, and More Juicy Art-World Gossip

Every Thursday afternoon, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint,
a gossip column of original scoops reported and written by Nate
Freeman. If you have a tip, email Nate
at nfreeman@artnet.com.

MR. PRINCE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

After years of declining ratings for the
Oscars, the award show’s board of governors moved
the ceremony up a few weeks this year in an attempt to drum up some
additional excitement. Which means… Larry
Gagosian’s annual blowout Oscars show is moved up a few
weeks too! Held the Thursday before the February 9 ceremony, the
opening at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space is by
far the biggest art-related event of the starriest week of the
year, when Tinseltown is stuffed to the gills with celebrities big
and small. And following the opening, there’s an extremely
tough-to-crash dinner at Mr. Chow, with Hollywood
and art-world royalty sprinkled among the fattest wallets on the
gallery’s client list. The seating chart is wild. Think hard about
who Larry usually puts next to himself, and you’ll realize the
answer is obvious. That’s right, it’s the richest man on earth,
Jeff Bezos.

Now, we can reveal that the artist who will nab the coveted
exhibition slot is Richard Prince, making him the
first artist to get the Gagosian Oscars show for a third time. In
2005, he unveiled his “Check” paintings, canvases full of canceled
checks, at the space, and in 2013, he had a show of of his “Cowboy”
paintings there. It’s unclear what Richard will be doing this time
around, though word has it that it’s a radical departure from his
last show at Gagosian in 2018, “High Times,” which presented
pot-laced hippie
paintings. Regardless, expect a star-studded affair at Mr.
Chow—and then, for the select few, a bash at Larry’s Holmby
Hills pad afterward.

REGRETS, WE’VE HAD A FEW

Alissa Bennett, the Gladstone
director who also hosts a podcast with
Lena Dunham, launched an Instagram account
that you will not regret following, even if it brings to mind
evenings you aren’t exactly proud of. Called Regret
Counter (@regret_counter_) it consists of pictures of
lists of things people regret consuming. Some are litanies of
different types of liquor, beer, wine, and, um, more extreme
substances. One submitter topped off a night with “a lot” of molly
and “quite a bit” of cocaine. (Quotations theirs.) Another with a
strong stomach lists, precisely, 375 ml of Jack Daniels, 6 Lone
Star beers, and 1 tab of acid. Sounds like a hell of a night! And
while Bennett won’t name names, she did say that 70 percent of the
submissions have been from people in the art world. Start the
guessing game now.

TAKE MY ART! PLEASE!

If you were trying to find a definitive end of the Post-Internet
art movement—a trend for art made about the internet, though not
necessarily with new media, that peaked in the early- to
mid-2010s—it has arrived in the form of an alarming thread on
Twitter. Michael Manning, a Post-Internet
artist whose work once regularly sold for around $25,000 at
auction, is now simply giving away the material that his galleries
can’t sell in order to avoid paying storage fees. “I have been
storing several shows of inventory for a while and it seems a
complete waste to hide away works based on the idea of not hurting
the value of already circulating works when in all reality there is
no real market for them,” he wrote on Twitter. “These should be out
in the world with people, not sitting in a closet somewhere.” And
that’s not all! If you want to personally meet the artist who is
trying to get rid of work that is, by his own admission, worthless,
he’ll deliver it personally—if you Venmo him $250.

FADE TO BLACK FRAME

One of New York’s most influential art and fashion PR firms has
abruptly shut down operations. Black Frame, which
once did all press for Frieze New York and repped
art-adjacent fashion brands such as Eckhaus Latta
and Opening Ceremony, is no more as of 2020, its
founder Brian Phillips announced in a long email.
Though he didn’t give a full answer as to why he was shutting down
the business, which had employed 100 people in its 15-year history,
he hinted at a future as a “a creative director and as a
producer.”

POP QUIZ

Readers! Can you figure out what painting is in the background
of this video of mega-collector
Yusaku Maezawa wishing his fans a happy new year? The winner will
be rewarded with fame and fortune, also known as a mention in Wet
Paint.

WE HEAR…

That Vanessa Carlos, the co-founder of the
deeply influential London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa,
is looking to open a gallery in New York … Andrew
Russeth, formerly the executive editor of
ARTnews, has taken a job as deputy editor
of Surface magazine … Emily
Alderman, formerly a director at Blum &
Poe, is now at Gagosian, based in Beverly
Hills … Artnet scribe Kenny
Schachter has been named best writer in the Baer
Faxt reader poll for the third time—and the best
Instagram, beating out meme machine Jerry Gagosian
… Zoe Kestan—also known as @weed_slut_420, the
Instagram celeb and lingerie designer who Wet Paint revealed had
a special relationship with Hunter Biden—also had
a “thing” with Mark Grotjahn.

SPOTTED

Nicole Eisenman at Lucien,
where the employees of art world’s favorite restaurant moved around
some diners so the Hauser & Wirth artist could be
seated at table nine, the best see-and-be-seen table *** fellow
Hauser newbie
Avery Singer at the dinner for
painter Issy Wood at
Balvanera on Wednesday, following the opening
of her wonderful new show at JTT *** Alex
Israel at the star-studded
W magazine Golden
Globes party at the Chateau Marmont
penthouse *** Kylie Jenner revealing on
Instagram that there’s a Richard Prince painting hanging on her
wall—though she could have been visiting her sister,
Kendall Jenner, who is starting to become a
contemporary art collector herself.

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Richard Prince Has a Surprise for Oscar
Week, a New Tell-All Instagram Feed Debuts, and More Juicy
Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet News.