Wet Paint: A Pro-Trump Dealer Joins the ‘Reopen’ Protests, Mega-Galleries Lose Artists Ahead of Recession, & 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.

TONY SHAFRAZI TO TRUMP: YOU CAN DO IT!

On April 16, Tony Shafrazi logged onto Twitter
and retweeted a message from a user who had posted a video of the
anti-shutdown protests in Lansing, Michigan. Shafrazi, the gallery
owner famed for vandalizing Guernica and for giving
early shows to artists such as Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Keith
Haring, has recently begun to use his lively account to
air some unexpected viewpoints. Text accompanying the video
indicated that he was not only endorsing the protests—he was
effectively joining them.

“Absolutely Right!” Shafrazi wrote, his style even more
all-caps-happy than that of his beloved commander-in-chief. “PEOPLE
must be RESPECTED & TRUSTED with care and caution TO RETURN TO WORK
because THEY NEED TO & THEY MUST ! Getting AMERICA Back To Work IS
THE VERY SIGN and ACT OF FREE WILL, INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY and the
GREAT FAITH  with which THIS BATTLE WILL BE WON !”

Shafrazi’s entire feed looks more like that of a
Trump-loving conspiracy theorist than of a guy who
for years has been part of the art-world jet-set. Even since his
gallery closed in 2014, he has often been spotted at galas,
receptions for the Brant Foundation in Greenwich,
Connecticut, and in a primo seat at the evening sales, hobnobbing
with the Nahmads (but rarely bidding).

The frequency of the declarations make clear that this is not
some kind of passing phase. In the past few weeks, he has tweeted
or retweeted messages that refer to “left leaning globalists” and
“the FAKE media” and said HBO host Bill Maher
was part of “‘LYNCH’ Mobs out to DESTROY.” Shafrazi has retweeted
President Trump a dozen or so times, and even made a reference to a
conversation they had in the ’90s when they ran in the same
art-adjacent circles.

“You can DO IT TO IT & DO IT GOOD ! Thank you Mr President,”
Shafrazi tweeted on April 13.

He has offered his support for the immigration ban and retweeted
James Woods when the hard-Republican actor posted
a meme suggesting throwing Hillary Clinton in jail
is the “one promise left.” With a link to a video of
Anderson Cooper interviewingLas Vegas Mayor
Carolyn Goodman about her decision to reopen
casinos, Shafrazi accused “socialists” of being “Alarmist Panic
driven FASCIST PROPAGANDA bullshit LIE used as WEAPON of Fear.”
(And, yes, as intrigued reporters have
confirmed in the past, the Twitter account is real. Shafrazi
did not respond to our direct message.)

His Instagram presence is slightly less frenzied, but it also
causes consternation among the artists and collectors he once
worked with. After posting a relatively neutral-seeming message
that said, among other platitudes, “let us be more gracious,” the
comments section got a bit messy. Collector Andy
Hall called Trump a “morally challenged wannabe dictator
whose stock in trade is hatred and division.” Shafrazi responded by
accusing Hall of “Spewing & Spreading Bitter HATE and DIVISION.”
When Sharf commented “TruckFump”—a comment liked by dealer
Leo Koenig and artist Enoc
Perez—Shafrazi responded “IS THAT GREAT HELP TO US ALL
?”

The same might be said of the Tony Shafrazi’s social-media
presence.

ARTIST ROSTER HAIRCUT

The dealer Ed Winkleman once said that, in a
recession, it is inevitable that gallery rosters get shaken up.
Either the artists will jump ship or the gallery will cut
non-essential artists loose. In the six-year period between 2008
and 2014, Winkleman estimated that mid-level galleries lost 46
percent of their artists. The mega-galleries were only slightly
less vulnerable, losing 30 percent of their artists. And while we
don’t know how many artists will bail or be cut this time around,
we already have some departures from at least one of the big guys.
Over the past six months, Pace and David
Zwirner went without any defections—congrats! But
comparing the current Hauser & Wirth roster with a
screenshot from last July, both the sculptor Ron
Mueck and the photographer Ian
Wallace have disappeared. Wallace last had a show in
Zurich in 2017, and Mueck made a splash with a show at the London
gallery in 2012. (A rep for Hauser didn’t immediately respond to a
request for comment.) Another artist missing from the roster
is Henry Taylor, but through an intermediary, the
beloved artist insisted he’s very much still with the gallery—his
artist page just needed some copy editing.
Gagosian, too, says its missing
artists—Walton Ford and Kim
Gordon—are still repped by the dealer even if they aren’t
on the gallery’s main page. Instead, they’re visible in the full
index under “See All Artists.”

SCHOOL DAZE FOR ONLINE FAIRS

The artist Lucien Smith, who first captivated
the art world as a young phenom in the early 2010s, got his start
after Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn bought work of out
of his thesis show at Cooper Union. But since
there will be no physical thesis shows this semester to give
graduating artists that crucial first shot at success, Smith is
using his nonprofit Serving The People to
organize the mini digital fair “BFA Student
Show.” Students from participating schools—there are 48 so
far—can show one work that they made during this disrupted term.
The idea came to Smith when a student at his alma mater reached out
trying to see if there was anything he could do to help the
unfortunate situation. “Serving the People is really about problem
solving,” said Smith, who also has a new painting for sale in the
digital Half Gallery booth at the online
Dallas Art Fair. “Ben Werther, an
artist I work with who is currently studying at Cooper Union,
expressed to me some disappointment about not having a senior
exhibition this year due to closures. And I realized that’s the
case for a lot of art students.” He added that the platform is an
entirely student-run enterprise, and that any school that hasn’t
yet put forth a rep can apply by May 15.

POP QUIZ

Last week’s quiz was, um, a tough one! Very few of you even even
ventured a guess as to who made the work presented as the clue, and
even fewer tried to identify the origin of the posters. Here’s the
full answer: The photo was part of Christopher
Wool’s Incident on 9th Street, a set of 13 photos
showing his East Village studio after a fire—they
were originally taken to document the damage and then sent to the
insurance company. (Wool’s work in photography is metal as
fuck—check out Studio Polaroids and East Broadway
Breakdown.) The fire happened in 1996, and the flier was for…
a Jack Pierson show held in January 1995 at
Jack Hanley, which was then located in San
Francisco, around the corner from
SFMOMA.

Here’s the flier up close.

No one got all three parts of the quiz right. But I’m going to bend
the rules and award this week’s Pop Quiz trophy to the one and only
person who identified the Wool work and knew that the
flier was for a Jack Pierson show, although he was a hair off on
the venue. And that person is… the critic Andrew
Russeth, a writer beloved by all and an indefatigable
chronicler of the arts in New York City and beyond. Congrats to
Andrew!

And now, on to the clue for this week. Here is a portrait of the
artist. Who is it?

All rules apply for this one. Just
be the first respondent with the correct answer sent to
nfreeman@artnet.com and, yahtzee! The winner gets a martini at
Lucien bought for you by your diligent scribe as
soon as all the bars reopen—in, like, a few months? 2021? Never?
But more immediately, you get a shout-out in the grandest art-world
gossip column on the great big internet.

WE HEAR…

Blind item: a number of Chelsea galleries gutted their staffs,
and one shop (which also has an outpost uptown) laid off nearly all
staffers and slashed salaries by half for the ones that stayed …
the artist Asad Raza has founded, in collaboration
with the artist Marianna Simnett, the platform
Home Cooking, which he calls an “open-source
digest of activities, poetry, movement, and live events” and in the
next few days there will be appearances by Moriah
Evans, Agnieszka Kurant, Prem
Krishnamurthy, and Hans Ulrich Obrist …
the interior designer Ricky Clifton has a
noteworthy memory of Peter Beard—who was pronounced dead on
Monday after going missing for weeks in Montauk—and it involves
his friends, the Kennedys: “MY FAVORITE PETER
STORY WAS WHEN HE GOT INTO DEEP SHIT FOR CUTTING JOHN JOHN’S HAIR
ON ONASSIS’ YACHT CHRISTINA. THERE WAS HAIR ALL OVER ARI’S SCROTUM
UPHOLSTERED BAR STOOLS. JACKIE AND LEE INVITED HIM.” …
Chinatown dealer Helena Anrather
has started a crowd-sourced video channel called
SCREENERS that will feature a new video work every
24 hours, selected by dealers Ellie Rines and
Lucas Casso, former Signal
proprietor Kyle Clairmont Jacques, and the artist
Catherine Telford Keogh … Dimes
Square may be shut, and Clandestino is
not opening at any point in the near future, but Montez
Press Radio continues to thank the heroic efforts of so
many, so tune in today and through the weekend and hear live radio
during the time of the pandemic—especially Saturday at 9 p.m. for
Bad Masterpieces, hosted by the great East
Village-based editor Dean Kissick and yours
truly…

SPOTTED

Diddy sporting a big bushy beard on
CNN while sitting in front of Kerry James
Marshall’s Past Times, the masterpiece that the
rapper and entrepreneur bought at Sotheby’s in
2018 for $21 million *** a bunch of art-world luminaries—dealer
Brett Gorvy, collector Gael
Neeson, editor Magnus Berger, gallerist
Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, artist Rachel
Feinstein, Hard Rock Cafe founder and
collector Peter Morton—wishing happy birthday to
Tico Mugrabi, who we wrote plenty about last
week *** Phoebe
Waller-Bridge virtually going on Stephen
Colbert while sitting in front of a Karlheinz
Weinberger poster that she possibly bought at
the Swiss
Institute *** Cecily Brown
getting all her PPE assembled before venturing outside, staying
safe by wearing a mask made by threeASFOUR ***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: A Pro-Trump Dealer Joins the ‘Reopen’
Protests, Mega-Galleries Lose Artists Ahead of Recession, & More
Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet
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