Wet Paint: Legendary Dealer Mary Boone Is Out of Prison Early, Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book Is Full of Collectors, & 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.

BOONE BREAKS OUT THE BIG HOUSE

It seems like a pretty good time to join
Citizen, the app that alerts you to police
activity in your general vicinity—what with, you know, the
president ordering militarized police forces to attack peaceful
protestors in cities around the country. The app pings you with a
notification when someone in your contacts has joined, and over the
course of the week, it appears that new downloaders include
Gagosian-employed gadabout Derek
Blasberg, David Zwirner
staffer-slash-scion Marlene Zwirner, and art
advisor Astrid Hill. But one new Citizen
downloader, according to a screenshot sent by a source, intrigues
more than most. Earlier this week, it appears that someone has
given back phone privileges to incarcerated art-dealing legend
Mary Boone.

Could it be that Boone has managed to get out early, having
served just 13 months of a 30-month sentence for tax
evasion? And that now, instead of serving time for committing a
crime, she’s downloading iPhone apps that allow her to track other
crimes instead?

Well, as it turns out, after plugging her inmate number into a
prison database, Wet Paint can confirm that Mary
Boone has been released from the Federal Correctional
Facility in Danbury, Connecticut, and is now in a halfway
house in Brooklyn ahead of a return to home confinement. A
spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of
Prisons confirmed she was transferred out of Danbury on
May 27.

The move appears to be a response to the threat
Boone and fellow older inmates faced after several
prisoners tested positive for COVID-19. In late
May, US District Judge Michael Shea issued an
order accelerating home confinement for FCI Danbury inmates with
heightened risk of infection. And as for the iPhone activity: As a
resident of a reentry and treatment facility, Boone is allowed to
use her cell phone.

Bureau of Prisons officials declined to elaborate on how long
she will be kept at the New York Residential Reentry
Management field office, the Brooklyn facility located
next to Industry City, before leaving the
halfway house for home confinement. Her current release date is
July 1, 2021, so if she is allowed to spend the last six months of
her term at home, which is typical for those on good behavior, she
could be out of the halfway house by early next year. Members of
the Chelsea art-dealing cognoscenti can take heart that Boone is
now out of prison and back in New York, the town she once ruled
over.

JEFFREY EPSTEIN, A PHONE CALL AWAY FROM THE ART
WORLD

Take a look at the names in your phone contacts. Some you know
well, others not as well. But you did get their
number at some point. And that is the same relationship that
Jeffrey Epstein had with everyone in his little
black book, the trove of names and phone numbers that the group
Anonymous leaked last week, putting it in the
public record. Gawker leaked the thing years ago,
so it’s not exactly new, but Epstein is as relevant as ever. Right
now, as the stuck-at-home nation is watching the gut-wrenching
Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein:
Filthy Rich and learning about the heinous abuse
Epstein callously committed over decades (fine, “allegedly”
committed—he died before trial), Wet Paint spent a few hours
trawling through the tome to find art-world figures that were just
a phone call away.

There are a ton of top-tier contemporary art collectors,
including billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, publisher
Conrad Black, former New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund billionaire and
MoMA benefactor Glenn Dubin,
Miami private museum owners Patricia and
Gustavo Cisneros, NetJets exec
Mark Booth, Dr. Samantha Boardman
(wife of developer and mega-collector Aby Rosen),
Palm Beach sugar baron José “Pepe” Fanjul,
industrial heir playboy Mick Flick, fashion
designer and filmmaker Tom Ford, lit agent
Linda Janklow, collector and gallerist
Adam Lindemann, banker and
erstwhile Gagosian
courtroom bête noire Ron
Perelman, shipping heir Constantine
Niarchos, Hard Rock Cafe founder
Peter Morton, San Francisco scions
Nick and Thomas Pritzker, late
Hong Kong businessman Sir David Tang, banking heir
Édouard de Rothschild, and
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary founder
Francesca von Hapsburg.

Some named in the book were active in the art world beyond
simply collecting (ie, being a well-connected rich person). They
include: art advisor Barbara Guggenheim,
LACMA board member Casey
Wasserman, Broadway director
Julie Taymor, former Sotheby’s
owner Alfred Taubman and his son Bobby
Taubman, singers Courtney Love and
Rufus Wainwright, Pablo Picasso
grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso,
Artsy board member Bob Pittman,
Duran Duran rocker Simon Le Bon,
artist Anh Duong, artist Hugo
Guinness, Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger, art-gala socialite Marjorie
Gubelmann, Whitney board member
Robert Hurst, high-profile art publicist
Nadine Johnson, and—last but certainly
not least—Genesis frontman Phil
Collins, the world’s leading collector of artifacts from
The Alamo. Dive into yourself, as the whole trove
is online and available for
perusal.

FIERY FEUD LIGHTS UP LA INSTAGRAM

Perhaps the most protracted and explosive social-media fracas of
quarantine happened this week, and it’s got the Los
Angeles gallery scene in a tizzy. Here’s the
back-and-forth as it happened.

This week, Esther Kim Varet, the owner of
venerable LA gallery Various Small Fires, posted a
since-deleted note to her Instagram. The artist and writer
Keith J. Varadi responded by reposting a
screenshot of the original on his Instagram, appending
this caption: “The art world can be so fucking oblivious to how the
rest of the world lives.”

The post was similar to several other screen-grab call-outs
Varardi has posted this week, reflecting on how collectors and
gallery owners are proceeding with their cushy lives amid the
protests that have engulfed the nation. He pointed out that
Susan Hort got takeout from The
Palm in Tribeca, Niels
Kantor was golfing in Beverly Hills, etc.

Then, Varet responded to the call-out, messaging Varadi on
Instagram, according to a screenshot Varadi posted.

And then—out of nowhere—it appeared to all be over: Varet posted
a long apology to Instagram, and Varadi reposted it with a
heartfelt note of conciliation. Everyone was friends! Hooray!

But the détente did not last. Late on Wednesday, Varadi uploaded
a multi-page post that alleged that Varet recanted her apology and
said she would be putting Varadi in touch with her lawyers to sue
him for extortion. You can read through the whole post here. It’s a
roller coaster.

And then, at 2:00 a.m. Los Angeles time, Varet posted this
comment on Varadi’s feed:

In a statement, Hilde Lynn
Helphenstein, the Various Small Fires digital director who also
runs the popular Instagram account @jerrygogosian and was named by Varadi
in his post, said she “categorically den[ies]” that she threatened
to use her influence to damage Varadi’s reputation, calling his
claim “a fiction.”

Varet provided a statement as well. It reads: “Keith was right.
Those posts were in poor taste, and I had the opportunity to
re-examine myself in this important time. The art world is a place
of privilege and blindspots continue to be important to identify.
There is no tolerance for ignorance in the art world anymore, and I
have made a commitment to be a part of this change.”

PADDLE8 GETS EATEN

What would you do if you possessed the awesome power of
controlling something as influential and epoch-defining as… the
official Paddle8 Instagram handle? Well,
dream no longer: for the right price, you can take that puppy and
its 82,200 followers and do whatever you damn well please with it.
Due to the bankruptcy of the failed
online art selling platform that once had the clout to throw
decent-to-OK brunches at Soho Beach House during
Art Basel Miami Beach, the intellectual property
consultant Nevium is selling off any assets
related to the company. This includes not only the Instagram
account, but also the Twitter handle (and its 36,000
followers!) as well as a Facebook account
that got 38,000 likes while the people who ran the company into the
ground were posting to it (surely you can do better). And while the
YouTube page only has, um, *checks the numbers*,
76 subscribers, you can up that right quick, can’t ya pal?
Perhaps more interesting on an anthropological level is the client
and transaction database, which will tell a rich story of a
now-bygone era of online art start-ups inside a very frothy
bubble.

POP QUIZ

Last week’s Pop Quiz, well, it was a tough one.
Only a handful of you correctly guessed that the actor in the
blurry Zoom pic was Orlando
Bloom, and behind him was a Lucien
Smith “rain painting”—one of which sold for more than
$370,000 at auction in 2014. Bloom bought it from LA
dealer-Svengali-art advisor Stefan
Simchowitz, who got it from Morán
Morán, then known as OHWOW.

Here are all the readers who got the collector, artist, and
facilitator, in order of the time they answered: the artist
Romeo Galactic; Molly Taylor, the
press, marketing, and events director at Kasmin,
who answered jointly with Anthony Atlas,
proprietor of apartment gallery The Middler;
Darrow Contemporary founder (and Pop Quiz
maestro!) Meredith Darrow; Matthew
McLean, senior editor of Frieze Studios;
and the advisor Julie Miyoshi, owner of
Miyoshi Art Projects LLC. Congrats to all the
winners!

Here’s this week’s. Name the artist who made the large sculpture
beyond the tennis court, and name the dealer who owns the house
where it’s seen installed here.

Winners will have their names passed down for generations, tales
of their arcane knowledge of the homes of art-worlders echoing
throughout time. That, plus a mention in next week’s column! Send
guesses to your humble quiz proprietor at nfreeman@artnet.com.

WE HEAR…

There are even some (extraordinarily low-stakes) signs of
protest in tony East Hampton, where someone
wrote “I CAN’T BREATHE” on the sidewalk in town … the savagely
wealthy private-equity firms run by mega-collectors Leon
Black and Henry Kravis were among the
robber barons that swallowed up more than $1.5 billion in
no-interest government loans that were supposed to go to small
businesses … beloved gallery-going app See Saw
will be adding an appointment-booking widget to help reopening
galleries stagger visitors to maintain social distance …
Karma Bookstore is donating 100 percent of
proceeds through Sunday to five charities—Grassroots Law
Project, Black Lives Matter, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, Emergency Release
Fund, and the American Civil Liberties
Union—so go buy some art books! …
Cultured cancelled a planned virtual
tour of the magazine’s editor Sarah Harrelson’s
Miami mansion “in solidarity with our community of thinkers and
makers” …

SPOTTED

*** Gagosian’s Upper East Side gallery and the
Judd Foundation in SoHo among the storefronts
boarding up to protect from potential looting *** Uncut
Gems star Julia Fox (who is
currently spending isolation working
on a memoir) picking up takeout from Lucien
*** Yuz Museum owner Budi
Tek defying a mandate from doctor and University
of Sevilla professor Alexander Herzog—who
is treating Tek for pancreatic cancer in Nidda, Germany—by
indulging in some caviar on his private jet ***
Monégasque collector Laurent Asscher defacing
an image of a Jean-Michel Basquiat masterpiece he
owns so instead of “Irony of negro policemen” it says, in Asscher’s
primitive finger-to-phone-screen scrawl, “Black Lives Matter”
***

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Legendary Dealer Mary Boone Is Out of
Prison Early, Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book Is Full of
Collectors, & More Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on
artnet News.