Greetings from Palm Beach, Where MAGA meets MoMA

On Saturday in Palm Beach, I walked into a restaurant called Cucina, on Royal Poinciana Way in the middle of the mile-wide island and steps from the ocean. I was there with a New Yorker who was working as a vice president at a major auction house. It was just after midnight, and although there were a few tourists in town attending the gala dinner at the collectors’ homes Bill Wrigley and Sue Hostetler Wrigley—The highlight of New Wave Art Weekend, where local outposts of major global galleries and masterful private collections host their biggest shows of the year — Cucina is the only place to enjoy a drink at that hour. Palm Beach Island has many things, consists of over 40 billionaire residents, but it doesn’t have many places for late night beer.

Cucina drinks beer – and tequila, DJ filming Ying Yang Twins, bottling service at overhead tables, and passing women holding bubbler overhead. It’s a POINT for the beach tycoons’ hunt. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this isn’t simply a bunch of drunken rich white kids. Many of the bow-wearing gentlemen imitated Cucina’s dancing – who I discovered, restaurant by first syllable, still classy – attended another prominent gathering of the night in town. : Christmas Gala Dinner Action The turning point at nine minutes down the road at Mar-a-Lago, featured a special appearance by Donald Trump he himself.

Such a collision between the art world and the Trump world is inevitable in Palm Beach. In recent years, the tiny town with an extremely wealthy population has turned into an unlikely focus for the art world, as dozens of New York galleries set up shop at the Royal Poinciana Plaza – where the outpost of Sant Ambroeus makes any girl in the gallery homesick. feel at ease — or among the designer stores on Worth Avenue.

Expansion to the south is needed. As the pandemic hit, collectors moved into second homes in Palm Beach, and agents set up camp in the seaside town perhaps the world’s most numerous buyers. By the time snowbird season arrives in late 2020, Sotheby’s, Pace Gallery and Paula Cooper have all won the space. This year, they feature Lévy Gorvy, Lehmann Maupin, just a few weeks ago, Christie’s newest flagship outpost.

“There is a lot of potential,” says Dylan Brant, an art dealer and consultant who opened a posh Worth Avenue space with a partner Stephane Timonier last year during the pandemic. “’It’s the most exciting place in the country right now to nurture collectors.

Founder of New Wave Art Wknd Sarah Gavlak opened its eponymous Palm Beach gallery years before the current wave of newcomers, and says it gave the New York powerhouse galleries a chance to understand that Palm Beach could be a place for a permanent gallery, not just a winter weekend getaway.

“That’s what I’ve been saying for years, but for some reason other galleries don’t take notice: This is a great community of collectors,” says Gavlak, “And then it was COVID and so people opened pop-ups in the Hamptons and Aspen — and so did Palm Beach. They didn’t do it in 2005, but that’s okay. Maybe the intention was, we don’t hold art fairs and nobody goes to the galleries in New York, so we have to go down there. ”

At the same time, there’s the issue of the overall vibe in the town, which makes it something of a misnomer for such a range of contemporary art pieces. The former president has been quite active in court at Mar-a-Lago over the past 11 months – the former Marjorie Merriweather Post transformed the flamboyant golf course that is now Trump’s legal residence and workplace. Over the past few weeks, he’s been meeting with North Carolina’s candidates for the House and Senate races, posing with the newly acquitted. Kyle Rittenhouse in front of a picture of Trump approaching Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, chatted with the Alabama secretary of state about football, and hosted the Log Cabin Republican Party. (Sean Parnell, The Pennsylvania Senate candidate, who was accused by his estranged wife of suffocating her and hitting one of their children, was set to have a fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago before suspended his campaign in late November. Parnell has denied all allegations.)

28 years old Charlie Kirk—Who started Turning Point USA in 2012 as a way to build Republican support among conservative kids and became a Trump lapdog factory during the 2016 election — held a winter gala there for several years. In 2020, undaunted by the global pandemic, Kirk charged attendees $2,000 a turn to go to Mar-a-Lago just so they could no mask with Kayleigh McEnany and the governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem.

When the Kirk acolytes team started showing up for this year’s edition on Saturday, the Baselgoers arrived from Miami in no time, many on the Brightline high-speed train. (Public transit. It’s weird!) The first stop is West Palm, which opens at Bunker, Beth Rudin DeWoodyHer private museum, where she houses some of the more than 10,000 pieces in her collection, is often organized into small shows throughout the space. One room memorably collects puppets and puppet-themed works, and another collects all the creatures’ artwork—Tom Sachs Rats made from Balthazar packaging, a John Wesley painting of two pigs, a Milton Avery drawing of a delicious looking fish. Cocktails were overflowing in the courtyard, but many flocked to the island, where on Worth Avenue, Brant and Timonier just minutes before the opening of a collage of his paintings. Karen Kilimnik with historic couture dresses owned by supermodels Stephanie Seymour, Who is Brant’s mother?