Wet Paint: MOCA Board President Revealed as Secret Trump Backer, Murakami Mix-Up at Paris Fashion Week, & 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.

MAKE MOCA GREAT AGAIN

Last week, Klaus
Biesenbach, the director of Los Angeles’s Museum
of Contemporary Art, posted to Instagram an image of
the museum’s board president, Carolyn Clark
Powers, standing in the California sunshine with megawatt
smile on her face. “Thank you @carolynclarkpowers for making it possible for @moca to
have FREE general admission from tomorrow on!” Biesenbach wrote.
Indeed, Powers, a major art philanthropist who has been on MOCA’s
board since 2009, donated $10 million to enable the museum to do away with its $15
entry fee beginning January 11.

And while her contributions to
the arts have long been heralded, her political donations have yet
to be revealed—but they might rub some of her fellow board members
the wrong way, not to mention the liberal Tinseltown elite who pick
at canapés at the museum’s star-studded annual gala. A prominent
dealer-collector in La La Land tipped me off that Powers has been
making hush-hush payments to Donald Trump‘s
campaign since 2018. Sure enough, a search on
OpenSecrets.org showed that the Powers has made
four contributions since the 2016 election, all in March 2018.
There were two donations directly to Trump’s campaign, both for
$2,700, and two different contributions to the Republican
National Committee, which is currently focused on the
president’s re-election. The first was for $10,700 and the second
was for $33,900. In total, Powers donated a cool $50,000 to a
president who has shown little interest in
funding the arts—and is quick to forcefully demean his
political opponents, women, and the press. 

To be sure, the sum Powers has
forked over to Trump and his cronies pales in comparison to the
amount she has given to MOCA, and it’s a fraction of the $1 million
that art collectors such as Henry Kravis and
Steve Cohen gave to the president’s 2016
Inauguration Committee. But any support for this president—who is,
in case you missed it, currently facing an impeachment trial in the
Senate—might rankle fellow MOCA board members like Ari
Emanuel, the Hollywood power-agent and brother to
former Barack Obama chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel, as well as outspoken artists
Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger,
and Mark Bradford. Though, to be fair, the board
isn’t a pure bastion of liberal politics: Trump’s current treasury
secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was a member until he
resigned to take the big DC
job in 2016. MOCA did not respond to a request for comment;
Powers couldn’t be reached. 

MORTIFYING MURAKAMI MIX-UP

Takashi
Murakami and Ai
Weiwei have been mistaken for one another often
enough that both have, at various points, posted videos to their
Instagram accounts in which they gently explain to an excited “fan”
that no, they are not that other famous Asian artist. Of course,
the two bearded men could hardly be more different in terms of the
work they produce—never mind the fact that they were, you know,
born in completely different countries and
don’t actually look all that much alike. So it
was particularly head-shaking to see that Getty
Images posted a picture of Murakami at the
Off-White Menswear Fall/Winter 2020–2021 runway
show at collector/dealer Patrick Seguin’s
gallery in Paris—but identified Murakami as “Ai Weiwei.” Make no
mistake: it is extremely amusing to imagine solemn human rights
activist Ai Weiwei sitting front row at a Virgil
Abloh show next to hip-hop
stars Takeoff and Quavo of
Migos, the rapper Tyga, and
Jonathan Cheban, the
Kardashian hanger-on who claims he
legally changed his name to “Foodgod.” But
it’s disturbing that one of the world’s biggest stock-image sites
had yet to fix the caption more than 24 hours later. And last week,
the New York Times had to issue a correction
after fashion editor Vanessa Friedman mistakenly
wrote that the brand Louis Vuitton had a history
of collaborating with the novelist Haruki
Murakami—again, amusing to imagine!—when it was, of
course, Takashi who made the iconic bags with the French house in
the aughts. Sorry, Takashi! It’s just not your
week. 

BUDGET FOR BOULUD 

Onetime Swiss powerhouse
Galerie Gmurzynska is in a bit of a financial
bind. The gallery is facing a lawsuit and resulting
fines stemming from its role in allegedly helping a financier avoid
paying a VAT tax on almost 100 works of art. It was also
conspicuously absent for the first time in a decade from
Art Basel Miami Beach, where it usually stages a
theatrical display, and plans to sit out Art Basel
Hong Kong in March. (The gallery said the lawsuit and the
fair no-shows are unrelated and declined to comment further.)
That’s why it’s a little surprising that the gallery is forging
ahead with another part of its program: fancy, spare-no-expense
dinners, which in the past have taken the form of bacchanals at the
penthouse of the Faena in Miami or the original
Mr. Chow on Manhattan’s east side. The invitation
for its latest event arrived Thursday, timed to coincide with its
exhibition “What’s for Dinner? A Brief History of Food in Art.”
Following a conversation with three-Michelin-star chef
Daniel Boulud next week, guests will head
over to his restaurant Bar Pleiades—which,
when the gallery isn’t picking up the tab, features “snacks” like a
$42 burrata ravioli.

THE STARS ALIGN AT FELIX

We’ve got the list of special
projects for the second edition of Felix, the art
fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt that runs
alongside Frieze Los Angeles in the
second week of February. And it looks like the local industry folk
punching in at the dream factory can’t keep away from the art folk
in town to sell (literal) pictures. The sector is curated by
critic William
J. Simmons, who recruited former
“Transparent” showrunner Jill
Soloway to curate a selection of work by feminist art
icon Judy Chicago. (This is not Soloway’s
first time working with Chicago; Amazon ordered a series from the
director based on her autobiography, but it was cancelled before it got off
the ground in 2018.) And Soloway not the only Hollywood figure
to factor into a project at Felix. Paz de la
Huerta, the actress who has one of the most unpredictable
Instagram presences around and is currently trying to get the
Manhattan District Attorney to listen to her case against
Harvey Weinstein for alleged rape, is
planning a yet-to-be-divulged presentation at the fair called “the
Paz Project.” It will take over the booth of none other than
Artnet News columnist
Kenny Schachter, with some help from the artist
Bjarne Melgaard. 

POP QUIZ

Can you identify the name and
year of this Basquiat painting, shown here
with its owner, the Valentino partner
Giancarlo Giammetti, heiress Nicky
Hilton Rothschild, and, um…ah yes, prominent
mid-aughts New York socialite Olivia
Palermo?(Thanks for the lowbrow-brilliant Instagram
account @hollywoodartwindow for tipping us
off to this bizarre photo’s existence.) Winner of the quiz gets
fame and glory courtesy a mention in this column.

WE HEAR

… that the Frick
Collection hasn’t officially decided to move into
the Met Breuer building, even though the Met is
still planning to move out after the Gerhard
Richter show closes in July. A spokesperson for the Frick
described the move as “possible” though they “still anticipate
being able to begin programming at the Breuer in late 2020,”
meaning they’ll be at least a few months later than initially
thought … that dealmaker Loic Gouzer is back
in New York after a
post-Christie’s year of travel and
environmental activism, and even though his garden leave is over,
he plans to take the next six months to figure out his next move …
that despite the many, many big-game artists claimed
by Hauser & Wirth in the past month
(Nicole Eisenman, Avery Singer,
George Condo, and Henry
Taylor—many of which were, ahem, first revealed in Wet
Paint), it’s arch-rival David Zwirner who’s
rumored to have a big artist poach bombshell to announce
soon. 

SPOTTED

*** Cleveland-based collector
and philanthropist Fred Bidwell announcing the
details of the FRONT Triennial, for which he acts
as CEO, during a bash at the office of art advisors Thea
Westreich Wagner and Ethan
Wager *** artist Shirin
Neshat at Soho staple Fanelli’s, where
she greeted the bartender by first name and sat down for some light
reading: Eleanor Heartney’s Doomsday
Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art ***
artists Zak Kitnick, Leigh
Ledare, Violet Dennison, Lena
Henke, Eva LeWitt  and Dena
Yago at Tribeca restaurant China
Blue to celebrate Madeline
Hollander’s new show “HEADS/TAILS” at
Bortolami *** an apparently very famous
singer who Wet Paint needed help recognizing named Dua
Lipa at Ray’s, a Lower East Side “dive
bar” owned by actor Justin
Theroux.

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: MOCA Board President Revealed as Secret
Trump Backer, Murakami Mix-Up at Paris Fashion Week, & More Juicy
Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet News.