Wet Paint: Tico Mugrabi to Fundraise for Trump After Bonding at Camp David, Deitch’s Watering Hole Closes, & 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.

MUGRABIS MOVING MEGA MAGA MONEY

It’s an open secret that the Mugrabi family,
the collectors who have amassed a $5 billion trove of contemporary
art, have a number of ties to President Donald
Trump and his family. The patriarch Jose
Mugrabi has an apartment in Trump Tower,
where Tom Wesselmann’s iconic Still Life No.
34 graces the wall of the dining room. His son, David
Mugrabi, also lived in the building until he moved in with
his wife, Libbie Mugrabi, with whom he is now going through a
(protracted and ugly) divorce. Jose’s other son,
Tico, has long been close with the president’s
daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband,
Jared Kushner. In 2014, when Kushner was
renovating the penthouses of the Kushner
Properties-owned Puck Building in SoHo,
the now-senior advisor to the president asked Mugrabi to loan some
art to make the place look more livable—and the collector gave a
Richard Prince, a George Condo, a
Jean-Michel Basquiat print, and a Damien
Hirst spot painting.

Tico’s wife, Colby Mugrabi, is a fashion
blogger from the same milieu Ivanka once inhabited before she
changed careers and started working at the White House. In
September, the couple attended the grand nuptials of designer
Misha Nonoo and Mikey
Hess (whose father, oil baron billionaire
John B. Hess, gave $1 million to Trump’s
inauguration committee in 2017), where they got papped walking
around Rome with Javanka, Secret Service tailing them closely.

But hanging out with the president’s daughter and son-in-law
does not necessarily mean that the entire family supports the
president—one who, in the past month, has drawn widespread
criticism for his response to the spread of COVID-19. In fact, in
the run-up to the 2016 election, Jose Mugrabi’s family office gave
$2,700 to the Hillary Clinton campaign, while
David Mugrabi gave $1,000. (It’s worth nothing that none of the
Mugrabis can vote; the father was born in Jerusalem and the sons,
in Bogotá.) Tico Mugrabi gave nothing to either candidate.

Now, however, sources within New York society say that the
Mugrabis are planning to throw a fundraiser for Donald Trump’s 2020
presidential campaign in the near future. Tico and Colby hatched
the plan while staying at Camp David, the
president’s woodsy retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain
Park, to attend Jared and Ivanka’s tenth anniversary party
in late October. (Trump and the first daughter denied that any
taxpayer funds were used to pay for the multi-day bash.) The
president was also in attendance, and sources said Colby later
bragged that he and Tico bonded while watching NFL games, and that
her husband acted as Trump’s “emotional support dog” during a
period when talk of impeachment hearings was ramping up.

It’s unclear how the stay-at-home orders will affect the
fundraiser, or where it will be held. (Mugrabi bought two triplex
mansions in a former printing press at 36 Bleecker Street in 2015
for nearly $18.6 million.) The Mugrabis did not respond to a
request for comment. An email to Trump’s campaign press office was
not returned.

PADDLE8 PILFERS FROM NONPROFIT PAUPERS

Things were not going great for online
auctioneer Paddle8 even before the spread of
coronavirus brought the US economy to its knees and sent the art
market into a tailspin. On March 10, the company was sued by
the New American Cinema Group, a nonprofit
associated with artist Jonas Mekas that claimed it
never received the funds raised by a charity auction hosted on the
site. A week later, the onetime online auction behemoth filed for bankruptcy,
and Chapter 11 filings revealed that Paddle8 owes funds to
charitable organizations run by Jay-Z,
Justin Bieber, and others. Now, an organization
with nowhere near the cash reserves of those musicians says it’s
owed money, too. In a letter to supporters, the Chicago art space
Prairie explained that Paddle8 owes them more than
$20,000 raised in an auction earlier this year. “We’ve been
robbed,” the founders Tim
Mann and Jack Schneider said in
a letter. “Prairie relies on fundraiser proceeds to keep our doors
open.” In a statement, Paddle8 put a somewhat glossier spin on
things, saying that “the safe harbor of Chapter 11 allows us to
work cooperatively with our creditors with the intention of
proposing a plan to satisfy our obligations to our nonprofits and
consignors with whom we have longstanding relationships.” But in
its letter, Prairie’s founders noted that they might not survive
the nine to 12 months that the case is likely to drag on. If you
have the means, donate to Prairie to
make sure the space can stay afloat through
the current crisis.

LIGHT A MATCH FOR LUCKY STRIKE

On the Friday of Armory Week, Jeffrey
Deitch held a dinner at Lucky
Strike to celebrate the opening of a joint
survey of work by artist and fellow gallery
owner Peter Nagy with Lower East Side
gallery Magenta Plains. The Keith
McNally joint has been an essential SoHo art boîte since
it opened in 1989, and Deitch has held a number of artist dinners
there since he opened a block away in 1996. The first was a
reception for Yoko Ono in April 1998—the first
time that McNally ever closed the whole restaurant for a private
party, Deitch said. Sadly, with the dinner for Nagy, Deitch has the
distinction of also holding the last art dinner at Lucky
Strike; McNally announced this week that due to high rents, the
legendary New York spot will not open following this period of
stay-at-home orders. “It’s the end of an era,” Deitch sighed over
the phone after hearing the news. He explained that, when Lucky
Strike opened, it was at the epicenter of a cluster of galleries in
a fertile one-block radius. In addition to his spot,
Friedrich Petzel, David Zwirner,
Lehmann Maupin, Paul Kasmin,
Pat Hearn, and Colin de Land were
all nearby, and made the restaurant their clubhouse. It was also a
favorite of the art stars of the time. “Eric
Fischl went there for lunch with Ralph
Gibson, they had a standing thing,” Deitch said. “I used
to go there to have a few beers in the evenings with Jeff
Koons. It was kind of a ritual.”

A ROLL OF THE ONLINE DICE

In 2018, the artist Zak Kitnick staged a show
at Clearing’s Upper East Side
space called “DOUBLES.” It had a brilliant participatory conceit.
The paintings were of geometric forms identical to those of a
backgammon board. Half the show was installed on the wall, but the
paintings could be moved to be installed face-up in steel-framed
tabletops in the center of the gallery, allowing them to actually
function, per the artist’s wishes, as backgammon boards. Throughout
the run of the show, visitors were invited to take a roll of the
dice and play one of the world’s oldest games atop a work of art by
Zak Kitnick—what a thrill! He even kept the gallery open after
hours so a lesbian and bisexual backgammon league could play all
night long. Alas, IRL backgammon tournaments are very much not
allowed at the moment, so Kitnick has had to satiate his love for
the game the only way he could—by putting together an
online backgammon tournament. Kitnick told me that he
wanted to explore themes of “connecting even in isolation and
always having good sportsmanship”—and to do that, he’s roped in a
few art-world figures to take part. The tourney has already
vanquished such formidable backgammon talents as artists
Whitney Claflin and Hadi
Fallahpisheh, Hauser & Wirth‘s
Sabrina Blaichman, Public Art
Fund curator Daniel Palmer, and
Sterling Ruby studio manager Tyler
Britt. The championship is tonight, with art advisor
Eleanor Cayre facing off against hotel manager
Leo Glazer. Best of luck to both!

POP QUIZ

Congrats to the many, many people who got last week’s answer
right. Honestly, it was great to hear from you all, and it’s
heartening to know how many in-the-know museumgoers are out there
reading in quarantine. The correct response was:
Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s
Sollie 17 (1979–80) and Basquiat’s,
Untitled (1982), which are both in the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington,
DC.

And while so many of you knocked it outta the park, as per the
Official Wet Paint Pop Quiz Rulebook, only the first responder gets
the glory. This week, the first person to email me (or slide into
my Instagram DMs, which is totally welcome) with the full
correct answer was Andrew Huff, the director of
communications at Gladstone Gallery—and, like your
Wet Paint scribe, happens to be a graduate of Duke
University. Congrats, Andrew! Go Duke!

Here’s another one. Can you name the work that this photograph
is a part of, its artist, the subject of the photo, and also
identify the fliers that hang on the right-hand wall? To be clear:
In addition to naming the artist, artwork, and subject, you’ll need
to identify the fliers with both the name of the artist who had the
show the fliers are advertising, and the gallery where the show was
held.

The first person to email nfreeman@artnet.com with the full and
complete correct answer wins eternal glory and endless bragging
rights via a shoutout in the best gossip column in the art
world.

WE HEAR…

Christie’s CEO Guillaume
Cerutti said the phrase “private sales” in a recent
all-hands call nearly two dozen times, indicating that it’s the one
part of the business that’s making money these days … artist
Ted Gahl put the Los Angeles dealer Nino
Mier on blast in his Instagram stories after Meir took the
down the images from Gahl’s 2015 show, as well as those from shows
by artists Chris Hood, Jan
Pleitner, and Bernhard
Buhmann because, Gahl said, they wouldn’t “bow
down to his abuse.” Mier restored the artists to his exhibition
history a few days later … As Artnet News
columnist Kenny Schachter pointed out,
Athena Art Finance used n richly ironic work to
illustrate the “immeasurable cultural and social values” of the art
world on its Instagram: Picasso’s Head of a Young Woman
(1906), which billionaire Jaime Botin actually
smuggled out of Spain
on his yacht … A work by Virgil Abloh and
Takashi Murakami that’s being auctioned as part
of Phillips‘s “Desktop: Online Auction” has
an estimate of £1,500 to £,2000, but had just a £50 bid on
Wednesday, before going up to £350 on Thursday …

SPOTTED

Emily Ratajkowski walking down the street in a
sweatshirt honoring the great art-world hang
Lucien *** Retired slugger Alex
Rodriguez going on MSNBC while sitting in
front of one of Jonathan Horowitz’s Self
Portrait in Mirror #1 works *** Tracey Emin
chiming in on the collector Andy Hall’s Instagram
comments to ask if he finds it “difficult to live amongst” the
Trump supporters in Palm Beach *** Anton Kern
“arriving” at his birthday party thrown over Zoom,
where dealers and gallery honchos such as Matthew
Higgs, Andrew Kreps, Max
Falkenstein and Adam Cohen were in
“attendance” *** the curator Neville Wakefield
biking around a remote town in the Catskills,
actually seen by yours truly—if you can believe it, your
mask-wearing, hand-washing columnist randomly ran into Wakefield
after a hike, and social-distance chatted with him for a minute
while staying safely inside the car.

PARTING SHOT

The post Wet Paint: Tico Mugrabi to Fundraise for Trump
After Bonding at Camp David, Deitch’s Watering Hole Closes, & More
Juicy Art-World Gossip appeared first on artnet
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