At 11 a.m. on Thursday, a crowd of art collectors and celebrities including Jodie Foster and Brad Pitt huddled under umbrellas in a rainstorm to get inside the inaugural day of Frieze Los Angeles.
“It’s about time we had a fair here,” Pitt said in an interview. “I hope they keep it going.”
The fair, which runs through this weekend on the lot at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, is something of a test for an audience that, according to conventional wisdom, prefers to buy in New York or London rather than locally. It anchors a week of at least six art trade shows and numerous star-studded openings at galleries, museums and private homes.
“Los Angeles collectors are very knowledgeable -- I just think we haven’t had a fair where the galleries have been comparable to the level of collectors,” Nancy Lainer, an executive at her family’s closely held commercial real estate company, said as she stood inside the booth for Marc Selwyn Fine Art. “They’ve traveled the world for other fairs, and so now I think that a lot of people are interested in what a fair in our own backyard looks like.”
Lainer, who exclusively collects black-and-white contemporary art, didn’t see anything that fit her criteria.
Miami ‘Energy’
“I have a very specific collection, and this is a lot of big, colorful contemporary art,” she said. “Having said that, it’s good to see what people are bringing.”
The L.A. version of Frieze is smaller than its New York or London editions, with 70 galleries in a space only six booths wide. As a result, the VIP opening day was both intimate and busy, even though fire codes kept the visitor count tight.
The event has “the same kind of energy” as the opening of Art Basel Miami, said Donald Johnson Montenegro, a dealer at New York’s Luhring Augustine Gallery, which is showing works by Jeremy Moon and Ragnar Kjartansson at its booth. “The scale of the fair helps. When you put 10 people in a small room it feels like a huge party.”
Michael Keaton, Amy Poehler, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sylvester Stallone were among Hollywood types rubbing shoulders with billionaire collectors including Maja Hoffmann and Eli Broad.
Kelley Quickly
Hauser & Wirth quickly sold a room-size installation by the late Mike Kelley, priced at $1.8 million, to a European foundation.