According to land records, the building was sold to the developer in August 2021 for $6.4 million. Mark Hunt, and then resold in February 2022 for $10.4 million. The current owners are two of the gala’s co-chairs: Rubio, the co-founder of Away, and Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack. It’s zoned commercial, not residential—Rubio has leased it to Christie’s in recent summers and may work with other arts organizations in the future, since it was designed as a gallery space. Plus, Rubio and Butterfield are around all the time: She and Butterfield bought a six-bedroom estate in Aspen’s Five Trees neighborhood for $25 million in 2021.
“Jen Rubio owns it now and she will enjoy it,” Boesky said.
And although the Jeff Bezoses and Tim Cooks of the world snuggle up at Casa Tua for après-ski, it is not they who keep the art world in Aspen alive. It is the dedicated collectors – take John Phelan, the former CEO of Michael Dell’s investment firm, which he raised to $19 billion before founding his own firm a few years ago. His wife, Amy Phelan, whom he met in 2001, spurred their collection, and the couple made the museum’s free admission policy possible with their (undisclosed but presumably generous) 2008 donation. Before ArtCrush, the Phelans invited so many visitors to their home that their street became impassable due to roundabout chaos and their doors were barricaded due to fire regulations. Those who got inside saw a wildly exuberant, self-consciously sexy installation, with Yayoi Kusama‘s floating silver balls in an indoor swimming pool, a Walead Beshty broken glass as a floor work on which visitors walk, and a Ed Ruscha This puts the whole thing in perspective: Across mountains that look like the Rocky Mountains, block text shouts: “IT’S RIDICULOUS.”
collector Nancy Magoon has a field that borders the Elk Mountains and doubles as a sculpture garden. A dealer told me that they have joined a group to Rachel And Gildor’s house at the old Independence Pass to get a James Turrell Skyspace in optimal light. They arrived there at 5:30 a.m. and were running late. Some of the founding fathers of American prosperity – Walton, Tisch, Bass – housed parts of their collections in houses near the slopes.
This class of collectors makes the Aspen Art Museum a world-class institution for a town of less than 10,000 people. There is an innovative program where curators work temporarily at the museum and rotate during peak seasons. Before moving to the Orange County Museum of Art in 2020, Heidi Zuckerman supervised an impressive series of solo exhibitions in the first years of the new building: Chris Ofili in 2015, Lynda Benglis And Thank you in 2016, Oscar Murillo And Seth Price in 2019 with a performance by Rashid Johnson. Nicola Lees took the helm after working as a curator at NYU’s 80WSE gallery and before that in her hometown of London at an institution that, like Aspen, follows the Kunsthalle method of borrowing rather than collecting.
“I’m from the Serpentine, so it really felt like the Serpentine of the mountains to me when I came in for my interview,” Lees told me.
This year’s group exhibition deviates from the usual solo exhibition of art stars with spectacular effect. Allison Katz, The radical painter, who joined Hauser & Wirth in 2022, had free rein to conceive any kind of exhibition.
And so Katz travelled back in time to Pompeii. Each room explores the idea of public and private spaces in the ancient Roman metropolis just before it was buried in fire and ash, with the final room looking head-on at the explosion of Vesuvius. There are some incredible paintings by Katz – surrealist menageries of roosters and gaping mouths and expressionist self-portraits – and a number of works by her colleagues and mentors: Robert Gober, Anish Kapoor, Amy Sillman, Kerry James Marshall, Karen Kilimnik. Most notably, however, she installed the works in different rooms to mimic the passage through a Pompeian house under the volcano, and even secured some impossible-to-obtain loans of mosaics from actually Pompeii. She can thank Cocurator for that Stella Bottai, who, in addition to his work as curator at the AAM, also curates the contemporary art program at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
“Every artist who curates a museum exhibition thinks it looks like The,“ said a dealer at a New York gallery as he left the building.
On Friday, Katz gave a tour of some writers, the artist Derek Fordjour and his wife, law professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, the dealer Olivier Babin, AAM Curator Simone Krug, MoMA Curator Stuart Comer, and others. As Katz began to enumerate where the loans came from, she came to a fascinating realization. In a city where 83% of the planes that land at the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport are private jets, Katz has mounted an ambitious museum group exhibition made up entirely of loans that actually offset carbon emissions by eliminating the need for fuel-burning transportation. All of the loans were local—except for the mosaics, which were shipped in a collection crate from Italy, with the Pompeii Archaeological Park waiving the loan fee and the shipping costs covered by the AAM.
“We are a non-collectibles institution, so we drew on the impressive collections in the neighborhood, which I suspect is also very environmentally friendly,” Katz said.
The Aspen Art Museum’s ArtCrush was held in a huge tent under Buttermilk Mountain. I arrived as a passenger in a Mini Cooper convertible with Fleetwood Mac blaring, along with fellow gondola survivor Jacob King and Sam Parker, the founder of the Parker Gallery in Los Angeles. It was golden hour, and the gala was themed around golden hour. Outside the step-and-repeat there was a long, long line of people ready to have their photo taken. Inside Sophia Cohen, a consultant to the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and founder of Siren Projects, strolled by the bar after interviewing Fordjour the day before as part of the Anderson Ranch Summer Series. The next day, she was on her way to LA to watch the Mets-Angels game. Domenico De Sole, the former CEO of Tom Ford–Gucci era, walking around with his wife, Eleanor. The artist Alex Israel was nearby, as was Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist, dressed in a striking cream-colored suit.
“It’s from my friend Matthieu Blazy,” he said. That makes sense. Bottega Veneta was a sponsor, and Blazy’s brand opened a boutique in Glitter Gulch last December.
Shortly after the broadcast began, the Christie’s auctioneer said, Adrien Meyer took the stage to begin a packed 12-lot live auction, and things went smoothly: A work by Jacqueline Humphries sold for $400,000 to a collector in the room, and the Dallas collector Nancy Rogers Bidding for an Israeli work rose to $265,000 and then rose even higher. A painting by Emma McIntyre, who became the youngest artist on David Zwirner’s list when she joined this year, was sold by Gagosian director Millicent Willner. It was the first time Christie’s had received the hammer for ArtCrush, and it brought with it a battalion of senior staff, including Vice Chairman Sarah Friedlander, Chair head of the 21st century Kathryn Widing, and many others. (Sotheby’s, which has had the business for the past few years, still had a strong presence, since its store is a block from the museum.) When the silent auction ended the next day, $4.5 million had been squeezed out of the proceeds, more than twice what the New Museum in New York (population 8.3 million) took in at its spring gala this year, and significantly more than what MOCA in Los Angeles (population 3.8 million) took in.
But before everyone could head to the after-party at the Caribou Club and eventually leave Aspen either on business or otherwise – one informant had seen at least one mega-gallery dealer and his artist hopping into pajamas at the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport – the honorees took the stage to deliver their speeches. Ban expressed his gratitude that “the people of Aspen love our building.” Jason Moran recalled coming to Aspen with his wife decades ago when she performed in town.
“I got high – I didn’t get high that way, but I got high… with Music,“, he said.
And then Humphries took the stage, less than 24 hours after fearing she might fall out of a gondola door, and admitted that she, too, had been to Aspen before, but only in transit and that it was a long time ago.
“We came to Colorado in the summer and that meant we had to drive on a dirt road, Independence Pass,” she told the 600 people at the gala under the tent. “Aspen was a very different place back then.”
