Why There are No Famous Artists

Thoughts After Avoiding an Art Fair

Art fairs are a bit like high school reunions—stretched out into a week-long bender. You run into old friends, feel melancholic pangs nostalgia for being young and innocent, which you promptly blunt with liquor and narcotics. Or at least that is my experience.

Last year’s Frieze Los Angeles was a fever dream. Some memories in order of occurrence: sneaking cigarettes at the Getty Villa before being caught and scolded by a guard, a friend throwing a martini glass out of a moving vehicle on the PCH, doing a walking tour of the Felix opening at the Roosevelt with a reporter from Planet Money while I narrated the fair aloud, introducing the radio journalist to Ryan Trecartin, to whom he claimed, “I invented TikTok,” an hour-long traffic jam on a winding road in the Hollywood Hills, an under-attended forty-person party at SoFi Stadium that clearly bewildered the staff, a DJ playing Radiohead at Club James, people lined up to get into The Red Lion like it was a nightclub because Jack Donoghue was there, and dancing next to a former president’s daughter in a red lit living room while Ja Rule played.