OLD NEWS

ART DADDY DAY CARE™ by The art daddy
Frieze LA is one week away, which means the art world is entering its annual phase of West Coast delusion. Everyone is suddenly “so excited for LA” in public while privately unraveling in at least three group chats. Dealers are pretending booth placement is random and spiritual. Advisors are ranking dinners like they’re drafting for the NFL. Artists are saying they “don’t care about sales” while checking Artsy in the bathroom. Someone has already announced they’re “just popping by Felix” in the tone of someone storming Normandy.
Flights have been booked with false humility. Hotels are being described as “low key” while costing more than a semester at RISD. Outfits are being tried on under bad lighting and rejected for not feeling “institutional.” At least one situationship with a Palo Alto collector is entering soft launch phase. And somewhere in Brooklyn, someone is saying “LA energy is just different” while panic ordering linen.
<https://tinyurl.com/39x8hr6v>
Let’s be clear. This is not a fair. This is a multi-day psychological endurance test under a tent near the ocean where everyone is hydrated but no one is stable. It is Coachella for people who use the phrase “primary market correction.” It is Burning Man for people who own storage units in Delaware. It is a live-action role play of power conducted in sunglasses.
And because the children cannot be trusted to regulate themselves between champagne refills and whispered secondary market rumors, Art Daddy Day Care™ is expanding to the West Coast.
We are not babysitting. We are managing volatility. We are a vertically integrated emotional containment system for culturally overextended adults who think they are above needing supervision. You are not above needing supervision.
Enrollment is now open. Waivers required. No refunds after VIP preview.
THE RAYMOND DIVISION
Raymond is not staff. Raymond is infrastructure. While the rest of you are spiraling about booth traffic and pretending you’re “just here for the artists,” Raymond is already operational. He is working the fair, working the room, working your nervous system. By day he is an on-site drug doula, calibrating microdoses with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker and the discretion of a Swiss banker. He knows the difference between transcendence and texting someone you blocked. He can sense a bad decision forming three martinis before you do. If you are about to corner a dealer and overshare, Raymond appears silently at your shoulder like a patron saint of damage control.
<https://tinyurl.com/yuavu2s6>
By night, Raymond transitions seamlessly into LA fixer, personal driver, and vodka sauce provisioner. The SUV idles. The martini waits. He will circle Santa Monica while you debate whether you are powerful enough to re-enter the tent. Need a table at something “impossible”? Wristband secured. Need someone gently removed from your orbit? Consider it handled. And when the fair day ends and your serotonin dips, Raymond delivers late-night pasta therapy to your hotel room, sauce calibrated to your emotional bandwidth. He does not judge. He stabilizes. Daddy supervises, but Raymond keeps the engine running.
DAY CARE TIERS
BRONZE:
Emerging Instability You insist you’re “just going to see friends.”
Includes: • Outfit approval before VIP
• One whispered “you look important” per hour
• Real time clarification of who is actually a collector
• Light emotional containment
SILVER: Preview Activated
You start saying things like “I just want to feel the energy.”
Includes:
• On site handler
• Controlled martini pacing
• Extraction from any conversation that begins with “I’m more into NFTs conceptually”
• Gentle steering away from pitching too hard
<https://tinyurl.com/astncua9>
GOLD: Secondary Market Sensitive
You googled your own sales history last night. Includes:
• Full phone confiscation after 10 pm
• Booth rotation strategy
• Tactical hydration
• We physically block you from cornering someone at Gagosian
PLATINUM DADDY: Institutional Containment
You are one rejection away from performance art.
Includes:
• Security detail
• Car idling at all times
• Wellness Yurt unlimited access
• Crisis PR if you cry at Hauser & Wirth
• Reputation laundering if photographed mid spiral
À LA CARTE SERVICES
WAMO Champagne & Chill Drop Off
Curbside champagne. Discreet Xanax concierge. Phone removed so you do not text someone from David Zwirner“thinking of you.”
Wellness Yurt Village™
Desert chic recovery compound behind the tent.
• Sound bath to cleanse booth envy
• Infrared sauna to sweat out insecurity
• Silent crying pod
• Reiki practitioner who says “strong institutional interest” while hovering hands above your aura
Jeff Magid Avoidance Task Force
Trained personnel intercept any man beginning with “Well actually.”
Immediate extraction vehicle available.
Collector Capture & Capital Rotation
We identify who actually buys versus who just photographs art.
We rotate you physically toward liquidity.
We gently remove you if you begin explaining too much.
<https://tinyurl.com/yws4z9cz>
Dinner Overlap Warfare Management
We cancel on your behalf.
We strategically double book.
We seat you next to someone from Sotheby’s if liquidity is required.
Institutional Fantasy Coaching
Rehearsed answers to “What are you working on?”
We eliminate “just vibes” from your vocabulary.
Emergency Outfit Steam & Ego Recalibration
Wrinkles removed. Delusions adjusted.
Larry Sightline Calibration
If Larry Gagosian enters your peripheral vision, we adjust your posture, chin angle, and conversational volume in real time. You will appear casually significant. Eye contact limited to 2.7 seconds.
Zwirner Text Draft Interceptor
Before you send “Let’s finally connect” to someone at David Zwirner at 12:14 am, we replace it with “Great seeing you at the fair.” Dignity preserved.
Hauser Cry Camouflage Unit
If you become misty at Hauser & Wirth, we immediately rebrand it as “deeply moved by the materiality.” Tissues are black, not white.
<https://tinyurl.com/3m678476>
Basquiat Misidentification Prevention
If you are within 10 feet of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, we will gently prevent you from saying “early graffiti vibes.” You’re welcome.
Sotheby’s Liquidity Whisperer
When someone from Sotheby’s appears, we murmur key phrases like “private sale,” “guarantee,” and “irrevocable bid” into your ear so you sound solvent.
Jeff Koons Inflation Buffer
If someone compares pricing to Jeff Koons mid conversation, we deploy a strategic distraction and escort you toward safer territory.
Frieze Photo Angle Director
Professional positioning so you appear in the background of important conversations without looking thirsty. Subtle. European.
Museum Board Fantasy Neutralizer
If you start describing your future board seat at LACMA, we gently reduce the delusion by 15 percent and hand you water.
Felix Delusion Detox
For those who say “Felix is where the real action is,” we provide clarity without cruelty.
Afterparty Extraction Drone
If you are 45 minutes into explaining your practice to someone who said they “work in tech adjacent,” we activate immediate removal. Uber already en route.
Franchise Expansion Packages
Bring Back Benefactors Matchmaking Lounge inside the Wellness Yurt.
Online BF Discount Tier for those in long distance delusion.
Dealer Delusion Detox Program for anyone who thinks “we should talk after the fair” means anything.
All jokes aside, art fair week does something strange to people. It compresses ego, money, desire, insecurity, status, and performance into a few fluorescent days by the ocean. It makes adults behave like middle schoolers with better shoes.
Art Daddy Day Care exists because we all need supervision sometimes. Even the powerful. Especially the powerful.
Frieze LA is not networking. It is endurance. Supervision for the culturally unstable.
Daddy is on the ground. Raymond is operational.
If you see Raymond, hydrate. If you see Daddy, behave. If you see yourself spiraling, enrollment is still open. _Theartdaddy

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APPROVE
<https://tinyurl.com/27c65j4p> _DavidShrigley

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3b93h4cd> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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35. MARDI GRAS BLACK MASKING INDIAN SUIT by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/6p4stmxm>
Since the 1880s, members of New Orleans’ Black Masking Indians have spent up to a year, every year, hand-crafting spectacular suits to parade on Mardi Gras. The tradition blends Native American designs with West African masquerade ceremonies in celebrations meant to honor both.
With up to 150 pounds of beads, rhinestones, ostrich plumes, and sequins, the suits can cost thousands of dollars in materials alone. They are engineered for spectacle; on Mardi Gras, Super Sunday, and St. Joseph’s Day, different tribes meet in ritualized encounters—Big Chiefs ceremoniously boast about whose suit is “prettier,” and the streets fill with chanted call-and-response songs that blend African rhythms and Creole dialects.
But the parades are only the surface. Onlookers don’t see the year of work designing and sewing a new suit from scratch, a process many participants describe as meditative. What reads as flamboyance to tourists is, for practitioners, a form of incremental, physically intimate prayer made visible. The suits’ beaded panels often carry sacred and specific imagery: Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, Yoruba orishas, ancestors stolen into slavery, or contemporary victims of racial violence.
When the suit is finally worn, the body disappears beneath its weight and a ceremonial identity emerges. Ordinary individuals only become Big Chiefs or Big Queens when masked; many describe the experience as being animated by ancestral presence, guided by something larger than themselves. The spectacle may be loud, but at its core it’s devotional. And after a year of quiet work, the figure steps boldly into the street _TheImpatientReader

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EXPOSED FRAMING WORTHVILLE, KY
<https://tinyurl.com/3sshepjb> _RuralIndexingProject

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BUTCHED UP NURSE PAINTINGS: RICHARD PRINCE, EDEN ROCK by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/3m7kf2su>
The Edlis Neesons are selling a set of eighteen Richard Prince Eden Rock paintings at Christie’s. They’re overpainted appropriations of the covers of a pulp sci-fi book series called Deathlands https://tinyurl.com/mwsab6t9, sort of butched up, post-apocalyptic nurse paintings. But greg.org readers may know them for their starring role in Eden Rock: The Movie, Prince’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi concept set in St. Bart’s. These Deathlands paintings were one tribe in Eden Rock; the Canal Zone Rastas were another; and the pin-up girls (from a Taschen book) scattered throughout the Canal Zone paintings were a third. [Fun fact: Eden Rock was the movie/pitch. Prince’s working title for these paintings, which read somewhere between a moodboard and a storyboard, was In My Movie.]
<https://tinyurl.com/4n46dfvb>
Three of Edlis/Neeson’s paintings were begun in 2005, and all were completed in 2006. Of those three, this one with the skull has the lowest inventory number, so maybe it was first? Prince was on it for a while, though; sixteen 0thers in the series that Prince showed at the actual Eden Rock Hotel over Christmas/New Year’s 2007-08 were listed as 2006-07. [FWIW, in an Eden Rock inventory filed in the Cariou trial, the walk-in price was $150,000, and all sixteen had buyers listed. At least one re-sold—maybe by David Ganek—for $87,500 in 2020. Christie’s estimates the Edlis Neesons’ set at $500-700,000.]
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3fr7bt>
I thought that Canal Zone connection would be the most interesting thing about these paintings, but I’m turning out to be wrong. From the low-res images I’d seen, I’d always assumed these were paint-for-hire copies of the covers, which he then whited out by hand. But they’re stroke-for-stroke matches, which means they’d have to be inkjets. Except unlike the nurse paintings, they’re listed only as acrylic, and they’re on pre-stretched canvases. Also, Prince’s painting contains elements cropped from the cover. So either Prince extrapolated, or he was working from the original painting. Around the same time, Prince created a series called Untitled (Originals) <https://tinyurl.com/38w2bkau> , which paired a pulp novel with its original cover art. Maybe the Eden Rock paintings are similar. In any case, they may not be what they say, and they are definitely not what they seem. _greg.org

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WORK OF 19TH-CENTURY PAINTER & NATURALIST JOSÉ MARÍA VELASCO,
including views of major sites like Teotihuacan's pyramids of the Sun & Moon
<https://tinyurl.com/ywunva72>
and plenty of na ture
<https://tinyurl.com/vvtb3a25> _MichaelLobel

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GIACOMO BALLA, CANARINGATTI - GATTI FUTURISTI (CANARY-CATS - FUTURIST CATS), 1925-26
<https://tinyurl.com/4kbywewm> _JesseLocker

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AMERICAN GRAPHIC ARTIST ROBERT RIGGS WAS BORN ON THIS DATE IN 1896.
Too hallucinatory to be called a realist, and way too abrasive for "mere" regionalism,
he is hard to deal with in the context of art history.
Psychopathic Ward, 1940, appears to take cues from Degas in a very unsettling way:
<https://tinyurl.com/3zdtwzdr> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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EGON SCHIELE. SELF-PORTRAIT WITH HANDS ON CHEST. 1910
<https://tinyurl.com/6ftedw2t>
Self-Portrait in Green Shirt with Eyes Closed Egon Schiele, 1914
<https://tinyurl.com/yayh43va>
Self Portrait with Checkered Shirt Egon Schiele 1917
<https://tinyurl.com/6byfcpcy> _RabihAlameddine


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WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ART MARKET WHEN HUMANITY STOPS MATTERING? by Scott Reyburn
<https://tinyurl.com/5bmxrw2u>
The art trade has always believed it represents a special relationship between culture and money. After all, acquiring an original work by a well-regarded visual artist is, in relative terms, an expensive business. You can buy a physical copy of a masterpiece of world literature, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for less than $10. Thanks to subscription streaming apps, it costs even less to “own” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or an Oscar-winning movie. Admittedly, you will have to pay quite a bit more to attend a well-produced live Shakespeare play or an opera, or a Taylor Swift or Oasis concert, but these are fractions of what you would have to stump up for an original work by an on-trend contemporary artist. Want to own an oil painting by Flora Yukhnovich? One of her charming little postcard-sized oil sketches will currently set you back around $40,000 at auction, according to Artprice.
Owning good art has for centuries been a badge of cultured affluence. But what if the affluent stop caring about culture? What happens if the Hegelian dialectic of civilisational progress reaches a point where all that matters to human beings, or at least to the human beings that matter, is power and money?
“Iron laws“
According to Stephen Miller, an influential senior adviser to Donald Trump, president of the US, the planet’s biggest art market, we now live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”. Speaking to CNN shortly after the US military had abducted the president of Venezuela, Miller added that “these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” and reiterated America’s intention to annex Greenland.
Miller’s words are eerily reminiscent of a speech given 103 years earlier by an up-and-coming German politician who had formerly been an unsuccessful artist copying picture postcards. “The whole world of nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory for the strong over the weak,” proclaimed Adolf Hitler, prior to his own campaign of imperial annexation.
What has this got to do with the impermeable, apolitical bubble that is the international art market? Well, while capital markets might be at all-time highs, cultural life in the US and elsewhere is coming under serious pressure from those with political and financial power in ways that are beginning to bear ominous comparisons with the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s.
Guns before culture
The White House has demanded that the US government-funded Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum group, present a more positive image of American history or face budget cuts. Reduced federal and state funding for culture in the US has resulted in artists increasingly having to pay for the production of their own institutional projects. Meanwhile, Trump has called for a 50% increase to the US defence budget, raising it to $1.5tn. Government funding for culture is also shrinking in Europe, as is the number of young people studying humanities subjects like art history. Right-wing administrations in Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia have restricted artists’ freedom of expression.
Yet recent data indicates that, after a two year slump, art sales are on the up, at least at the top end of the auction market. Sotheby’s reported consolidated global sales of $7bn in 2025, a 17% gain on the previous year, while Christie’s reached $6.2bn, 7% up on 2025. The influential Baer Faxt trade newsletter has pronounced there is “less volatility in the art market” and at least four collections valued at more than $200m will come to auction this year. More galleries will close, others will open.
The power of cultural prestige
The top end of the art market might often seem to be more about lifestyle, luxury, fashion and financial speculation than the profundities of the creative process, but this small sub-sector of the global economy has always depended on a degree of cultural prestige to justify exceptionalist price points. Works by “trophy” artists like Leonardo, Van Gogh, Picasso, Giacometti and Rothko are all meant to embody, in their own different ways, some kind of universal, life-enhancing truth. Their works will have a timeless value for humanity that fully justifies an eight- or nine-figure investment, the trade assures its ultra-wealthy clients. As with real estate, huge prices paid at the top of the market trickle down to make even entry level purchases difficult to afford.
This value system depends on its adherents a) believing that they are part of a wider something called “humanity”, and b) taking some kind of interest in creative culture. But as income inequality continues to widen and the politics of more and more countries lurch towards authoritarianism, the more the rich and powerful reject the idea of inclusive societies and free creative expression, which they regard as “problem” features of outmoded liberal democracies.
Mine, all mine
Eoin Higgins, the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, recently pointed out in an interview with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that today’s technogarchs, unlike the Robber Barons of America’s Gilded Age, who built museums, libraries and concert halls for the wider community, “don’t think that they owe anybody anything”. Higgins added: “They don’t appreciate that they live in a society, and they don’t think that they have any obligation to the rest of society, or the rest of the country.”
For tech barons and most other members of the billionaire class, art no longer has that special status it once enjoyed. “The rise of tech, the rise of crypto, the rise of truly excessive amounts of liquidity the likes of which we’ve never seen have given the wealthy a myriad of asset classes that are a lot more sexy than the art asset, which has this trophy saying, ‘I’m a fancy art collector,’” says the California-based collector and dealer Stefan Simchowitz. “Collectors have lost so much money at the galleries,” he adds. “Art no longer provides that centrality.”
Insiders who monitor the performance of the art market tend to fixate on how much art is being sold by the ultra-rich and how share prices and interest rates affect the confidence of the ultra-rich people who buy art. As is so often repeated, money isn’t a problem. But the political and cultural context in which art is transacted has changed. To be sure, there will always be enough super-wealthy people in the world to buy trophy works by brand-name artists. Canaletto is one of these brands. Christie’s, having sold the 18th-century artist’s figure-packed Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day for $43.9m in July last year, was confident enough to guarantee the sale of another big, decorative Canaletto of this timelessly commercial subject for at least $30m this month in New York.
<https://tinyurl.com/4hxvas48>
Consequences of a volatile world
But if the rich and powerful lose interest in humanity and the humanities, is there a danger that the art market will become all about transacting in proven brands? Are there enough of these brands and people interested in art to sustain a global trade in unique objects offered by thousands of individual dealers? This is the concern that makes new events in the Gulf, like this month’s inaugural Art Basel Qatar, so consequential.
Critical re-evaluation has turned Philip Guston into big-ticket art world brand—Hauser & Wirth are taking a 1978 self-portrait priced at $14m to the fair—but is this kind of art of interest to a wider audience in the region? Can the fossil fuel-wealthy Gulf, which so many in the art trade are hoping will be an El Dorado of new buyers, sustain a stable art "ecosystem" if the most powerful nation in the world keeps sending armadas of warships to the region to intimidate governments it doesn't like?
When gallerists are asked when the recent slump started, many point to the Hamas attacks in October 2023 and the retribution that followed from the Israeli military. Things have stabilised (if that is the word) in the Middle East since then. But the wider world still matters. And that world is getting a lot more volatile in ways that can affect the composure and concentration levels of participants at every level of the art market.
Inevitably, Germans have the right compound noun for it—Weltschmerz, meaning “world-pain”. Spending hundreds or thousands or millions on an original work of art can be a pretty big ask when you’re waking up every morning thinking, “What the hell is going to happen next?” _ArtNewspaper