How the Chicest Ski Town Collided with the Art World—and Got Richer: Aspen Is “On Steroids”
According to property records, the building was sold in August 2021 for $6.4 million to the developer. Mark Hunt, and then sold for $10.4 million in February 2022. The current owners are two of the gala’s co-chairs: Rubio, the co-founder of Away, and Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack. The place is zoned commercial, not residential—Rubio leased it to Christie’s in previous summers, and it could potentially partner with other art institutions in the future since it’s designed as a gallery space. Plus, Rubio and Butterfield are always there: 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 would love it,” Boesky said.
And while the Jeff Bezoses and Tim Cooks of the world may congregate at Casa Tua for a post-ski getaway, it’s not the people who sustain the art world in Aspen. It’s the devoted collectors—take that. John Phelan, former CEO of Michael Dell’s investment firm, who grew the company to $19 billion before starting his own company a few years ago. His wife, Amy Phelan, whom he met in 2001, has been a driving force behind their collection, and the couple made the museum’s free admission policy a reality with their (undisclosed but presumably huge) 2008 donation. Before ArtCrush, the Phelans invited so many visitors to their home that a traffic circle incident left their street impassable and their door blocked due to fire regulations. Those who did get in found a highly exciting, self-consciously erotic installation, with Yayoi KusamaSilver balls float in an indoor pool, a Walad Beshty The floor was made of broken glass that visitors walked on, and a Ed Ruscha Which makes it all the more true: Block text scattered across mountains that look like the Rocky Mountains, exclaiming, “THAT’S RARE.”
Collector Nancy Magoon There is a field bordering the Elk Mountains that is also a sculpture garden. A vendor told me that they joined a group to go to Rachel And Ephi Gildor’s house on the old Independence Pass to see a James Turrell Skyspace in optimal lighting. They got there at 5:30 a.m. and they were late. Some of the founding names of American wealth—Walton, Tisch, Bass—had some of their collections installed in houses near the slopes.
It’s this collection that has helped make the Aspen Art Museum a world-class institution for a town of fewer than 10,000 people. There’s an innovative program where curators work at the museum on a temporary, rotating basis during peak seasons. Before leaving for the Orange County Museum of Art in 2020, the director Heidi Zuckerman oversaw a series of impressive solo performances in the early years of the new building: Chris Ofili in 2015, Lynda Benglis And Danh Vo in 2016, Oscar Murillo And Seth Price in 2019, with the performance of Who is Rashid Johnson? Nicola Lees takes the helm after curating at NYU’s 80WSE gallery, and before that in her hometown of London, at an institution that, like Aspen, takes a kunsthalle approach of borrowing rather than collecting.
“I’m from the Serpentine, so when I came here for a job interview, it really felt like the Serpentine of the mountains,” Lees told me.
This year’s group exhibition not only features the usual solo exhibitions of art stars, but also brings spectacular effects. Allison Katz, The radical artist joins Hauser & Wirth in 2022, free to create any kind of exhibition she wants.
And so Katz travels back in time to Pompeii. Each room explores the idea of public and private space in the ancient Roman metropolis just before it was engulfed in fire and ash, with the final room facing the explosion of Vesuvius head-on. There are some of Katz’s own stunning paintings—surrealist menageries with roosters and gaping mouths, and expressionist self-portraits—and a series of works by her colleagues and mentors: Robert Gober, Anish Kapoor, Amy Sillman, Kerry James Marshall and Karen Kilimnik. But most notably, she installed works across various rooms to simulate moving through a Pompeian house at the foot of a volcano, and even retrieved some unlikely mosaics from actually Pompeii. So she can thank her co-manager. Stella Bottai, who, in addition to his role as curator at the AAM, is also the curator of the contemporary art program at the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
“Each artist manages a museum exhibiting think that looks like this,an art dealer at a New York gallery said as they left.
On Friday, Katz hosted a number of writers, artists, Derek FordDate and his wife, a law professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, salesman Olivier Babin, AAM Manager Simone Krug, MoMA Curator Stuart Comer, and others. As Katz began to recount the origins of the loans, she realized something interesting. In a town where 83 percent of the planes landing at Aspen/Pitkin County Airport are private jets, Katz has organized an ambitious museum group exhibition made up entirely of loans that actually offset their carbon emissions by eliminating the need for fuel-powered transportation. All the loans are local—except for the mosaics, which were shipped from Italy in a consolidated crate, with the loan fees waived by the Pompeii Archaeological Park and the shipping costs covered by AAM.
“We are a non-collecting organization, so we have taken advantage of all the great collections at the end of the block, which I think is also very smart for the environment,” says Katz.
The Aspen Art Museum ArtCrush takes place in a giant tent below Buttermilk Mountain. I arrived in a Mini Cooper convertible, Fleetwood Mac, gondola survivor Jacob King, and Sam Parker, founder of Parker Gallery in Los Angeles. It was golden hour, and the party had a golden hour theme. Outside, step-and-repeat, there was a long line of people waiting to take pictures. Inside, Sophia Cohen, A consultant for the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and founder of Siren Projects, who was hanging around the bar, had interviewed Fordjour the day before as part of the Anderson Ranch Summer Series. She was headed to LA the next day to watch the Mets play the Angels. Domenico De Sole, former CEO of Tom Ford–Gucci time, walking with his wife, Eleanore. Artist Alex Israel nearby, as well as the Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist, wearing eye-catching cream colored suit.
“It’s from my friend. Matthieu Blazy,” he said. Makes sense. Bottega Veneta is a sponsor, and the brand Blazy opened a store in Glitter Gulch last December.
As soon as the show began, Christie’s auctioneer Adrien Meyer took the stage to begin a 12-lot live auction, and things started to get exciting, with a Jacqueline Humphries work selling for $400,000 to a collector in the room, and Dallas collector Nancy Rogers Bidding for an Israeli work soared to $265,000 and then climbed higher. A painting by Emma McIntyre, who became the youngest artist on David Zwirner’s list after joining this year, was auctioned by director Gagosian Who is Millicent Willner? This is the first time Christie’s has given ArtCrush decision-making power, and the company has brought with it a senior staff, including a vice president Sarah Friedlander, 21st Century Chair Head Kathryn Widing, and many others. (Sotheby’s, which has hosted the show in recent years, still has a strong presence, as its brick-and-mortar store is just a block away from the museum.) When the silent auction ended the next day, $4.5 million had been raised, more than double what the New Museum in New York (population 8.3 million) raised at its spring gala this year and significantly more than what MOCA in Los Angeles (population 3.8 million) raised.
But before everyone could leave for the afterparty at the Caribou Club, and eventually leave Aspen for business or otherwise—a tipster spotted at least one major gallery dealer and their artist in pajamas at the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport—the honorees took the stage to speak. The panel expressed 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 was high—I wasn’t high that way, but I was high…with music,he said
And then Humphries took the stage, less than 24 hours after she feared she would fall out of the gondola door, and admitted that she had been to Aspen before, too, though she had only been passing through and it had been a long time ago.
“We came to Colorado in the summer, and that meant driving on an unpaved road, Independence Pass,” she told 600 people at the tented party. “Aspen was a very different place then.”
