By Harissa Beaumont
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a London art dealer in January is both underdressed for the weather and overdressed for the company. This past week has been a whirlwind of frostbite, self-promotion and truly appalling canapé decisions.
On Monday, I hosted a VIP private view for one of the gallery’s more controversial artists, Pascal Duvall. Pascal is a French conceptualist whose latest collection, “Reckoning with Banality,” features portraits of Amazon delivery drivers—painted entirely in melted vegan cheese. The pieces are surprisingly powerful, though the smell in the gallery is now something between a raclette restaurant and a forgotten gym bag.
The event was invitation-only, which meant, of course, that half of Mayfair’s gatecrashers found their way in. One particular guest, a suspiciously young “collector” named Tyler, cornered Pascal. I don’t know what he said, but Pascal later asked me if it’s legal to deport people for crimes against art.
Tuesday was spent at a fair in Shoreditch, which was as exhausting as you’d imagine. These smaller fairs are ostensibly designed to give a platform to emerging artists, but in reality, they’re just an excuse for tech bros to walk around pretending they “get” postmodernism. One particularly harrowing moment came when I overheard a man in a puffer jacket explain to his girlfriend, “This isn’t about the painting—it’s about the artist’s trauma. But, like, I’d buy it if the frame was gold.”
By Wednesday, the gallery was in chaos thanks to a shipping debacle involving a marble sculpture by Davide Greco. The piece, “Solitude in Marble,” was due to be installed in the home of an oligarch who only communicates via his personal assistant (a man with the personality of a broken fax machine). Somewhere between Naples and Kensington, the crate went missing. After several frantic calls, I discovered the sculpture had been mistakenly delivered to his mansion in Belgravia rather than his mansion in SW3.
Thursday, I attended a charity auction at some stately home in Surrey. It was one of those ghastly affairs where everyone pretends to care about endangered species while bidding on yacht holidays in the Maldives. I contributed a small contemporary piece from an artist I represent, a minimalist called Wilma Stevens who works with charred wood and glass shards. It sold for £50,000 to a woman who declared it would “look divine” in her orangery. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the piece is titled “Collapse of Capitalism”.
Friday brought me to a gallery brunch in Belgravia, a cursed idea if ever there was one. The menu featured “avant-garde avocado toast” (essentially avocado served in a glass box), and the crowd included a woman who loudly pronounced Basquiat as “Bas-QUETTE.” When I tried to excuse myself, she grabbed my arm and said, “You’re an art dealer—can you explain why people are still obsessed with Picasso? Like, hasn’t he been cancelled?”
The week culminated on Saturday night at a dinner party hosted by one of my more eccentric clients, Margot von Helmut. Margot, who insists she was “a muse to Warhol” (she wasn’t), owns a sprawling Georgian townhouse filled with so much Damien Hirst, it looks like a taxidermy enthusiast’s fever dream. The guest list included a DJ who claims to collect “soundscapes” and a novelist who once tried to pay me for a painting in poems.
The pièce de résistance of the evening was when Margot unveiled her latest purchase—a £150,000 neon sign that reads “F. Austerity”. As she did this, a waiter passed around bowls of caviar. I can’t decide if the moment was ironic, iconic, or utterly unbearable.
There you have it: another week in the glamorous, maddening, faintly absurd world of art dealing. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my office, googling “career change after 30” and trying to scrub the smell of vegan cheese out of my coat.