Fight, Flight or Frieze: Our Culture Editor's LA Art Week Diary
From Frieze to Felix and all the parties in between, here’s everything our Culture Editor experienced over the four-day Art Week in LA
Welcome to LA Frieze, where there’s a fifty-fifty chance that every middle-aged man wearing sunglasses inside is Leonardo DiCaprio. With Frieze as the four-day centerpiece of LA Art Week, the city becomes a veritable bacchanal of gallery openings, pop-up exhibitions, open studios, after parties, and after-after parties. Every invite you receive is a Brand X Brand collab brought to you by their sponsors: a car, a tequila, and some newly launched can of seltzer. Beneath all the corporate showboating, you can sometimes locate the faint heartbeat of what gives these events a shred of integrity: inspiring art and the artists tenacious enough to brave the industry.
Now that the weekend has passed, we’re sleeping off our hangovers and surrendering to that “cold that’s been going around.” Here, we're also taking a look back at all the overwhelming, underwhelming, and simply whelming moments of LA Art Week.
Thursday, February 29th
Happy Leap Day! With the extra day in the year, those 24 hours feel like a freebie—when you're playing with the house money, it’s easy to throw caution to the wind (a.k.a. drink five margaritas on a work night).
With my trusty plus-one, I Ubered to Friedman Benda Gallery in West Hollywood for their Art Week Party. The gallery itself is located in a beautiful modern house up the street from Chateau Marmont with a balcony view of Los Angeles. In a city as sprawling and flat as LA, any view-creating elevation is one of the city’s finer luxuries. Inside the main room of the gallery was a sculptural installation by Lithuanian designer Barbora Žilinskaitė entitled “Chairs Don’t Cry.” She creates abstracted and anthropomorphized furniture with a Dr. Seussian sensibility. The showroom features mirrors with clasped hands, a credenza with feet, and a chair that—despite the exhibition’s name—is crying, leaving cartoonish puddles of tears around the gallery.
In the bathroom, there was an installation by Charles Hickey, aptly located because many of his artworks are 3-D pen sculptures of bathroom staples such as Head & Shoulders shampoo, ACT mouthwash, and Gilette shaving cream. I was particularly fond of Hickey’s 3-D pen on canvas paintings. He combines classical painting tableaus with playful illustrative elements. I’m excited to see what this up-and-coming artist does next.
After a few margaritas and some polite small talk around the backyard fire pit, we headed over to Mars in Hollywood for an LA Art Week Party that my friend BJ was DJing. At the bar, we had a few more cocktails—“powered by BODY vodka”—and flitted around the plush velvet couches of the dimly lit lounge. I chatted with BJ behind the DJ booth; he said he’d already injured himself on his outfit—a large jacket adorned with quarter-sized discs of metal. In the spirit of indie sleaze, there was a fair amount of The Ting Tings on the playlist, which sparked nostalgia for all those hours I spent at H&M in 2009.
Friday, March 1st
At 9 a.m., I drove to a press breakfast at Phillips Gallery for an installation by The Invisible Collection, an upscale furniture atelier that boasts bespoke pieces by top designers. A chocolate croissant in hand, I tried not to get pastry flakes on the white bouclé upholstery as I chatted with Invisible Collection founder Isabelle Dubern-Mallevays. She walked us through the gallery, and we talked about the intersection of art and design, discussing the trend toward collecting designer furniture as an artistic investment. One of Isabelle’s colleagues recently declared, “Fashion is dead; it’s all about design now.” I feel there’s still hope for fashion, but I have to agree there’s been a trend of all my friends suddenly becoming armchair design experts with a penchant for shopping on 1stDibs. Is it a trend, or are we just turning 30?
In the evening, I went to the Reserved Magazine Art Week party hosted by MC+ Design Studio. Snaking through the rooms of the party, we stumbled upon a hair salon, a tattoo parlor, a bar, and design showrooms—my plus-one kept asking, “What is this place?” and I sincerely didn’t have an answer. Whatever it was, people were having a ball. The crowd smelled of rain-soaked leather jackets and mezcal shots. This was a particular brand of West Hollywood scenester that lands somewhere between indie “rocker” and boho—imagine a Chrome Hearts Janis Joplin or a bohemian Johnny Depp. Post-last call, the crowd migrated from MC+ over to The Moon Room, Jared Meisler’s new spot on Melrose. After a few more rounds of cocktails, some peppy disco beats, and some people-watching, we retired for the night.
Saturday, March 2nd
I drove to the Santa Monica Airport around 10:30 a.m. to catch the third day of Frieze Art Fair. Outside the parking lot, there were activists braving the rain to protest the art world’s silence in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. They particularly wanted to draw attention to the Fair’s relationship with Deutsche Bank and other sponsors with ties to Israel. Walking past Deutsche’s “Wealth Management Lounge,” the cognitive dissonance was impossible to ignore.
Attending the fair with a friend who is a seasoned veteran of the art gallery system, I was hyper-aware of “how the sausage is made” in relation to blue-chip art fairs. We chatted with her former co-workers, already on their fifth cup of coffee of the day, eyes vacant from three days in convention-center lighting. In an attempt not to get lost, we zigzagged through the booths like aisles in a grocery store, trying not to miss any of our favorite artists. As always, there was a mix of legendary classics, contemporary favorites, and a few new discoveries.
After Frieze, I drove over to The Webster, a hypebeast-y boutique retailer attached to the Beverly Center. The store was hosting a pop-up of luxury retailer Paris Laundry in collaboration with artist Larissa De Jesús Negrón. As a fan of Negrón’s paintings, it was a treat to see how her signature style came alive on the 3-D canvas of hand-painted jackets, scarves, and a wide range of apparel. Guy Samuel, founder of Paris Laundry, explained how the brand’s name references the cycles of inspiration in fashion that create a constant cultural dialogue between Paris and New York. Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born artist who crossed paths with Samuel in Forest Hills, NY, and the collaboration was born out of their instant connection and a shared respect for each other’s creative ethos.
After picking up a few friends on my way across town to Echo Park, we stopped at Des Pair books to see the debut of “Brilliant Disguise,” showcasing the artworks of Madeleine Kunkle (founder of cult clothing brand Hollywood Gifts). The mixed-media paintings were cheeky yet resonant, elaborating on pop culture with pathos and a flourish of incisive humor. In addition to Kunkle’s work, hand-crafted candles sculpted by Ravenne Swaner (@luckystarcandle) were displayed throughout the store.
After dinner, we caught the tail end of Amit Greenberg’s first solo show, Wilder Flowers and Peculiar Seeds, on display at CULTUREEDIT’s Tom of Finland Store. Greenberg’s nude figures are both sleek and playful, straddling the line between poetic and profane. Meeting Greenberg, I told him I particularly liked the canvases that had figurative elements painted over in white as a background to the larger figures. He said that effect was the result of a “happy accident,” but he liked the way they feel “almost like hieroglyphics.” We discussed Frieze burnout, recreational mushrooms, and—a tentpole of most conversations this week—the differences between New York and Los Angeles. We both agreed a certain monologue in My Dinner with Andre captured the Stockholm syndrome of most New Yorkers.
As the store closed up, the crowd of hot, stylish girls and gays slowly migrated west for the after-party at the West Hollywood EDITION’s club, Sunset. We cashed in our drink tickets and danced to the cowbell-heavy house music on the dance floor.
Saturday, March 2nd
On the fourth and final day of Art Week, I caught the tail end of the Felix Art Fair hosted by the Roosevelt Hotel. I’ve always enjoyed Felix as the less pretentious younger sibling of Frieze. The added gimmick of galleries presenting in hotel rooms (including their bathrooms) was refreshing after the more corporate feel of a convention center. Thanks to a collaboration with Dover Street Market (housed in an installation by artist Oscar Tuazon), Felix brought in a crowd of Hollywood hypebeasts, indie art nerds, and art-scene veterans. Between the hotel rooms, I heard the words “declassé,” “symphonic,” and “cerebral” drifting around—I love eavesdropping on the vocabulary one-upmanship among the armchair art critics. In contrast with the blue-chip galleries of Frieze, Felix showcased up-and-coming galleries and artists, which sparked some excitement after the visual fatigue of four full days of Art Week.
My pitch for Coveteur for Art Week 2025: Instead of throwing a party like all the other magazines, we should sponsor a sensory deprivation room at each art fair as a much-needed palette cleanser from all the action. Sound-proof headphones, sensory deprivation tanks, a soundproof booth to scream in, and a big blank wall to stare at until you feel ready to look at art again. Believe me, it would be a smash hit.
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