On Saturday in Palm Beach, I walked into a restaurant called Cucina, on Royal Poinciana Way in the middle of the mile-wide island and steps away from the ocean. I was there along with a fellow New Yorker who works as a vice president at a major auction house. It was just after midnight, and although there were a number of visitors in town for the gala dinner at the home of collectors Bill Wrigley and Sue Hostetler Wrigley—the highlight of New Wave Art Weekend, where the local outposts of global mega-galleries and masterpiece-stuffed private collections put on their biggest shows of the year—Cucina was the only place to get a drink at that hour. The island of Palm Beach has many things, including more than 40 billionaire residents, but it does not have many places to get a beer late at night.
Cucina had beer—and tequila shots, a DJ spinning Ying Yang Twins, bottle service at elevated tables, and women walking through holding aloft bubbly affixed with sparklers. It was 1 OAK for the scions of tycoons at the beach. But it increasingly became clear that this wasn’t simply a bevy of tipsy rich white kids. Many of the dancing imbibing bow tie-clad gentlemen of Cucina—who, as I found out, refer to the restaurant by just its first syllable, stay classy—had attended the night’s other prominent gathering in town: a Turning Point Action Christmas Gala at nine minutes up the road at Mar-a-Lago, featuring a special appearance by Donald Trump himself.
Such a collision between the art world and the Trump world was inevitable in Palm Beach. In recent years, the tiny town with the enormously wealthy populace turned into a somewhat unlikely center of gravity for the art world, as a dozen New York galleries set up shop at the Royal Poinciana Plaza—where the Sant Ambroeus outpost makes any homesick gallery girl feel at ease—or among the designer boutiques on Worth Avenue.
Expanding southward was necessary. When the pandemic hit, collectors moved permanently into second homes in Palm Beach, and dealers set up camp in perhaps the world’s most monied beachside town. By the time snowbird season arrived in late 2020, Sotheby’s, Pace Gallery, and Paula Cooper had all snatched up spaces. This year, they were joined by Lévy Gorvy, Lehmann Maupin, just a few weeks ago, the latest flagship outpost of Christie’s.
“There’s so much potential,” said Dylan Brant, an art dealer and adviser who opened a space on ritzy Worth Avenue with partner Stéphane Timonier last year during the pandemic. “’It’s the most interesting place in the country right now to cultivate collectors.
New Wave Art Wknd founder Sarah Gavlak opened her eponymous Palm Beach gallery years before the current wave of newcomers, and said that it gave the powerhouse galleries in New York a chance to understand that Palm Beach could be a place for a permanent gallery, not just a weekend jaunt in the wintertime.
“It’s what I’ve been saying for years, but for whatever reason other galleries weren’t paying attention: This is a great community of collectors,” Gavlak said, “And then it was COVID and so people were opening pop-ups in the Hamptons and Aspen—and Palm Beach was the same thing. They weren’t doing it in 2005, but that’s okay. Maybe the intention was, well, we’re not doing art fairs and no one’s coming to galleries in New York, so we have to go down there.”
At the same time, there’s the matter of the general vibe in town, which makes it something of an incongruous locale for such tonnage of contemporary art. The former president has quite actively held court at Mar-a-Lago for the past 11 months—the former Marjorie Merriweather Post turned gaudy golf course is now Trump’s legal residence and workplace. In the last few weeks, he’s met with North Carolina’s candidates for House and Senate races, posed with the newly acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse in front of a picture of Trump approaching Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, chatted with the Alabama secretary of state about football, and hosted a gala for the Log Cabin Republicans. (Sean Parnell, the Pennsylvania Senate candidate who was accused by his estranged wife of choking her and hitting one of their children, was set to have a fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago before suspending his campaign in late November. Parnell has denied all allegations.)
The 28-year-old Charlie Kirk—who started Turning Point USA in 2012 as a way to drum up support for Republicans among young bro-y kids on conservative campuses and pivoted to being a kiddo Trump lapdog factory during the 2016 election—has been throwing a winter gala there for several years. In 2020, undeterred by the global pandemic, Kirk charged attendees $2,000 a pop to come to Mar-a-Lago just so they could maskless-mingle alongside Kayleigh McEnany and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem.
As the Kirk acolytes started popping up for this year’s edition on Saturday, Baselgoers were arriving en masse from Miami, many via the high-speed Brightline train. (Public transit. How quaint!) First stop was West Palm, for the opening at the Bunker, Beth Rudin DeWoody’s private museum where she houses some of the more than 10,000 works in her collection, often organized into mini shows throughout the space. One memorable room collected puppets and puppet-themed works, and another collected all of the artwork of critters—Tom Sachs rats made out of Balthazar packaging, a John Wesley painting of two pigs, a Milton Avery drawing of a tasty-looking fish. Cocktails flowed in the courtyard, but many bolted to the island, where on Worth Avenue, Brant and Timonier had just minutes before opening a show that paired paintings by Karen Kilimnik with historic couture dresses owned by the supermodel Stephanie Seymour, who is Brant’s mother.