There’s never a bad time to be at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Last Wednesday at 3:45 p.m. the bar was full, and the producer Ilya Salkind—you don’t know him, but he did the original Superman movies—was eating an early dinner. He got the Polo Lounge McCarthy Salad, as everyone does, and was chatting with a pair of agents looking to make a Christopher Reeve documentary. Art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, who’ll open an LA outpost of Michael Werner Gallery this year across from Larry Gagosian’s spot in Beverly Hills, wandered through, early for a meeting. An elegant-looking woman in a coat insisted that her tea rest for 10 minutes before it was served to her. This is the classiest place to take a drink in Los Angeles.
In strolled Simon Fox, the busiest man there—he’s the global CEO of Frieze, the art fair company owned by Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, and Frieze Los Angeles was set to open the following day. He’s British, once ran the publishing umbrella that owns The Mirror and OK!, and favors blue suits. He ordered a glass of Champagne and a bottle of flat water.
“I have that worst and most obvious Los Angeles excuse: traffic,” he said, explaining his 15-minute tardiness, his English accent stretching out that dreadful word.
I wanted to chat with Fox about the business of Frieze, which started out as an arts magazine in the ’90s and in a 10-year span starting in 2003 birthed extremely popular art fairs in London and New York. Emanuel’s Endeavor bought 70% of it in 2016, and then opened the first Los Angeles outpost in 2019. Fox was hired as CEO in 2020, and opened the fair in Seoul in 2022.
Those fairs all face stiff competition from the Art Basel fairs on each of those continents, as they compete for blue-chip galleries to exhibit and collectors to attend. So last year Frieze bought up more fairs: Expo Chicago and the Armory Show in New York. The latter gives the group a big shindig to complement the boutique-ish Frieze New York, which takes place at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a downsize from the giant tent that it once occupied on Randall’s Island.
Adding a fair in Chicago was a bit more surprising. I didn’t see it coming, even though I had a major inadvertent tip-off. I ran into Fox and Frieze fairs director Christine Messineo in line for the Chicago architecture boat tour in 2023, but it didn’t occur to me for a second they were doing anything other than admiring the skyscrapers by Mies van der Rohe and Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas—much less buying the art fair that was opening the next day.
“Ari’s from Chicago,” Fox said, leaning forward. “So there is a corporate love for the city.”
Fox is from England, and was educated at St. Paul’s School and then Cambridge. He moved to Los Angeles for his first post-college job, at a bank that was later bought by Bank of America.
“And I had the funnest, best time. I mean, really, I nearly moved here,” he told me. “I kind of fell in love.”
It’s fair to say he’s having an even more fun time now. Fox told me about the private homes he’s been in this week, spectacular homes with stirring architectural pedigree—some with real historical significance and some that are just really, really big. He wouldn’t say the names of the collectors who opened their doors to him, but I’d been to a few art-filled pads myself, and I’ll share my list.
Walmart heir Sybil Robson Orr had her annual cocktail party for Serpentine at her eight-bedroom mansion in the Bird Streets, with Lana Del Rey showing up to hang out with Hans Ulrich Obrist under the James Turrell skyspace installed in the roof. Former NFL player Keith Rivers had a party at his place, and Jason Swartz opened up the Sheats-Goldstein house—the original Lautner house and the newer additions, which include a nightclub and perhaps the world’s first infinity tennis court—to various trustees of local institutions. (James Goldstein, the house’s owner, eventually popped up on Instagram in Milan for Fashion Week.) The Getty Villa started as J. Paul Getty’s private ranch house—Frieze threw its kickoff party there Monday night, and there’s plenty of Greco-Roman sculpture dotting the immense property. And filmmaker Lorraine Nicholson (recent Vanity Fair contributor, daughter of Jack) invited the curator Jed Moch to install a bunch of works in her historic midcentury-modern home in Laurel Canyon.
“Frieze is just like an extremely important week for the city,” Nicholson said as the musician Beck and the artist Issy Wood and various Haim sisters filled the balcony of her home at the opening dinner. “I keep on going up to people and taking their hand and saying, ‘This is a very important week for the city.’”
The most coveted home-tour invite was to Jimmy Iovine’s 10-bedroom stunner across the street from the Playboy Mansion, for a benefit auction to raise funds for his school with Dr. Dre, the Iovine and Young Academy. Attendees didn’t even mind that they couldn’t really see much of the Beats cofounder’s art holdings, as the event was confined to a cavernous room that Iovine had converted into a skating rink for his wife, Liberty Ross, who just really loves skating.
“I’m glad you finally found a use for this room, Jimmy,” James Corden, the night’s emcee said drolly from the stage as Ed Ruscha, Benny Blanco, Brian Grazer, and the young music exec Justin Lubliner looked on.
Iovine came on next to kick off the auction, proclaiming, with utter confidence, “The stock market’s going up 5,000 points tomorrow, so spend it tonight.” Corden tried another tactic, saying, “I want you all to point out the richest person in the room.” Many fingers were directed at Iovine. The auction was put together by Sotheby’s and the LA dealer David Kordansky, and several of his artists—Hilary Pecis, Austyn Weiner, Chase Hall, Jennifer Guidi—watched with a combination of fear and intrigue as auction house reps bid their works up and up, with some breaking records.
Los Angeles also has a few semipublic spaces that are technically accessible to the masses, if you know the right place to shoot an email, or the right buzzer to press. O-Town House is a fascinating gem in a historic live-work building in MacArthur Park, housed in the downstairs portion of the space that curator Scott Cameron Weaver uses as an apartment. It’s named for the gigantic sign atop a building seen from the balcony—the sign used to say Sheraton Town House, but all that’s left of the Sheraton is the O. Harley Wertheimer, the A&R vet and one of the owners of the small-plates wine bar Stir Crazy, also opened part of his house to create CASTLE, a gallery open to the public on certain days, often group shows that he lets others curate.
The most effortlessly chic private gallery of all might be Maison d’Art, the elegant private space in Hollywood run by Theo Niarchos, the art dealer and Greek shipping heir. He managed to pull off one of the most brain-exploding gallery shows in town and keep it a hush-hush secret: a show of classic works by the reclusive master Cady Noland. It’s her first LA solo show since 1990, and many of the loans were last seen in the much-lauded retrospective at the MMK Frankfurt.
The gallery rep led me to the upstairs office of Maison d’Art, which housed an elegant library and two collage works on the wall. It was about as uncanny an art experience one can get in LA this week, and I thought Fox should really see the show too. He was pretty busy, with the first stop on the dance card an event cohosted by Jeffrey Deitch, Emanuel’s art adviser, held at the headquarters of Staud, the fashion line started by Emanuel’s wife, Sarah Staudinger.
This is the second edition of Frieze LA to be held at the Santa Monica Airport, after a two-year stint at the studios at Paramount Pictures, and one at the Beverly Hilton. Despite the hike for anyone who lives on the east side, Fox can see the advantages of not shuffling the location around every few years.
“I’m hoping we’ve found a permanent home, and that’s exciting,” he said.
When I asked if the fair made money, he said he couldn’t talk about the specifics, and alluded to the math problem at play. Fairs rake in cash through booth fees, and a fair that only lets in 95 galleries, like Frieze LA, can’t compete with a fair that lets in 277 galleries, like Art Basel Miami Beach.
“The economics of art fairs are challenging,” Fox said. “They’re simple. It’s a function of the number of galleries, really, and a little bit of sponsors as well, and this is not a big fair.”
But he gets that Frieze can be a passion project for Emanuel, who firmly believes that to have an entertainment powerhouse in 2024 you need an arts-and-culture emporium in the mix of different assets—there’s a reason James Murdoch bought Art Basel a few years after Emanuel got Frieze. Owning Frieze could also help if Emanuel decides to take the whole thing private again. In January, Bloomberg reported that private equity fund Silver Lake Management, which currently owns 71% of Endeavor, plans to gobble up the rest with the help of financing from places such as a state-owned Emirati wealth fund in Abu Dhabi.
“Financially, we are insignificant to Endeavor overall,” Fox admitted. “We are tiny, but I do think we have an outsize influence. I used to work in newspapers, and people and proprietors don’t tend to own newspapers necessarily for their financial reasons, but because of the brand and the influence. It isn’t really the financial impact we have, but we have an impact. We are taken very seriously by Ari and the team, disproportionately to our financial contribution.”
And when the fair opened Thursday, Emanuel was bopping around to different booths, his cabled earphones drooping down in case a call came in he had to take. I’m told he eventually bought work by the South African artist Blessing Ngobeni at the booth of San Francisco gallery Jenkins Johnson, and a work by Gary Tyler, the winner of the 2024 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize. As Emanuel admired the Joe Bradley works at the David Zwirner booth, Robert Downey Jr. shuffled across the floor in a bucket hat and parked himself in the LA Louver booth, then started scribbling notes as a director told him about the work of Terry Allen, the legendary country music singer who has for decades been working on a visual art practice beloved by Bruce Nauman and the late critic Dave Hickey. Will Ferrell and Rob Lowe were walking around. The collector Shelli Azoff told me she bought an Amoako Boafo and a Robert Longo and was thinking about a Raymond Pettibon. Leonardo DiCaprio somehow got time off from shooting a Paul Thomas Anderson movie in Sacramento to jet down to LA and make it to the Frieze opening.
“I think literally all the LA collectors are here—and they came to Santa Monica,” Messineo told me as Downey and his crew walked by.
Back at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had asked Fox about the light-speed expansion of the Los Angeles gallery scene: an entire art nabe that emerged out of nothing in Melrose Hill, the new outposts of New York and Europe-based galleries, the expansion of the collecting class in town. He speculated that there are 50% more parties and collection tours and general schmoozing than in years past, but that could honestly be an understatement. The arrival of New York galleries such as Karma, Marian Goodman, Sean Kelly, David Zwirner, and Lisson means that there are so many more stops on the city’s gallery crawl, and this week one could go from one to another and sit in the expansive back rooms, stocked with art for sale. I clocked multiple gallery directors sipping this season’s extremely LA drink of choice: Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, available at the closest outpost of the obsessed-over organic grocery store, Erewhon.
At night the dinner invites stacked up. There was Wednesday’s soiree at Dan Tana’s, the West Hollywood red-sauce joint, for the new LA iteration of Tribeca’s the Journal Gallery, which was showing new work by the artist Leelee Kimmel, the first Tinseltown show for an artist who was once known as an actor. Kordansky celebrated its solo booth of new paintings by the artist Sam McKinniss with a party at the old-school Santa Monica hotel Shutters on the Beach—a white-fence kind of place in a section of town one dinner attendee described as “the Connecticut of Los Angeles,” perfect for a Litchfield County resident and Connecticut native like McKinniss. Matthew Marks had a cocktail at the gallery where artists Kelly Akashi, Calvin Marcus, Laura Owens, and Jill Mulleady drank near curator Helen Molesworth.
“The art fair this week may be the centerpiece, the catalyst, but it’s just a piece of a much bigger thing, a much bigger ecosystem of art that’s happening in LA for a week or more,” Fox said. “And yeah, the art fair makes it happen, galvanizes it, puts a point in time, but when I think about the art fair model, I’m thinking much more than the art fair.”
He’s also thinking about 2028. The years leading up to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles will likely bring about infrastructure improvements that could only help the city’s cultural offerings. Much of the activity will go down near the LA Coliseum, where George Lucas’s massive new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open in 2025. Director Sandra Jackson-Dumont gave very small hard-hat tours to Frieze VIPs, taking those with sturdy shoes on a swing through the museum: a 300,000-square-foot building on an 11-acre campus, with 100,000 square feet of exhibition space.
As we walked through, you could see the ambition that’s gone into the $1 billion project—Jackson-Dumont used to work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the branding typeface for the Lucas Museum vaguely resembles The Met’s red colorway. At one point she compared one section of the new building to the Temple of Dendur. “This is going to be a major part of the Olympics. This is going to represent the world,” she said. “2028, that’s tomorrow.”
