Vanity Fair
Art Basel Party-Hopping! Vanity Fair Celebrates Tracey Emin, Marco Glaviano Iconizes Cindy Crawford, and Richard Phillips Fêtes His Hot Rod’s “Sexiness”
Brett BerkAs you may know, Art Basel is famous for its boozy, celebrity-dotted parties. And last night we packed our schedule with a panoply of them—including Vanity Fair’s very own celebration of artist Tracey Emin. Along the way we ran into everyone from Cindy Crawford to Kevin Spacey. Take a stroll through our list and help us remember what we did.
Venus Over Manhattan: Our first stop was the V.I.P. preview of an art exhibit curated by Adam Lindemann’s Venus Over Manhattan gallery, sponsored by Ferrari, and consisting entirely of pieces created on, about, or adjacent to the automobile. Artists represented included Richard Prince, Kieth Haring, Damien Hirst, and Kenny Scharf.
Richard Phillips was there with an extremely powerful and incredibly loud, black 1972 Dodge Charger, which he created in collaboration with Playboy magazine. “The car has a dimension of sexuality and sexiness,” Phillips told us. “When we turn it on, it comes alive. It is no longer inert.” This sentiment echoed his feelings about the Herzog and de Meuron-designed parking structure, in which the show was held. “Like the car, it’s a cross section between art and functionality.” Perhaps the same could be said for the Playboy bunnies that surrounded him?
Art Miami: One of the major fairs that takes place during Art Week, Art Miami, occurs in the Wynwood Arts District. We popped by for the opening night preview, and bumped into Cindy Crawford, who was in town to help celebrate a retrospective of photographic portraits of her made by Marco Glaviano, and mounted by the Keszler Gallery. These diamond-dusted black-and-white and color images were printed on canvas and sparkled gloriously in the overhead lights.
We asked Crawford, who arrived at the event in a gorgeous Maserati Quattroporte GTS, how it felt to be surrounded by so many glamorous images of herself. “A lot of these pictures were taken for my swimsuit calendar,” she said, “and were taken with a specific audience in mind—who buys swimsuit calendars? Mostly young men. But looking at them, they seem way more iconic now.” Crawford was especially fond of a grouping of tight portraits of her face, rendered in pop-y color, and grouped together. “As the mother of a young daughter, I see my youthful, girly self in these pictures,” she told us.
Berluti: Meanwhile, over in the Design District, storied cobbler Berluti was hosting an intimate get-together at their pop-up store to celebrate their recent collaboration with Dutch designer Maarten Baas. Extending Berluti’s usual focus on handsome menswear, Baas created a number of items that would be found in a gentleman’s dressing room. These included a valet, two mirrors (including a shoe mirror!), and a chaise. Each of the pieces was covered in the designer’s exclusive synthetic resin-based clay, lending them a combination of the stately and the whimsical. We were smitten with them, as we were with everything else in the store, including the store’s cocktails, which were served in goblets.
Museum of Contemporary Art: Next up was the Phillips party (co-hosted at MOCA by Vanity Fair) celebrating the opening of a neon-centric exhibit by Tracey Emin entitled “Angel Without You.” Throngs of guests, including Kevin Spacey, Pharrell Willams and his wife Helen Lasichanh, Princess Eugenie, Damien Hirst and his girlfriend Roxie Nafousi, and featured artist Emin herself were in attendance, along with thousands of other revelers, crowding the museum’s galleries and charming open-air garden.
Later that night, at an exclusive after party at Soho House, we saw Vanity Fair photographer Bruce Weber; Marc Spiegler, director of Art Basel Miami Beach; and Val Kilmer (who we are beginning to believe may be stalking us). Everyone stood around the double pools in the backyard drinking Grey Goose cocktails, paying careful attention not to fall in.
Le Baron: Next we stumbled a couple miles down Collins to the SL Nightclub James Royal Palm hotel for an after-after party hosted by our friends from Le Baron, the discreetly chic global nightclub chain. After-after parties are rarely a good idea, but this one was not only fun, it was also on-brand, as Le Baron is known for nothing if not carousing until dawn. The capacity of the room was listed at around two hundred, but there must have been a thousand people packed into a space smaller than our grandma’s den, smoking, dancing, drinking, and pretending not to notice that some of them were much, much younger than others, and that at least one of them was Lola Schnabel.
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