‘Art Is the Ideal Placeholder for Derelict Real Estate’: Hot Takes and Hangovers at Frieze Los Angeles

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Frieze Week in my home city of Los Angeles began with the opening of 99Cent, a gargantuan, wild, spur-of-the-moment group show collectively organised by street art legend Barry McGee, New York gallery The Hole, and the artists of Los Angeles. For one week only, it showcased the work of more than 200 artists in every sort of medium, mounted on every exposed surface of an almost-20,000-square-foot liquidated storefront on Wilshire Boulevard. Wading through its packed aisles felt a lot like scrolling through the most chaotic algorithm, where my oversaturated brain continually reset itself from one moment to the next. Unable to process almost anything I saw, I do remember sweating in the damp heat and searching for a painting by my partner that I never found. My fragmented memory also recalls seeing:

... a kinetic sculpture of a rotating circle of microwaves; a live sitar player with electric pickups; the musician Mia Carucci performing inside an empty refrigerator; market economist Magnus Resch chatting with The Disaster Artist (2017) director and star James Franco (my first sighting of many of the pair, who I collectively dubbed ‘Manco’); visitors with spray cans tagging up the shelves; visitors tagging up the windows as they waited in line outside; an irate security guard cursing about the kids lighting up their joints indoors; posters by Alfonso Gonzalez Jr; a pamphlet titled Making Art During Fascism that I placed in my purse; and a recurring announcement over the intercom asking guests, politely, to please make their way toward the exits so that the people waiting outside could come in....

The line wrapped two or three times around the block, totalling more than 2,400 people. “We actually let in everyone that waited,” The Hole founder Kathy Grayson later texted me, “which made me really happy.” 

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“The contraction of the art market had opened a space for artists to organise among themselves”

That 99Cent extravaganza captured the essence of perhaps my favourite LA Frieze Week ever: seven days of last-minute group shows continuously dropping into my Instagram feed. It seemed as though the contraction of the art market had opened a space for artists to organise among themselves; you’d see a flyer on Tuesday for a group show opening on Saturday at someone’s studio, a bar or some type of abandoned building. In a week of profound community alignment and reassertion of local identity, LA-based artists who are friends and family to me could be seen in multiple group shows and fairs around town. Here in Los Angeles, we talk about the “LA community” so often it can be annoying, but it really is a beautiful thing.

“If you’re an artist and you weren’t in five shows this week, were you really in LA?” — Untitled Art Houston director Michael Slenske (joking)

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Frieze Week in LA is anchored by parties in beautiful mid-century homes—the kind with quintessentially indoor/outdoor spaces and turquoise pools that no one swims in. On Monday night I had tiny tacos at Jumex juice heir Eugenio López Alonso’s opulent Beverly Hills estate, a very genteel gathering of the collector class that included LA artist Paul McCarthy, collector Beth Rudin deWoody, Borat screenwriter Anthony Hines and the Manco duo (sighting number two).

On Tuesday night, New York and LA galleries Sebastian Gladstone, Morán Morán and One Trick Pony hosted their annual roast at OTP founder Arty Nelson’s place in the Hollywood Hills, where you have to cross a little bridge over a stream to enter the front door. A rowdier crowd of younger gallerists and other art workers gathered to eat a pig that had been roasting in a tomb of hot coals all day. While I was smoking in the backyard with New York-based Canadian performance artist and sculptor Miles Greenberg, he asked me if anyone had ever fallen. “Into the moat? I don’t think so.” “No,” he replied, “I mean down the hill.” We were standing on the edge of a precipitous drop-off, but one with a devastatingly beautiful view of the city lights.

My party of the week was Thursday evening in the home of Esther Kim Varet, Democratic candidate for the US House of Representatives and founder of the gallery Various Small Fires. Varet and W magazine hosted a joint party for three different Institute of Contemporary Art institutions based around California (in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose), resulting in a guest list of mainly artists and fashion people, everyone being very attractive and mostly gay. Club beats pulsed in the courtyard (thank you DJ Bradley John!) as we admired the efficiency of Kim Varet’s home, all modernist architecture in a highly diverse palette of matte greys.

Because the ICAs are non-partisan organisations, the event was strictly unaffiliated with Kim Varet’s congressional bid—a fact that might have been muddled if, hypothetically, a box of campaign merchandise had materialised on the kitchen counter, or if, hypothetically, the men on the dance floor had been wearing camo-print “Esther for Congress” trucker hats. Hypothetically.

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Takes (as in, hot takes) are, I think, a new kind of currency; people love to hear an opinion in 30 seconds or less. I asked David Kordansky gallery administrator César Recalde Vázquez-Añón for his Frieze LA take, and he said the week had been “Miamified”—that is, saturated with brand collaborations, particularly ones that hadn’t been on my Frieze LA bingo card: photographer Gregory Crewdson with Canadian fashion retailer Aritzia, for example, or artist Lauren Halsey with LA-based denim label Citizens of Humanity.

“Takes are, I think, a new kind of currency”

This year, Autre magazine and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch’s annual Monday party at The Edition hotel was sponsored by LA fashion label and purveyor of “understated luxury” Vince, which did not furnish an open bar, but did offer cookies with their logo written in icing, and mountains of cigarettes and Vince-branded lighters that were quickly whisked away as people started lighting up indoors. Under a ceiling of disco balls, the dance floor sparkled with familiar faces, including local artists, eight-time Grammy winner Beck, and Manco sighting number three.  

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I woke up on Friday with a splitting headache, a hell of my own creation. After the ICA party I went to an art fundraiser for victims of Jamaica’s Hurricane Melissa, in a beautifully well-appointed Hollywood private club that explicitly requested not to be named. The event began with a spirited bidding war (overseen by Swiss auctioneer Simone de Pury) between America’s Next Top Model’s Winnie Harlow and 13-time Grammy nominee Diplo. Let’s just say the evening took off from there.

We can fast forward through my two-day hangover straight to Sunday, the next time I left the house. My partner Joe and I went back to Wilshire Boulevard, where the family that owns the derelict 99 Cent store also owns the office building and decommissioned Sizzler steakhouse next door. These became the temporary homes of Away From Desk, a five-gallery art fair alternative, and a group event named Sizzler Art Show, which included work by Lucy Bull, 1980s icon Mark Kostabi, and almost 40 others.

“The week had been “Miamified”—that is, saturated with brand collaborations”

At Away From Desk, I did the “Take Room”, a live panel organised by Artillery magazine where critics voiced their impressions of the week. I said some maudlin things about LA reasserting its identity after years of being seen as an extension of New York. And about art’s ability to fill any container, making it the ideal placeholder for derelict real estate, for better or worse. Outside, Wilshire Boulevard was buzzing with people hopping between abandoned buildings that had been filled with works of art.

A homegrown artist with a Penske-branded rental truck (similar to New York’s itinerant U-Haul gallery, which was also parked just down the street) was sitting out front with his paintings displayed inside the vehicle. They guy’s name was Oliver Dabao, and he told me he had just sold a painting for the first time, for $4,500. “I found out LA Art Week was this week, and I had something to show and figured out a way to get it out there,” he said. I, sincerely, could not have been happier for him. —[O]

Main image: Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE), Frieze Projects, 'Body & Soul', in partnership with Art Production Fund, Frieze Los Angeles 2026. Courtesy Frieze. Photo: Casey Kelbaugh/CKA.