It’s Fashion Week vs. an Art World Awakening in New York City

Perhaps you are aware that it is Fashion Week in New York City. The telltale signs are here. Models are tottering on the cobblestoned Bond Street with their heels getting stuck in the rivets. All the big restaurants are posting stories announcing, “Sorry, closed this evening, private event.” Isabella Rossellini hopped in the elevator with me Thursday morning going up to the Vanity Fair HQ, and the first thing that crossed my mind was: It’s fashion week, baby.

But take a closer look at the model list for the latest collection at Carolina Herrera, once again put together by creative director Wes Gordon. There wasn’t just one or two token art people—it was a murderers’ row of people from the art world: artists Amy Sherald, Anh Duong, Eliza Douglas, Ming Smith, and Rachel Feinstein, plus Flora Currin—Feinstein’s daughter with the artist John Currin—and the gallerist Hannah Traore.

Hold on, aren’t all these art people supposed to be getting back from Doha, or sunning themselves in St. Barths or Palm Beach? How are they even going to notice what’s happening in New York yet? There’s actually quite a lot happening in New York. Even if the spring museum shows don’t start opening until March, this week, the final announcements came. Case in point: The New Museum is reopening after three years, following a massive construction project, in which a new building, just as freaky as the jumbled-blocks first one, adds nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. The inaugural group show takes over both buildings, old and new, and promises to be a banger. There are 15 commissions specifically for the show, from artists such as Ryan Gander, Camille Henrot, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Wangechi Mutu, and Hito Steyerl. And there are dozens of other artists represented, reaching back to the turn of the 20th century to today, from Francis Bacon and Salvador Dalí to younger millennials, such as the video artist Vitória Cribb, large-scale sculpture-maker Tau Lewis, the fabulous multiphyphenate Precious Okoyomon, young artist Cato Ouyang, and the painter Pol Taburet.

And I think you’ll be incredibly excited to know that the New Museum is also gifting downtown Manhattan with a new restaurant that is—I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s cool—accessible through Freeman’s Alley. It’s from Oberon Group’s Henry Rich and chef Julia Sherman, and there’s a number of artist collaborations at the restaurant, spanning the entire ecosystem of the dining experience—more to come on all that.

Hop the F train to the 7, and you’ll find yourself at MoMA PS1—which this year is hosting another anticipated edition of Greater New York, only staged twice a decade—an event that aims to take the temperature of the five boroughs and its artists. Few details were released apart from the artist roster, and and some of the artists chosen stuck in my mind, including the only non-living artist represented: Jay Carrier, who died last year and had a show at 47 Canal in January 2025, which was truly one of the year’s highlights for me.

It was also the week when the mega galleries started rolling out their first major shows of the year in Chelsea. There’s the intricately installed Michael Heizer show at Gagosian, really it has to be seen in person to soak it up, though no doubt you’ll get pretty heavy doses of it via Instagram. Matthew Marks on Thursday night opened three shows—Anne Truitt, Ron Nagle, and a three-person exhibit called “Plein Air”—and Hauser & Wirth opened a show that features, and only features, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s fantastic Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform).

But the real news lighting up my group chats wasn’t about an art gallery, but an art magazine. On Wednesday, Artforum announced that editor in chief Tina Rivers Ryan, who had been at the helm for two years, would be stepping down, and in her stead, the new co-editors would be Rachel Wetzler, currently the executive editor at the magazine, and Daniel Wenger, who has worked at The New Yorker and Harper’s, and is also a practicing artist who has shown work at galleries such as Moran Moran, Paul Soto, and STARS. The news came as something of a shock—there was no indication that Ryan was about to head out, but at the same time, the general consensus was that she steadied the great ship that is Artforum for two years following the departure of former editor David Velasco, and set up the magazine for another era of greatness. I personally think that Wetzler and Wenger are excellent choices to lead the once-and-still reigning Art World Bible. I should probably disclose that I’ve known both of them for well over a decade, but, if I can speak objectively, they’re incredibly smart, well-respected people, who clearly love the magazine. Look no further than Wetzler’s excellent cover essay on the artist Banks Violette, chronicling a remarkable career that has included a number of Irish exits from the scene and an improbable comeback via Hedi Slimane and Celine. I devoured Wetzler’s story as one should: in the ad-stuffed print magazine, heavy on my coffee table at home, after the children were fast asleep.

I would be depriving you of information if I didn’t let you know about the galas—like the wonderful RxART Gala that honored the adviser and collector, Glori Cohen, and the artist Mickalene Thomas. If you’re not familiar with RxART, it’s an incredible organization that commissions artists to make works for hospitals around the world. Another spectacular gala happened not in New York but in the glorified confines of Palm Beach. Yes, that would be the Norton Museum of Art Gala, which I attended last year and enjoyed thoroughly, resulting in a quite lengthy dispatch, which I recommend you take in, if just to soak in the weirdness that was Palm Beach after the inauguration.