At the Hirshhorn’s Annual Gala, the Art World Braces for Trump 2.0

Like the mirrored surfaces of his iconic balloon animals, Jeff Koons has an uncannily smooth face. Reportedly worth $400 million and widely known to the world outside the confines of Planet Art, the artist can’t help but be conspicuous in a crowd. On Wednesday night at The Shed in Hudson Yards, Koons beamed, sharklike, as his expression flickered moment to moment between open warmth and blithe inscrutability. 

Koons was one of over 50 artists set to be honored at the Hirshhorn Annual New York Gala, with the D.C. museum marking its 50th anniversary with its largest fête to date. The party guests—the artist-honorees and their partners, collectors, museum trustees, funders, and hangers-on—were clad in their finest evening attire, clinking champagne flutes and posing for pictures at a pre-dinner reception on The Shed’s fourth floor. 

At the center of the room stood an enormous flower arrangement the size of a small apple tree. Like a castle with a moat, it was ringed by a circular reflective bar staffed by black-clad bartenders and waiters passing out refreshments.

One guest, a Phillips Collection board member named Jane Lole who was resplendent in pink Alexander McQueen, urged me to get familiar with the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. 

While contemporary artist and textile designer Lin Tianmiao, one of the Hirshhorn’s honorees, posed for a group photo with her cohort, her husband, the artist Wang Gongxin, enthusiastically documented the proceedings. 

The elephant in the room: the recent, crushingly decisive reelection of Donald Trump and his running mate, shadow money-adjacent buffoon J.D. Vance, who surprisingly has art world ties of his own. 

Many artists, Koons included, had publicly come out in support of achieving a different result. This fall, the artist donated a huge new piece, American Flagpole (Gazing Balls), to an Artsy-facilitated fundraiser for Kamala Harris, Artists for Kamala. The sale raised over $1.5 million. Koons’s balls, sadly, weren’t enough to sway an increasingly right-swinging nation, leaving the sculpture to become just one of many semi-absurd footnotes in Harris’s ultimately doomed presidential campaign. 

Several guests at the Hirshhorn gala were hesitant to get into the whole Trump thing. “We’re all being very careful with it,” one collector told me. The collector’s wife, an interior designer with a robust Instagram following, stood quietly by his side as we chatted, looking slightly anxious. 

“I think there’s a lot of racism and there’s a lot of stupidity,” I overheard one guest say to another. 

“I’m miserable,” Marilyn Minter exclaimed. “And Jeff hates Trump,” she confirmed of Koons. The brilliant multidisciplinary artist and her husband_, Bill Miller, a former vice president at Morgan Stanley, were holding court at a spindly cocktail table. 

“I think we just have to go to the place of one foot in front of the other, and breathe, and go about our daily business,” Minter told me. “And when we are strong enough, fight back.” 

Overseen by Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu, who’s held the position since 2014, the museum’s annual gala has sometimes pushed political themes. Inspired by the Women’s March on Washington after Trump’s first electoral victory, Chiu saw to it that the 2017 gala was dedicated to championing exclusively women artists, including Grant award winner Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jenny Holzer, and Yoko Ono. Vanity Fair photographed the 31 honorees for a spread the following March, noting: “There was a unique frisson in the air as the artists, many of whom had never met one another, came together for this photo shoot.” 

This year, the museum awarded its first-ever Hirshhorn Leader in the Arts Award to Peter Marino. The architect’s aggressively opulent design projects–he’s a favorite of luxury fashion clients like Fendi and Chanel–contrast playfully with his preferred personal uniform: pure leather daddy. 

At The Shed, Rashid Johnson, one of the artist-honorees, worked the room in a beautifully tailored, ‘70’s-inspired brown suit, which Johnson told me was custom-made for him by his friend, the designer Gabriela Hearst. 

“Even today, there have been a number of potential appointments that are challenging to swallow,” Johnson told me, gesturing towards the news that Trump had just announced a expectedly noxious roster of picks for his cabinet. “I think Sammy Davis Jr. said it best: Trying to live, not merely survive. At times like this, you have to keep your friends close and lean into your community.” 

“But I think more than anything, we have to be really conscious of the people who are most vulnerable,” Johnson continued. “Those of us who are less vulnerable need less help. [We need to] be more aware of those of us who are more vulnerable and not take on the burden ourselves but stay strong to fight for those who are going to be subject to more painful conditions.” 

Shortly afterwards, the swelling crowd of art world luminaries swept from the room and up the escalators to the eighth floor, where the main event was set to begin.