The Art World Pauses Its Summer Holiday for Aspen’s Jam-Packed ArtWeek

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Every summer, the art world is distilled into its purest, most potent form during Aspen ArtWeek, a full calendar of art fairs, dinners, parties, and gallery openings that this year runs July 30 to August 3. The week culminates, on August 2, with the storied ArtCrush Gala. Part dinner, part dance party, and part charity auction, the gala is one of the art world’s most prestigious events and a fundraiser for the Aspen Art Museum. Last year it raised around $3.8 million.

“It really is a major summer art world event that galvanizes the collecting community in the mountains,” art adviser and independent curator Molly Epstein, who is co-chairing the ArtCrush Collector Committee with adviser Abigail Goodman for the second consecutive year, told ARTnews. “Part of what has always made it an incredible event and a special convening is that it brings a lot of artists and curators and galleries to the Rockies to support the museum, but also celebrates contemporary art each year when most of the art world is headed off on holiday.”

This year’s sale is notable—for the first-time the museum will allow artists featured in the ArtCrush gala auction to keep a portion of profits, up to 30 percent of the proceeds from their works sold. “As an artist-founded institution, artists are centered within all we do, and the fulfilment of our mission depends on their trust,” Nicola Lees, the museum’s director, said in a statement to ARTnews when the profit-sharing program was announced.

More than 50 works will be on the block during the auction, which begins August 2 and is led by Christie’s global head of private sales and co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art Adrien Meyer. This year includes works donated by artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Allison Katz, Emma McIntyre, Shota Nakamura, and Marina Perez Simão.

If the gala’s committee is any indication, the event will be teeming with A-listers, society folk, and dignitaries. The committee includes the new MoMA president Sarah Arison and her partner Thomas Wilhelm; cofounder and CEO of Away luggage Jen Rubio and her husband Stewart Butterfield, who cofounded both Flickr and Slack; Charlie Pohlad, who is on Biden’s President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (and is a member of the ultra-wealthy Pohlad family); and Domenico De Sole, the chief executive of Tom Ford–era Gucci.

For those who make the trek, the week will be filled with events ranging from the pastoral to the glamourous to the overtly highbrow. There’s an invitation-only hike with the artist Lena Henke, a performance by Ryan Trecartin on the summit of Aspen Mountain, and talks between Jacqueline Humphries and Hamza Walker, Allison Katz and James Meyer, and Shigeru Ban in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Over the past couple years, Aspen has returned to roughly what it was like pre-Covid. While the city has always been a bolt-hold for the collector/patron class, the pandemic ramped up its market potential. With the cancellation of art fairs across the globe and a growing aversion among collectors to the online viewing room, galleries starting launching long-term pop-ups in well-heeled enclaves like the Hamptons, and Palm Beach in search of a home near their benefactors. In 2021, Lévy Gorvy and Lehmann Maupin opened spots in Aspen. Almine Rech, London’s White Cube, and Malin Gallery soon followed.

“Aspen is important because there are so many collectors here,” Richard Edwards, cofounder of Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery, told ARTnews. “When you get a confluence of rich collectors from all over the world, museum people follow because, of course, it’s easy for them visit their donors. It’s only natural that galleries and artists follow.” 

Some, however, saw Aspen’s market potential well before the pandemic. Marianne Boesky, who’d been a regular visitor since she was a child, opened a fully programed, year-round outpost in 2017. 

“When Covid hit, obviously everything changed for everyone,” Boesky told ARTnews. “Everyone had to close, everything was up in the air.” 

The enthusiasm for outposts has since cooled, but not for lack of market interest, according to Boesky, who suggested that landlords in places like Palm Beach and Aspen started trying to charge peak season rates year-round. For many galleries, she said, it no longer made financial sense. (Boesky sold her Annabell Selldorf–designed Aspen building in 2021 for over $6 million during the post-Covid real estate boom; it sold six months later for over $10 million.)

But Boesky has far from abandoned Aspen, instead opting to hold summer pop-ups. This year, Boesky will show geometric abstractions by Sanford Biggers, Svenja Deininger, and Sarah Meyohas, the latter of which has become something of a digital art darling. New Orleans–based gallery M.S. Rau is also holding an Aspen pop-up, which this summer will show antiques, jewelry, and fine art by Renoir, Gaugin, Warhol, and George Condo, as well as a $20 million Degas pastel work, Ukrainian Dancers, that made an appearance at Tefaf Maastricht.

But ArtWeek is not comprised solely of gallery pop-ups and museum-related events. For the first time, Aspen will host two art fairs during ArtWeek. The city’s original fair, Intersect Aspen, which began life in 2010 as Art Aspen, once again takes place in the 16,000 square-foot Aspen Ice Garden. There are 30 galleries participating including Aspen Collective, Hilton Contemporary, HOFA, Jackson Fine Art, and Winston Wächter Fine Art. There will also be a strong international contingent and 12 first time participators, including Tel Aviv’s Corridor Contemporary. 

At Intersect’s entrance, visitors will be greeted by sculptor Gino Miles’s massive 9x8x15-foot stainless steel sculpture titled Passage. The work is on offer by Sponder Gallery for $700,000. The Chicago-based gallery Hilton Contemporary, meanwhile, will bring work by new media art duo Ouchhh. At Art Dubai this year, the gallery showed the duo’s physical version of Human Cell Atlas Project  (created in partnership with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN). The digital version became the first AI artwork in space thanks to a Nova-C lander named “Odysseus,” carried by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, that in February touched down on the moon, the first American spacecraft to accomplish that feat since Apollo 17 in 1972. Hilton Contemporary will bring two unique works, “spliced” as it were, from the Human Cell project, at $250,000 each. Each work will also come with its own DPP—a digital product passport that safeguards the authenticity of the work and ensures the integrity of the ownership and provenance on the block chain.

The second fair, which takes place at the storied Hotel Jerome, is aptly named the Aspen Art Fair. The bar at the Jerome is, sources told ARTnews, historically where deals get done, and therefore a shrewd venue for a hotel fair, the trendy solution to collectors and dealers craving more intimate environs and interactions than the contemporary mega-fair can offer. 

“The fair is really an art, design, lifestyle, luxury, and hospitality takeover,” Becca Hoffman, Aspen Art Fair’s cofounder, told ARTnews. (Hoffman is also the former director of Outsider Art Fair and Intersect and currently runs 74tharts.) “We are occupying pretty much the entire face of the ground floor of the Jerome.” 

That ground-floor occupancy consists of 16 hotel rooms, three of which will be reserved for artist residencies and the remainder for galleries. There will be also 18 traditional art fair booths, where PATRON, Miles McEnery, and Perrotin, among others, will set up shop. 

While most galleries were cagey about what they are bringing to the fairs, Galerie Gmurzynska said it was bring Wifredo Lam’s 1969 work Je dors, je vois, priced at $150,000, an untitled 1963 work by Roberto Matta for around $250,000, and an undisclosed Picasso around $3 million.

When a new fair launches in a one-horse town, it’s not outrageous to think there might be some animosity in the air. But among the dozen or so people ARTnews spoke to, the pervading theme was that Aspen stands out because the people that live there care deeply about the arts, aesthetics, and the power of institutions. 

When asked about the new fair, Tim von Gal, chief executive of Intersect Art and Design, told ARTnews that putting on a fair “is such an investment of time, effort, energy, and love that it takes all of our focus to arrange what we think is going to be a great fair. Maybe it’s a little naive but you know, we feel that if we work hard to present the best fair weekend, there’s nothing else to worry about.”

I’ll leave you with one travel tip from the locals. Stop at Carl’s Pharmacy and pick up an oxygen tank, starting at $9.99, or the herbal remedy Altitude Adjustment. One, or both, will help cure that one thing in Aspen you’ll want to avoid: altitude sickness.