Last Sunday in Hollywood, a contingent of dealers, collectors, and artists still in town after Frieze L.A. alighted upon a restaurant called Horses, a new bistro in an old space that is impossible to get a seat at—in other words, catnip for status-obsessed art world denizens. After a stroll by the bar punctuated by stop-and-chats (a curator from New York, a powerhouse local gallery owner, a streetwear designer turned collector) dinner was in the back room, a private-ish space surrounded by paintings of horses by the young artist Kacper Abolik.

“Do you really think this is the right place to sit?” Bill Powers, the art dealer with spaces in New York and L.A., said to local rising-star gallery owner Matthew Brown, by chance seated a table over. Like all seasoned diners at the hot spot du jour, he feared his seat was actually Siberia.

A few minutes later, through a back door walked the two most famous art collectors on planet earth, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who spread their many acquisitions between homes in Bel Air, Tribeca, and East Hampton. Beyoncé sat down in a booth in the back of the room, while Jay went to say hello to former XXL editor in chief Elliott Wilson, who was seated solo at the bar, before joining his wife for dinner. The energy in the room, already giddy, turned electric.

“I guess these seats aren’t so bad,” Powers said.

During last week’s maniacal, mad-dash fair week, it became clear that Los Angeles—the city’s art infrastructure is now girded by outposts of David Zwirner, Pace, Lisson, and Hauser & Wirth—needs a crop of go-to restaurants to feed diva artists and their gallery reps every time there’s a show in town, and to fête collectors with a lavish dinner once the show opens.

The white-cube-dotted Hollywood landscape is a far cry from the late 1950s, when curator Walter Hopps and business mind Irving Blum were running Ferus Gallery and all his artists would hang out at Barney’s Beanery on La Cienega. “If there had been a flash grease fire at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood circa 1960, the entire L.A. art scene would have been wiped out,” said Ferus artist Ken Price in the 2008 documentary The Cool School.

The art boîte came to Tinseltown in a bigger way when collector Peter Morton opened Morton’s on Robertson and Melrose in 1979, and for decades helped spur on market moves by introducing generations of power-lunching Hollywood execs to the Bacons and Ruschas he hung on the wall. (The space is now the Soho House–owned Cecconi’s, and has not exactly emerged as an art world hang.) Larry Gagosian opened in Beverly Hills in 1995, and has made Mr. Chow the spot for post-opening dinners. (The spot for post-post-opening dinners is always Larry’s house in Holmby Hills—the ultimate art world hang.) Tower Bar, in Bugsy Siegel’s former apartment on the ground floor of the Sunset Tower, has long been a favorite haunt of Hollywood-adjacent art transactors, especially since the owners installed a Lawrence Weiner on a divider that faces the iconic pool.

But this is a new era of Los Angeles as an art capital full of art capital. After decades of trying, it’s finally a closed-circuit scene with a self-sufficient motor, no longer a small set of a few galleries with budget sheets kept in the black by hobbyist buyers in The Industry. Enter the need for a batch of newly opened but already on-rotation spots that can provide the fairy dust of exclusivity, reliability of strong cocktails and large-format staples, and the dim-lit atmosphere that invites both deal making and bad behavior alike.

Horses currently leads by a few lengths.

“A lot of the places we drew inspiration from were exactly those restaurants,” said Liz Johnson, who acts as a chef alongside her husband, Will Aghajanian, and other partners, many of whom also work the line. The couple are also co-owners of the space.

Aghajanian, sitting beside the open kitchen minutes before the start of dinner service, chimed in with some other points of inspiration: Keith McNally, River Café, Spago, Swifty’s, Contramar, Zuni Café. Both Johnson and Aghajanian, who had on their chef’s whites, brought up New York’s Lucien, a place they love, and like Lucien, Horses also has crayons and paper table covers, in case the muse strikes.

“It’s like about café society—” Aghajanian said.

“—just a little bit, nope nope!” came a cry from a line chef to someone at the vegetable station.

“—and how can we create the right vibe for that, and let people be comfortable, so they don’t think it’s too stuffy.”

When we spoke on Sunday, it was clear that Horses and its Cornish game hen had become the week’s most reliable redoubt. On Wednesday, Phoebe Saatchi—daughter of British ad man Charles Saatchi, who through the ’80s bought YBA masterpieces by the warehouse-load—hosted a dinner with her husband, Arthur Yates, that took over the entire back room, with collectors and auction-house rainmakers dotting every table. Bobby Flay sat at the bar. On Friday, Maritza Lerman Yoes, former social media strategist for Tesla and LACMA, threw a bash in the back room. Beck was there, as was Benny Blanco. On Saturday, maître d’ Charlotte Lansbury Instagrammed a screenshot of the Horses ResyOS, revealing that the wait list for a table that night had 1,410 names on it.

“It’s insane,” Johnson said, of the demand.

“I don’t even know how that works,” Aghajanian said.

“There’s hard work, and there’s also luck, and we had really great timing,” Johnson said. “After the pandemic everyone was like, I want to fucking party, I want to go out, I want to hang out with my friends, and everyone wants to go out and eat right now.”

Far from Horses in the downtown arts district, the restaurant Manuela has become a reliable spot for Hauser & Wirth dinners…which makes sense as it’s owned by Hauser’s Iwan Wirth and his wife Manuela, the restaurant’s namesake, and housed next to the gallery spaces. On the walls are sketches made at dinner breaks by heavy hitters from the roster like Henry Taylor, Paul McCarthy, and Rashid Johnson.

Hauser will look to replicate the model with its new shop at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard in the center of West Hollywood. When the gallery opens this fall, it will also have its own dedicated eatery, perhaps one that aims to replace the nearby Dan Tana’s as the reliable hang in the neighborhood.

Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo are restaurateur-collectors who cater not to just one gallery, but basically all of them. They opened Animal in 2008 with the backing of art publisher turned mega-collector Benedikt Taschen and his wife, Lauren, and have since opened Jon & Vinny’s, Son of a Gun, Petit Trois (with Ludo Lefebvre), and other spaces that have hosted many, many gallery dinners. Last week, the Jon & Vinny’s in Brentwood cooked for the New York gallery Karma, and Dotolo—who in 2016 curated a show at the Hollywood gallery M+B—was seen at Frieze in its opening hour and at the dinner for Robert Nava’s new show at Night Gallery.

But the most genuine of the new art boîtes, the spiritual descendant to Barney’s Beanery, isn’t in Hollywood or Beverly Hills. It’s El Prado, a small natural-wine bar that serves condiment-crisscrossed hot dogs on a quiet block of Sunset in Echo Park, and is owned by the artist Nick Fisher, who worked his way up at Prado after starting out as the door guy.

Los Angeles is not a town known for organic random meetups at bars, and yet for artists it’s tough to go to El Prado without running into a colleague or acquaintance. In the last few months, stop-ins have led to pét-nat-soaked nights with the artists Calvin Marcus and Lucy Bull, who designed a light box installed on the ceiling in the outdoor smoking section; Online Ceramics designers Alix Ross and Elijah Funk; Oneohtrix Point Never mastermind Daniel Lopatin; and directors from galleries such as David Kordansky, Blum & Poe, and Gagosian. A gathering on Sunday after the Horses dinner drew many of the art world denizens dining at that restaurant (sadly not Jay and Bey), and they joined a bustling crowd that was half rising L.A. guard, half New York interloper art dealers still in town for Frieze.

Much of that has to do with Fisher. After his art training at the University of Oregon in Eugene, he started ambling down the left coast to Northern California, working as a brewer and winemaker, when Marcus, his old buddy from college, called him to come down to L.A. and crash at his Lincoln Heights studio. Once in town, Fisher combined his brewing chops and art background to stage performance-art pieces where he would sling drinks at a bar-as-exquisite-corpse, with each part contributed by a different artist, at artist-run spaces such as the sadly departed 356 Mission, cofounded in the mid-teens by the artist Laura Owens along with gallerist Gavin Brown and bookseller Wendy Yao.

“The first one was in Calvin’s studio, and we threw this rager there, and everyone kind of remembered it,” Fisher said, sitting outside of El Prado Monday evening drinking a glass of a Cab Franc. “We just partied all night. There was some mushroom tea and illegally imported mezcal, with beer that I brewed in the backyard at Calvin’s studio. So it was always something that had so many different heads contributing.”

Fisher took over ownership of El Prado in 2019, and immediately fused elements of the performance-art bar into the DNA of the decades-old, paying-customers-on-Sunset bar. Artists gave Fisher work for bar tabs, and tab-in-hand brought their artist friends to drink for free, and voilà, a scene.

As speakers piped in Roxy Music’s Avalon, spinning on the record player inside, Fisher said he was tentatively looking forward to the ways in which an influx of New York and international art world personalities would shift the vibe in town. Anyone’s welcome, of course, but he said he wasn’t really letting galleries rent out the whole spot for private events.

“I’m still trying to be a neighborhood bar,” Fisher said. “We’re so DIY and funky, you get a bunch of rich dealers in here and they’re like, ‘This place is a fuckin’ dive bar, let’s go somewhere nice.’”

But there are certain elements of the art-boîte expansion in Los Angeles that appeal to Fisher. A rising tide lifts all boats, and anyone who enjoys a nice meal and good wine can see the appeal of new restaurants showing up to feed the art world.

“I said to some friends, ‘Look, we party here every week. I want to go to Beverly Hills this weekend, throw down the big bucks and take us out to the nice restaurants,’” Fisher said, finishing his wine. “That’s where we wanna go. I want to go to fucking Horses, you know?”

Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…The cover story of the latest How to Spend It, the Financial Times’s lush weekend supplement for the mega-yacht crowd, is a wonderful, all-access profile of Larry Gagosian, in which writer Robert Armstrong makes a great argument that Gagosian is the best art dealer to ever play the game. Dive in and you get beefy secondaries from Met director Max Hollein and former Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, plus some excellent pictures of Chez Larry by Tyler Mitchell. Perhaps the best moment is this bonkers anecdote involving one work in the Gagosian collection hanging at the house: John Currin’s portrait of Jennifer Lawrence, which he made for the cover of Vogue’s September 2017 issue to mark that magazine’s 125th anniversary. Apparently J-Law was offered the work through Gagosian, Currin’s gallery, but passed, so Larry bought it himself. Then years later, Armstrong reports, Lawrence went to a dinner party at Gagosian’s house, saw the painting, and tried to buy it, to which Gagosian replied, “Sorry Jennifer, I love you, but that ship has sailed.”

…After weeks of marketing and fanfare, panels and parties, the latest mega-million NFT evening sale at Sotheby’s sure looks like it flopped Wednesday night. It’s been nearly a year since that Beeple sold at Christie’s for the equivalent of $69 million in ETH, followed by a year of NFTs going for numbers higher than anyone could have imagined. But on Wednesday, a heralded lot of 104 CryptoPunks only managed a single bid, for well under its $20–30 million estimate. As a result, the consignor shocked the auction house brass, tweeting that he would “hodl” (“hold,” for the non-extremely online) the work and cancel the sale, claiming that he had “rugg[ed]” (“pulled the rug on,” sigh) Sotheby’s. Inconveniently for hundreds of NFT fanboys, crypto junkies, opportunistic art world bandwagoners looking for a paycheck, and rubbernecking journalists…they were all at Sotheby’s on the Upper East Side when the fiasco occurred. Perhaps the NFT boom will be a casualty of the vibe shift…

…LaGuardia has teamed up with the Queens Museum to commission six permanent artworks for the soon-to-open Delta Airlines hub in Terminal C. The artists chosen are ​​Mariam Ghani, Rashid Johnson, Aliza Nisenbaum, Virginia Overton, Ronny Quevedo, and Fred Wilson. Before we get all cynical about this, let’s remember that Terminal B has been greatly improved by the works installed in 2020, especially by the sprawling Laura Owens that greets passengers as they enter the pre-security departures area. An Owens tiled mosaic of iconic New York City stuff—what could be better than that?!

…Next week in London, the evening sales at the three major auction houses will be the first major test of the art market in 2022, and all indications point to things going quite swimmingly. All eyes are on the opening suite of lots in each house’s sale, which lean heavily on the prevailing trend of the moment: brightly colored pseudo-surrealist paintings by young women artists. Expect works by Lauren Quin, Hilary Pecis, Shara Hughes, Rachel Jones, Jadé Fadojutimi, Flora Yukhnovich, and Issy Wood to all explode out the gate and sell for prices several times higher than their already bullish estimates.

Total brought in by Xavier Hufkens, which sold six very large paintings by Thomas Houseago—Brad Pitt’s best friend—in the fair’s first day: $2.1 million

Price of a McCarthy salad at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, after tax and tip: $58

Number of big James Turrell installations in Hollywood Hills homes used as party locations: 2 (the Sybil Robson Orr House and the James Goldstein House)

Number of cast members of the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers present at the opening day of the fair: 3 (Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jane Seymour)

Number of pictures of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in Los Angeles last week on BFA: 36

Number of pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow talking to artist Alex Israel in Los Angeles last week on BFA: 1

Number of attendees over the course of four days: more than 30,000

Cost of a ticket to the fair on preview-day Friday: $227

Cost of a ticket to the fair if you’re a VIP attending on the invite-only first day: $0

And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.

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