How the Ritziest Ski Town Collided With the Art World—and Got Richer: It’s Aspen “on Steroids”

According to property records, the building sold in August 2021 for $6.4 million, to the developer Mark Hunt, and then was resold again for $10.4 million in February 2022.The current owners are two of the co-chairs of the gala: Rubio, the Away cofounder, and Butterfield, the Slack cofounder. It’s zoned as commercial, not residential—Rubio has rented it out to Christie’s in past summers, and could work with other art organizations in the future, as it was designed as a gallery space. Plus, Rubio and Butterfield are around all the time: She and Butterfield bought a six-bedroom estate in Aspen’s Five Trees neighborhood for $25 million in 2021.

“Jen Rubio owns it now, and she’ll enjoy it,” Boesky said.

And though the Jeff Bezoses and Tim Cooks of the world curl up at Casa Tua for après-ski, that’s not who is sustaining an art world in Aspen. It’s the dedicated collectors—take John Phelan, the former managing director of Michael Dell’s investment firm, who took it to $19 billion before starting his own firm a few years ago. His wife, Amy Phelan, whom he met in 2001, spurred on their collection, and the pair made the museum’s free-admission policy possible with their (undisclosed but presumably hefty) 2008 donation. Before ArtCrush, the Phelans invited so many visitors to their home that a traffic circle snafu left their street impenetrable and their doors barricaded due to fire codes. Those who got in saw a wildly exuberant, self-consciously sexy install, with Yayoi Kusama’s floating silver balls in an indoor pool, a Walead Beshty broken-glass floor work that visitors walk, and an Ed Ruscha that puts the whole thing in perspective: Splashed across mountains that look like the Rockies, block text exclaims, “IT’S RIDICULOUS.”

Collector Nancy Magoon has a field abutting the Elk Mountains that doubles as a sculpture garden. One dealer told me that they joined a crew to go to Rachel and Ephi Gildor’s house by the ancient Independence Pass to see a James Turrell Skyspace in the optimal light. They got there at 5:30 in the morning, and they were late. Some of the foundational names of American wealth—Walton, Tisch, Bass—have parts of their collections installed in homes near the slopes.

It’s this collecting class that allows the Aspen Art Museum to be a world-class institution for a town of less than 10,000 people. There’s an innovative program in which curators work at the museum on a temporary basis, rotating in during the busy seasons. Before leaving for the Orange County Museum of Art in 2020, director Heidi Zuckerman oversaw an impressive run of solo shows in the early years of the new building: Chris Ofili in 2015, Lynda Benglis and Danh Vo in 2016, Oscar Murillo and Seth Price in 2019, with a performance by Rashid Johnson. Nicola Lees took the helm after working as a curator at NYU’s 80WSE gallery, and before that in her native London, at an institution that, like Aspen, follows the kunsthalle method of borrowing rather than collecting.

“I come from the Serpentine, so it really felt like the Serpentine of the mountains for me when I came for my job interview,” Lees told me.

This year’s group show strays from the usual art-star solo show to spectacular effect. Allison Katz, the radical painter who joined Hauser & Wirth in 2022, was given free reign to conceive of any kind of exhibition she wanted.

And so Katz went back in time to Pompeii. Each room explores the idea of public and private spaces in the ancient Roman Empire metropolis just before it was buried in fire and ashes, with the last room confronting the explosion of Vesuvius head-on. There’s some incredible paintings by Katz—surrealistic menageries of roosters and wide-open mouths and expressionist self-portraits—and an array of work by her peers and mentors: Robert Gober, Anish Kapoor, Amy Sillman, Kerry James Marshall, Karen Kilimnik. But most remarkably, she installed the works through different rooms to mimic moving through a Pompeiian house under the volcano, and even snagged some impossible-to-secure loans of mosaics from actual Pompeii. For that she can thank cocurator Stella Bottai, who, in addition to serving as a curator-at-large at AAM, happens to also curate the contemporary art program at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

“Every artist that curates a museum show thinks it looks like this,” said a dealer at a New York gallery on their way out.

On Friday, Katz gave a walk-through to a few writers, the artist Derek Fordjour and his wife, law professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, the dealer Olivier Babin, AAM curator Simone Krug, MoMA curator Stuart Comer, and others. As Katz started rattling off where the loans came from, she came to a fascinating realization. In a town where 83% of the planes landing at Aspen/Pitkin County Airport are private jets, Katz put on an ambitious museum group show made up entirely of loans that actually offset carbon emissions by taking away the need for any fuel-burning shipping. All the loans were local—save for the mosaics, which were shipped from Italy in a consolidated crate, with loan fees waived by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and shipping costs covered by the AAM.

“We’re a non-collecting institution, so we drew on all the amazing collections down the block, which is, I guess, also very environmentally smart,” Katz said.

The Aspen Art Museum ArtCrush took place at a giant tent underneath Buttermilk Mountain. I arrived riding shotgun in a Mini Cooper convertible, Fleetwood Mac blasting, with my fellow gondola survivor Jacob King and Sam Parker, the founder of Parker Gallery in Los Angeles. It was golden hour, and the gala was golden-hour-themed. Outside, the step-and-repeat had a long, long line of people ready to have their picture taken. Inside, Sophia Cohen, an adviser to the Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles and the founder of Siren Projects, meandered by the bar, having interviewed Fordjour the day before as part of the Anderson Ranch Summer Series. She was heading to LA the next day to watch the Mets take on the Angels. Domenico De Sole, the former CEO of Tom Ford–era Gucci, strolled around with his wife, Eleanore. The artist Alex Israel was nearby, as was Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist, clad in an eye-catching cream-colored suit.

“It’s from my friend Matthieu Blazy,” he said. Makes sense. Bottega Veneta was a sponsor, and Blazy’s brand parked a boutique in Glitter Gulch last December.

Shortly into the programming, Christie’s auctioneer Adrien Meyer took the stage to commence a stacked 12-lot live auction, and things started to go gangbusters, with a work by Jacqueline Humphries selling for $400,000 to a collector in the room, and Dallas collector Nancy Rogers bidding on an Israel work that soared to $265,000 and then went higher. A painting by Emma McIntyre, who became the youngest artist on David Zwirner’s roster after joining this year, was getting bid on by Gagosian director Millicent Willner. It was the first time Christie’s had been handed the gavel for ArtCrush, and it brought a battalion of senior staff, including deputy chairman Sarah Friedlander, 21st century chair head Kathryn Widing, and many others. (Sotheby’s, which had the gig in recent years, still had a robust presence, as its brick-and-mortar store stands a block from the museum.) By the time the silent auction ended the next day, $4.5 million had been milked from the proceedings, more than double what the New Museum in New York (population 8.3 million) raised at its spring gala this year, and significantly more than what MOCA in Los Angeles (population 3.8 million) pulled in.

But before everyone could depart for the after-party at the Caribou Club, and eventually depart Aspen either commercially or otherwise—a tipster spotted at least one mega-gallery dealer and their artist hopping on a PJ at Aspen/Pitkin County Airport—the honorees took the stage to give their speeches. Ban expressed his gratitude that “the people of Aspen love our building.” Jason Moran recalled coming to Aspen with his wife decades ago when she was performing in town.

“I got high—I didn’t get high that way, but I got high…with music,” he said.

And then Humphries took the stage, not 24 hours after she feared she would fall out of a gondola door, and admitted that she too had been to Aspen before, though she had only passed through and it was a long time ago.

“We came to Colorado in the summers, and it meant driving on an unpaved road, Independence Pass,” she said before the 600 people at the gala under the tent. “Aspen was a very different place then.”