Inside the LACMA Gala, Hollywood’s Starriest Museum Moment

On Saturday night, with Brat Summer showing no sign of abating, Charli XCX was standing surrounded by bodyguards in the courtyard outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She wore a red Gucci leather coat and a red Gucci bra as Chloe Sevingy took the stage microphone-in-hand.

“Make some fucking noise for Charli XCX!” the latter screamed.

Andrew Garfield, Kaia Gerber, Laura Dern, Colman Domingo, and Taylor Zakhar Perez

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Kim Kardashian and Chloë Sevigny

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Laura Dern, Sarah Paulson, Kaia Gerber, and Ricky Martin

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Charli strutted onto the stage, passing by friends such as Emily Ratajakowski, Cara Delevigne, and Kaia Gerber—“Yaaaaas bitch,” Gerber said to Charli—as the pop star began “360.” Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno filmed and mouthed along to every word next to the artist Alex Israel. Charli’s tourmate all summer, Troye Sivan, surprised the audience by performing their remix of “Talk Talk” and the crowd went nuts.

“Where my gays at?” Charli asked, to deafening screams.

This wasn’t your typical stop on the Sweat tour. It was the 13th annual LACMA Art+Film Gala. Disney CEO Bob Iger was there, having spent the dinner portion of the evening sitting right next to Charli herself. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos was watching, Laurene Powell Jobs was in the scrum, as was Francois Henri-Pinault, operator of Artemis, which runs Gucci parent Kering and Christie’s and CAA. Was that artist Cathy Opie near Ricky Martin? There was David Geffen, who spent $150 million of his fortune to fund the new Peter Zumthor-designed LACMA building that will bear his name, idling near the dozens of models in Gucci fits. Even LACMA’s Michael Govan, one of the world’s most respected museum heads, was singing along—he later admitted to me that he has a bunch of Charli’s music on various playlists.

Cara Delevingne, Kaia Gerber, and Dree Hemingway

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Emily Ratajkowski and Stella Maxwell

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Ostensibly, the LACMA Art+Film Gala is just that, a museum gala, that asks the board of trustees and local patrons to spend tax-deductible funds to benefit their city’s cultural hub. Every museum has a fundraiser, and the one for the 63-year-old museum that serves Los Angeles County is a particularly successful one. It raised $6.5 million on Saturday, a record total and a big number for the institutional landscape. It’s $2 million more than even the billionaire-stuffed Aspen Art Museuam’s ArtCrush mustered in August.

But more than fundraising, Art+Film has become a cultural flashpoint that transcends museumdom and becomes a pop-culture content machine. Only a few galas, or parties in general, feed the celeb-heavy instagram handles and the Daily Mails of the world days of wall-to-wall photos. And that ubiquity is fully harnessed. Once again the event was presented by Gucci, and De Sarno used the evening as a platform to debut new looks from his Gucci Notte evening wear line, effectively staging a fashion show in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light. Most of these functions have a token celebrity to help the rich folk in—but the LACMA Gala has Blake Lively and Kim Kardashian. There’s also the fact that LACMA is just a few months away from the scheduled unveiling of its gigantic new building in April 2025. Built over the course of nearly a decade to the tune of $750 million, it will soon at last open on Wilshire Boulevard.

It helps that the bash is hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow, the art-collecting ex-wife of restaurateur Michael Chow. But the real power comes from the museum’s tactic of honoring one visual artist and one film director each year and harnessing the respective powers of those two industries. We’ve talked a lot about the ways in which contemporary art and Hollywood are like oil and water. But Art+Film might be the only place where the two worlds truly do intertwine in a way that seems seamless. The honorees often have double-dipping industry fan bases and such was the case this year. Baz Luhrmann is a longtime art world staple who used to hang at Klaus Biesenbach’s office at MoMA PS1 in Queens during parties there. Simone Leigh has two shows up in town, at LACMA and the California African American Museum, underwritten by a number of entertainment industry biggies—and she also herself works eloquently in the mode of film, most prominently with Conspiracy, a film made with collaborator Madeleine Hunt-Erhlich.

It’s certainly the only gala where one table was bought by the tasteful and tastemaking gallerist Matthew Marks, and the next tables over were purchased by Netflix, Google, NBC, and Snap.

Ricky Martin, Laura Dern, Andrew Garfield, and Simon Amstell

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Michelle Rodriguez

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Stella Maxwell

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

The evening started earlier that day, when Leigh arrived at the museum for a sprint through her show with de Sarno, and Govan, and the three of them were standing in front of the Resnick Pavilion staring at Sentinel, a 16-foot, 1,120-pound sculpture first seen at the US pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Editions of Sentinel are owned by MoMA (purchased with funds from Steve and Alexandra Cohen) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington (with funds provided by Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales). LACMA has never situated a work on the platform outside the Resnick Pavilion, and it is under 24/7 surveillance.

“We’ve never installed anything here but with the Academy Museum it’s become this energy point, so we wanted to put this here, and we want to keep it here for a long time,” Govan said.

By evening invited guests were dropped off by black cars. Many gawked at the new building that undulates over the highway as they walked in. Ford Foundation president Darren Walker buttonholed MoCA LA director Johanna Burton to tell her “this is the most fun gala, I always tell people from New York that you have to come to this gala.” Lorraine Nicholson went to say hello to Alex Israel, who was in sunglasses, as always. In another form of crossover, Israel seemed most excited about the fact that he got to meet “both Menendez brothers”—referring to the actors Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, who played infamous siblings on Monsters, and not the actual Menendezes, who are still incarcerated for the time being.

More art-meets-film: Govan wove through a crowd to say hello to Iger; the CAA mega-agent and collector Joel Lubin introduced himself to the artist Lucy Bull and declared himself to be a fan of the painter’s work; Owen Wilson broke off from speaking with the artists Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka to say hello to DiCaprio, who was standing with his father, the legendary underground comics publisher George DiCaprio.

Emily Ratajkowski

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

And of course, well-wishers waited to pay their respects to the honorees, with Leigh taking selfies with Govan and catching up with Law Roach. When I congratulated Baz, whom I’ve gotten to know a little bit over the years (he even met my daughter as a six month old, in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont) he spoke in typical word-of-god proclamations, humbled by the approval of his peers in the industry, and in the art world.

“We’ve been on this journey for a long time,” he told me.

Govan began the evening’s program by reaching across the aisle to his fellow Los Angeles museum directors: MoCA’s Burton, Cameron Shaw of the CAAM, Sandra Jackson-Dumont of the soon to open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Amy Homma of the Academy Museum, and Ann Philbin, the outgoing director of the Hammer Museum

“I call her Annie Philbin—the director of the Hammer Museum for the past two decades, who is stepping down after 25 years of helping to build Los Angeles and the arts as a true leader,” he said. “Annie, we love you.”

Javier Bardem, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

Guests finished up the sliced cuts of wagyu provided by Simon Kim’s grand, gussied-up, NYC-based Korean BBQ joint Cote. Andrew Garfield, jammed beside Dev Patel and Javier Bardem, came up to congratulate Luhrmann after Laura Dern did. Then everyone was rushed to their seats for the speeches. Sarandos made it back to his from the bar just in time, each fist clutching a martini, one for him and one for his wife, former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas Nicole Avant.

“My formerly enslaved great-grandparents raised a little girl who was my grandmother,” said Bryan Stevenson, the social justice activist—and inspiration for the film Just Mercy—in his introduction of Leigh. “My grandmother was a powerful force in my life. She would whisper things in my ear, she would teach me things.”

He explained that he discovered Leigh’s work shortly before she represented the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and was shocked when he walked into the Arsenale and saw the artist’s 16-foot Brick House, which he later helped install in the entrance to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama.

Kaytranada and Yara Shahidi

Photograph by Roger Kisby.

“I saw Brick House and was flooded with these emotions because I wasn’t looking at a sculpture—it was in Venice, Italy that I found my grandmother again,” Stevenson said.

After a video montage of Leigh’s works, she took the podium, clearly awed.

“This moment right now reminds me of the day my daughter came home and she told me that her friends had decided that I was cool,” Leigh said. “She said, ‘Before, we just thought you were odd.’”

In a surprise treat, Luhrmann’s introduction came from Condé Nast global chief content officer Anna Wintour, as the Vogue editor has collaborated with Luhrmann on the Met Gala on occasion. Turns out she’s also enlisted him in some smaller endeavors.

“When I asked Baz just a few years ago for a little bit of advice about one of my children’s weddings, he proceeded to install violinists dressed as nymphs in all the trees—actually, we have quite a lot of trees,” Wintour said. “And then to recruit the groomsmen into a surprise chorus of trumpets.”

In a revealing and emotional speech, Wintour got to the bottom of why Luhrmann’s films are unforgettable spectacles of the sort that Hollywood seems scared to make these days, big capital-M Movies that are unapologetically big and unmistakably Baz, self-aware celluloid magic that embraces the absurd to an auteurist degree.

“I have literally seen him in the car on the way to a premiere trying to fit something into the movie’s final cut,” Wintour said. “And thank God. I can’t think of anything that would be worse than a Baz who churned out normal movies on a normal schedule.”

Sarandos chuckled at that last part.

“I do want to say something about the privilege of being on the road, the journey, with actors,” Lurhmann said on stage, bringing up that bit about “the journey” again. “And there’s a few in the room—one of them was 19 and came all the way to Australia with his father, George DiCaprio was his name, actually. And you know what? If he didn’t come down and cash in the two business class tickets to come all the way down there and do that, there would be no Romeo+Juliet and I wouldn’t be here today.”

At this point, there had been little discussion of what was clearly on everyone’s mind—it was almost a conscious choice to not talk about the election. There’s not much political diversity among the Hollywood brahmins, and when the chatter in LA turned toward Tuesday, most threw up their arms and said it was impossible to say who would win. But after the speeches, as the gala attendees were getting set to walk across the campus to watch Charli perform, Colman Domingo took to the podium, and encouraged the crowd to vote, and have faith that the right candidate will win.

“We can make this world a better place,” he said. “We can do it, but for now, we’re going to go outside and dance like there’s no tomorrow.”