The Met's Second-Most Grand Event of the Year: It’s Anything But Small | Vanity Fair

When’s the best time to go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art? There’s an argument to be made that, well, it’s the wintertime, when the museum’s façade glows in the cold night and the whole Upper East Side feels like a scene out of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. You cannot beat The Met in Whit Stillman season. Trust me. And now the neighborhood has more juice than ever, thanks to an auction house’s full revamp of a historic museum building, record-breaking Klimts, and a newly hot restaurant scene anchored by the art world’s new clubhouse, Maxime’s. Winter uptown. Get into it.

Winter is also when The Metropolitan Museum of Art throws its annual Art & Artists Gala, a black-tie affair that raises money for new acquisitions and celebrates the acquisitions of the year about to end. No, it’s not the Met Gala, which famously goes down on the first Monday in May and raises funds for the Costume Institute specifically. That gala, attended by a variety of superstars, is the world’s greatest party, moving the needle in fashion globally and forever percolating in the social media landscape.

The Art & Artists Gala, then, is the Met shindig for the heads, for the museum folks, for the insiders—gallery owners, collectors on the board, local cultural bigwigs. It’s always the week after Art Basel Miami Beach, when the art world is transitioning into holiday mode, the mania of the art market taking a back seat for at least a few weeks. Though the fair calendar is busier than ever, there’s a blissful break when the actual calendar flips, with most dealers staying put at least until the Fog art fair opens in San Francisco in late January.

Last year, The Met’s other gala was the sole big-tent institutional shindig the week after Basel Miami. There are always holiday parties—the galleries tend to do buyouts at chic downtown eateries, while the collectors will host more intimate gatherings at their art-stuffed private homes, the most coveted invites of all. Now there are more galas. The Met’s event is still the big night at the museum to end them all, but two other bashes went down the day before. Over at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, its director, Dr. Mariët Westermann, welcomed patrons to the annual Under the Oculus benefit, honoring Rashid Johnson and the NBA, with that league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, in attendance. The Roots performed, with Johnson’s show in the rotunda acting as the backdrop, as hoopster Andre Iguodala watched.

Jon Batiste and Rashid Johnson

A few blocks away, Sotheby’s hosted the first big full-floor dinner at the Breuer building, the Creators & Collectors dinner, honoring the cover subjects of the most recent issue of Sotheby’s Magazine: Julian Schnabel, collector Jen Rubio, Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, über-architect Peter Marino, and Jon Batiste, who managed to pull off a pretty remarkable in-motion wandering performance on his melodica, an instrument best described as a portable kazoo piano. It was a dynamic crew. You had art’s old guard, from Schnabel, Jeffrey Deitch, and Jean Pigozzi to the big established collectors like Aby Rosen—but then also a newer guard, like Antwaun Sargent and Tyler Mitchell, plus breakout actor Chase Sui Wonders, of The Studio, and “Feed Me” founder Emily Sundberg.

David Schulze, Jordan Casteel, Louise Kugelberg and Julian Schnabel

And that was a fun night, but it’s hard to beat the magic of walking into the Great Hall of The Met to see an entire constellation of the art world decked out in tuxedos. At the center of the hurricane was, of course, Met director Max Hollein—there with his wife, Nina Hollein—catching up with Alejandro Santo Domingo. Curator David Breslin was chatting up Larry Gagosian. Nearby were two of the architects of the museum’s future: Kulapat Yantrasast, who gloriously reworked the Rockefeller Wing, and Frida Escobedo, who designed the Tang Wing, which will break ground in 2026.

When that wing opens in 2030, it will have a designated grand space for contemporary art, something Hollein has made a cornerstone of his directorship since arriving at the museum in 2018. But even without that wing, The Met is already every contemporary artist’s secret favorite museum. This year I saw a great Lorna Simpson survey there, and after unveiling new works by Jeffrey Gibson on the façade of the museum, Hollein held a soiree for supporters at his home. Over the summer, Richard Prince told me about walking around The Met with his dog and discovering a shoehorn that he decided was an artwork, perhaps the most important artwork he’d ever seen—a pivotal moment that Prince describes at extreme length in Deposition, the video work that debuted this year. If you want to know how the ultra-ultra-contemporary artists feel about The Met, just ask young phenom Lorenzo Amos. When describing how he came to discover his approach to painting, the 23-year-old artist told me, “I would go to MoMA, and I wouldn’t like anything, and I’d go to The Met, and I’d like everything.”

And appropriately enough, I walked into the Great Hall and immediately saw Jeff Koons talking with Schnabel, not far from Amy Sillman and Nicole Eisenman (who has a banger of a show up at 52 Walker; run, don’t walk). After making my way to the Temple of Dendur for dinner, I caught up with artists Cy Gavin and Alex Da Corte at one table, and artists Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson at another. The great artist couple Julia Chiang and Brian Donnelly (a.k.a. Kaws) were at my table, along with Met board members Scott Sartiano—a former profile subject of mine—and collector Jamie Singer Soros. There were too many Met board members to name them all, in addition to members of the night’s host committee, such as Samantha Boardman, Dasha Zhukova Niarchos, Amy Griffin, and Jordan Casteel.

Julia Chiang and Brian Donnelly

As appetizers arrived, Hollein took the stage and announced that the museum had acquired more than 1,400 works in 2025 and put on dozens of shows.

“You must be exhausted,” Schnabel remarked from his table, to laughs. If anyone could chime in on Hollein’s remarks, it was Schnabel, his old pal. Hollein met him as a young curator at the New York Guggenheim in the ’90s, and gave the artist perhaps his first full-breadth, ultra-serious museum survey in 2004, when he was the director at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Max Hollein

Hollein then announced that the evening had raised $5 million, a new record for the event and a massive haul for any museum, though not quite in the same stratosphere as that of…the Met Gala, which raised $31 million this year for the Costume Institute. And then he pressed play on a short film made especially for the evening, featuring two living artists with work in The Met’s collection, Wangechi Mutu and Alex Katz. It was projected onto the gigantic walls that house the Temple of Dendur, everyone in their penguin suits rapt with awe. Each artist picked an object from The Met’s collection; Mutu homed in on a nearly 3,000-year-old statue of Osiris, while Katz chose an Edgar Degas drawing of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre.

At the end of the video, Katz summed up the night’s whole vibe, saying, “In all my experiences in New York, the happiest day I ever had was when I came into The Met and saw my painting.”

“What do you think about your art adding to The Metropolitan Museum’s collection?” the interviewer asked.

“I think it’s a big asset!” Katz said, laughing.

And just because we’re so excited…we have to mention…

Across the country, another museum is announcing some big news: The Vanity Fair Oscar Party is moving to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

That’s right—the best party on Hollywood’s biggest night will now be held at the brand-new campus for LACMA, a month before it’s set to open to the public. The Peter Zumthor–designed building is already winning over the hearts and minds of Angelenos, and it’s a great privilege to bring this historic event to perhaps the most anticipated new fortress of art constructed this century.

“The idea of Hollywood has never been more expansive than it is today,” said Mark Guiducci, global editorial director of Vanity Fair, when announcing the new venue. “The film industry intersects with so many disciplines, and the silos between them are breaking down. Artists make films. Sports stars are producers. Movie moguls fund art museums. And technology is embedded throughout. We’re thrilled to capture that energy with a cultural institution that undergirds the importance of Los Angeles and the industry at a time when Vanity Fair and LACMA are both entering exciting new chapters.”

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