Monday 21^st March 2011

Massive: at Trenton’s Gallery, for Beatrice Cantor’s opening, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours, her mother, Lady Newell, now superbly restored after her awful accident, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, Professor Stella Delaney .

Lashings of Poor Little Rich Gays: Laura Malcolm, Matt Driver, Prince Dmitri Hersov, Bruce MacBain, Tancredo Viamare, Ned Czernowski and others too grand to stir from their apartment building owing to lassitude or the lift not working – in other words, not there.

And tragic No! Beyond belief! Despite salaries exceeding Smallmeal’s (he the loathed Head of Landfill or whatever in this country), not all Poor Little Rich Gays were used at the after dinner – although it must be known that Prince Dmitri Hersov refused.

But Yes! Grayson. Yes! Grayson! Grayson was there.  I fingered his frock, which was a Bo-Peep cape really. The idea was the Post-It notes you stick on the backs of your ‘mates’ at school (Grayson has ‘mates’), scawls of penises etc but here laminated and rendered as couture, as Grayson explained to me personally, Adrian Edge, in his gruff motor-bike voice.

Laura Malcolm has always been rather. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘he’s made such an effort to be different and everybody’s thinking: “So what?”

Well, I wasn’t.

But how wrong to go on about Grayson. What about Beatrice ?  The creator, the giver of the Art Show! But so far from strident or grabbing. She does portraits; they’re either huge or small, many of young women of today found in magazines.  You think: that’s an annoying person: or, she needs to buck up. But there’s much, much more to it: this work is alarmingly ambiguous, fearless, uncompromising. These flimsy girls are forged anew: they are simultaneously flayed and transfigured into enduring presences. The Multis are big collectors. Her huge double portrait of them I’m sure will be a classic, along with all the other great double portraits such as by Gainsborough, Hockney, Velasquez and Goya.

Without, a special fat moon hung, the fattest moon we’re likely to see in our days apparently. Poor Little Rich Gays graphed it in the interludes from viewing

I ascended to the dinner floor. Upstairs in the gallery 100 dined in utterly modern, white, vast circumstances. They were either very good, or very bad, very left-wing or very right, very rich or very poor. Either Beatrice’s bad brother, Flint Cantor, whose subversions abound in the Press, or Trenton himself, the gallerist, who had only gained this country an hour before. ‘I was at an Opening in New York last night,’ he told me in his Upper East Side drawl, although resident near Tottenham Court Road. Either a performance artist who dances with furniture (never nervous before a perf. or during but aggressive for twenty minutes afterwards and then needy for another twenty) or a Young Money who bought a contemporary Greek work: ‘That was in 2005 when £10,000 was a lot to spend.’ Now not so sure about it.

As we were winding down the Photo Multi announced a lunch at the Penthouse for the next day. Someone huge over from Beatrice’s New York Gallery; all flung together at the last minute. Beatrice and Seth absolutely free.

As the Photo Multi often says: ‘The truly powerful are always free. Only the weak have a full diary.’

So the Art World: it’s a whole way of life.

The New York Greatness was superb: male, cheekbones, bronzer, staying at the Connaught; announced serious dyslexia, has to show addresses to cab drivers on his phone rather than attempt to read himself. Lovely vulnerable side.