{"id":101206,"date":"2022-05-21T02:06:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T20:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/anna-delveys-art-show-i-have-seen-the-death-of-culture\/"},"modified":"2022-05-21T02:06:00","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T20:36:00","slug":"anna-delveys-art-show-i-have-seen-the-death-of-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/anna-delveys-art-show-i-have-seen-the-death-of-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Delvey’s Art Show: I Have Seen the Death of Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cWelcome to my partyyyyyy,\u201d a vaguely Eastern European-accented voice drones, as a crowd of reporters, influencers, and hangers-on whip out their phones to capture the magic. \u201cShut up! I\u2019m a masterpiece. I\u2019m a masterpiece. I am Annaaaaaaa. Am I gorgeous or what? And don\u2019t you worry. The wire money is coming. The wire money is coming, baby.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The voice on the loudspeaker is from an Anna Delvey impersonator, but a few minutes later, the real Anna speaks in a prerecorded message. \u201cYou\u2019ve heard so many voices already, but this is just the beginning of me telling my story, my narrative, from my perspective,\u201d she concludes, with whoops of approval from the crowd. Immediately, Kanye West\u2019s \u201cFlashing Lights\u201d blares over the loudspeaker as a bevy of swan-necked models in black BDSM masks parade down a narrow corridor carrying various crudely drawn sketches. There\u2019s an image of inmates swanning around in Hermes and Bottega Veneta on the stairs of a penitentiary, with the caption \u201cCorrections Collection\u201d; a paper doll showing a female figure\u2019s transformation from donning Sally Hershberger highlights and a Dries van Noten jacket to a prison-instituted sweatsuit and Amazon panties; and an image of a woman in thick, black-rimmed glasses confronting a harried desk clerk, with the bubble, \u201cThis is a club card. Run it on my card. Run it again!\u201d No one, except for the models, was wearing a mask.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dozens of photographers clamor to shoot the models holding the art, even though no one else in the room is paying much attention to it. All of the works are signed, in highly stylized, curlicue font, looking much fancier than the chicken-scratched, color-penciled images themselves, \u201cAnna Delvey.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The audience seems a little baffled by the display; or at least, the audience members who are paying attention to it in the first place, and not just checking how many people have viewed it on their Instagram stories. One attendee later refers to it as \u201clike a Kanye video when he\u2019s off his meds.\u201d \u201cI think she\u2019s making some sort of big statement,\u201d I overhear the woman behind me saying, but she doesn\u2019t really elaborate on what that statement might be. <\/span><\/p>\n

Anna Delvey is a convicted criminal and scam artist who, in pretending to be a Bavarian heiress raising venture capital for an arts space, humiliated and ruined the lives of innumerable people. But in pretending to be an iconic New York City heiress, she has also, improbably, remade herself as an iconic New York City success story. In 2017, she was arrested after raising the alarm of numerous big banks and failing to pay her hotel bills. In 2020, she was convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from friends and various businesses in New York. Having been released early on good behavior following a jail sentence for multiple counts of grand larceny and theft of services, she is now currently at an ICE detainment center in Orange County, New York\u00a0 for overstaying her visa and is awaiting deportation to Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\"Photo

Anna Delvey launched her solo art exhibit titled, \u201cAllegedly\u201d at the Public Hotel in New York City on May 19, 2022<\/p>\n

John Nacion\/STAR MAX\/IPx\/AP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Despite her myriad crimes \u2014 chief among them failing to pull off a consistent Bavarian accent \u2014 Delvey has attracted a bevy of devotees, largely due to Julia Garner\u2019s objectively excellent portrayal of her in the objectively terrible Netflix series <\/span>Inventing Anna. <\/span><\/i>On her Instagram, where she has one million followers, she regularly attracts approving comments from her fans, millennial women and gay men bottle-fed a steady diet of true crime, slickly shot scammer narratives, and yasskweenslay<\/em> white feminism that teaches us that committing any number of white-collar crimes can be totally empowering for women, provided they talk funny or wear Miu Miu while doing so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At \u201cAllegedly\u201d \u2014 Delvey\u2019s first solo show, which was held at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side \u2014 these stans were out in full force, painting Anna Delvey as a modern-day Robin Hood subject to the brutal capitalistic forces of the patriarchy. \u201cAnna Delvey is the people\u2019s chick,\u201d Stephen James The Artist, a Zack Morris lookalike clad head-to-toe in a tie-dye sweatsuit he identified as \u201cLenny Vuitton,\u201d proudly proclaimed. \u201cShe\u2019s doing everything everyone else really wants to do, which I think is really exciting,\u201d says perfume designer Ryan Richmond (whose product is named, appropriately enough, \u201cRich Mess.) \u201cGoing to New York, getting more popular, going to the right events, getting into the seat of things. She figured out her dream along the way\u2026I don\u2019t know the moral of it or anything, but parts of it are definitely inspiring.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019s such a pioneer in the age of the scam,\u201d says Taylor Greist, an aspiring screenwriter and Catskills lodge worker. \u201cShe\u2019s very talented and had her hands in so many different things. It\u2019s good to see her apply herself in a creative way. There\u2019s an art to the scam, but I\u2019d like to see her doing art itself.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One woman who declined to be named (many attendees declined to go on the record, perhaps correctly estimating that prospective employers may not look kindly on full-throated defenses of convicted felons) framed Delvey as a feminist icon: \u201cShe is absolutely not a scammer. She\u2019s a woman who was trying to start a company and raise capital. This would never have happened to a man\u2026 How many men have pre-seed ideas or pre-launch ideas and get funded and either they execute it or they don\u2019t? For some reason this woman got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.\u201d (To date, Delvey is the only person who has been charged in connection to her scams.)<\/span><\/p>\n

I had been reluctant to attend the show, to say the least. I am heavily pregnant, and the prospect of lumbering around soberly making conversation with underpaid New York Magazine<\/em> interns, Marymount kids who could not get into Tisch, and aspiring influencers who would later lobby to fuck Cousin Greg at Ray\u2019s<\/a> down the street, did not appeal to me. The art show struck me as the type of naked press grab common among former tabloid mainstays who suspect they may be losing their grip in the zeitgeist, and judging by the fact that almost everyone I spoke to at the show was either a reporter, a publicist, or a friend of either, this assessment turned out to be correct.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, and perhaps more to the point, I knew from having reported on the trial that Anna Delvey had made more than $300,000 selling her life rights to Netflix for <\/span>Inventing Anna, <\/span><\/i>before the New York State attorney\u2019s office sued her under the Son of Sam laws, preventing her from directly profiting off her crime. Though she got to keep some of the funds, she was reportedly making much more money off of this art show, with the collection estimated at $400,000-$500,000. The goal of the show, she said, was to sell 48 percent of the collection, and Anna would presumably be turning a profit; even though she had served her time, the idea of her profiting further off the notoriety her crimes struck me as unsavory, to say the least. But the prospect of interviewing a convicted art world scammer who had found a way to continue the scam behind bars was intriguing to me, so I got a sitter, invited my artist husband as a plus-one, and grudgingly trudged up the escalator to the Public Hotel\u2019s packed bar.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to bear witness,\u201d he said over his shoulder as he snapped photos of the ectomorphs parading in. \u201cSomebody needs to be here to show the world what\u2019s going on with people\u2019s brains.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In any event, the art, clearly, was not the main attraction here. With her childlike, faceless sketches, Delvey shows far less promise as an artist than as a canny cultural critic, with her work often alluding to the media circus around herself and her trial. One sketch depicts Delvey and a barely recognizable Julia Garner meeting for the first time at a swanky NYC hotel; another shows a newspaper titled The Delvey Crimes<\/em> showing a woman lounging on a chaise, with the headline, \u201cADA: Instead of Getting a Job She Was Busy Getting a Blowout.\u201d\u00a0 The company handling the sales of Delvey\u2019s work is called Founders Art Club, and when I spoke to cofounder Patrick J. Peters, he claimed, somewhat improbably, that when he first saw her work, he deemed her \u201cthe real deal.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Currently, Founders Art Club only has two publicly listed clients: Delvey and fellow convicted criminal\/Delvey\u2019s former artistic collaborator Alfredo Martinez, who was incarcerated for forging fake Basquiats. (Martinez curated Delvey\u2019s first show back in March<\/a>, which featured five of her works.) To create the works, they helped transport rudimentary supplies such as colored pencils and paper into the prison, as acrilycs and paintbrushes were declined by security; to actually transport the works themselves, they had to use Delvey\u2019s lawyer to get them in and out of the prison, which cost nearly $5,000 per trip.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe did something wrong. She served her time,\u201d says Founders Art Club cofounder Chris Martine, when I spoke with him the day after the show. \u201c<\/span>This is an opportunity for her to voice herself in a more permanent way and enter the world she tried to enter the wrong way the first time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither Peters nor Martine revealed exactly how much money Delvey had been paid for her art, only saying it involved a flat rate and royalties. They also did not reveal how many people had expressed interest in buying a stake of the works, or from which art houses, though Martine did say that many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs \u2014 weirdly, among the very people Delvey had tried to grift \u2014 had expressed interest. \u201c<\/span>They understand the grind and hustle that it really takes to make it. The mantra, fake it till you make it, there\u2019s elements to grasp when you\u2019re trying to start a company,\u201d Martine says. \u201cObviously, forging documents is not something you should do, but building your vision, seeing what you can accomplish, that\u2019s what they resonate with.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Founders Art Club said that while a percentage of the proceeds of Delvey\u2019s print sales \u2014 there are currently 4,000 prints of her works available, at a tiered system starting at $250 a pop \u2013 will go to an organization benefitting immigration reform, the group did not specify which one. They also did not address whether any of the money Delvey had made would go to her victims: \u201cThat is not something we\u2019re privy to,\u201d says Martine. \u201cT<\/span>o our best knowledge she has paid all of her restitution for everything outstanding.\u201d<\/span> I later called Kacey Duke, Delvey\u2019s former personal trainer who was portrayed by Laverne Cox in <\/span>Inventing Anna, <\/span><\/i>who said Anna still owed her money, though it was a relatively small amount; <\/span>Rachel Deloache Williams<\/span><\/a>, another of Anna\u2019s victims, also says on her website that Anna never paid her back.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ethical morass of profiting off or exploiting a convicted felon without donating any proceeds to victims seems to have occurred to the founders of Founders Art club, though not in a material way. \u201cE<\/span>veryone feels for victims who have been wronged in this case or any case. For us, it\u2019s not our place to determine the way those people, through the legal system, will be compensated,\u201d says Martine. <\/span>\u201cI think it\u2019s a good point,\u201d Peters says when I ask if what he and Delvey are doing is exploitative of her victims, in a manner that suggests he does not think my question is a good point. \u201cBut at the end of the day, people have the ability for redemption.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Delvey\u2019s comeback career as an outsider artist has certainly set the stage for a redemption arc of sorts, redemption implies undergoing some form of moral evolution, and Delvey has barely expressed anything akin to remorse for the harm she did. \u201cThe thing is, I\u2019m not sorry,\u201d she <\/span>told<\/span><\/a> the <\/span>New York Times <\/span><\/i>in 2019. She later changed her tune in front of a parole board, saying, <\/span>\u201cI completely understand that a lot of people suffered when I thought I was not doing anything wrong.\u201d But in the past, her attitude towards her victims has bordered on contempt, and her most ardent stans do not seem to harbor much sympathy for Delvey\u2019s victims, either.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think what she did was ultimately wrong and dishonest, [but] I\u2019m surprised people didn\u2019t probe into her more,\u201d says Steven, who identified himself as a fan of <\/span>Inventing Anna<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThere were so many questions with the accent, the backstory. People just didn\u2019t do their research.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who get screwed over tend to exaggerate,\u201d says James, who says he knew a mutual friend of one of Delvey\u2019s victims (he declined to say who) who was irate with him for attending the event. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s not my problem.\u201d He then requested to follow me on Instagram so he could pitch me about his music.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Since none of the partygoers had any apparent empathy for Anna\u2019s victims, I wanted to talk to someone who would: Duke, who <\/span>had not been invited to the party, and was hosting her own event for a friend that evening. But when I called her, she was surprisingly sanguine about Delvey profiting off her time scamming people like her and other members of the New York glitterati.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI say good for her,\u201d Duke says. \u201cShe did the crime, she did the time. She should be able to express herself. There are lots of snake oil people out there. If this is a creative outlet that lets her put her energy in something other than conning people, I think that\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Duke harbors no bitterness toward Delvey herself, she did express some consternation towards Delvey\u2019s stans. \u201cPart of me says, are you kidding me? People are making her out like she\u2019s a hero. And there is something weird about that,\u201d she says. \u201cIf someone is buying her work to look up to her or to be a con, that\u2019s the kind of energy you don\u2019t want.\u201d But she also acknowledges the inherent appeal of Delvey\u2019s story: that someone with basically nothing could remake herself from the ground up, and then, having spectacularly failed to do so, do it all over again via seemingly more legitimate means.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf people admire her because they see that you can make yourself anything you want, they\u2019re saying, the system is kinda messed up, so I\u2019m gonna do what I need to do,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is a point where you have to believe in yourself. That\u2019s what I taught her in my life coaching\u2026.if you\u2019re looking at somebody who\u2019s taking lemons and has a creative outlet to make lemonade, that\u2019s a good thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Later in the evening, Founders Art Club moved the party to the Public Hotel\u2019s glittering rooftop, where they displayed Delvey\u2019s works sans models and later patched in Delvey for an interview with podcaster Niki Takesh, who cohosts Forbidden Fruit<\/em> with Julia Fox (who has expressed interest in a Delvey collaboration). As I watched the crowd break into spontaneous chants of #FreeAnna, with Takesh imploring Delvey to do an \u201coutfit reveal\u201d by giving us a twirl in her prison uniform, I considered that there was indeed something inspiring about Delvey\u2019s trajectory. She had done absolutely everything wrong, and somehow, in doing so, had gotten absolutely everything she wanted. She had won the adoration of the wealthy and flawlessly dressed. She had dozens of press outlets clamoring to tell her story, a fact often remarked upon by Takesh (\u201c<\/span>love <\/span><\/i>Page Six,\u201d she purred in her interview, to cheers from the crowd). She was being feted, in spectacularly decadent fashion, by the very world she had fucked over, whose respectability she had so desperately craved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was not the only person to reflect on the fact that Delvey was proof that, by breaking countless laws and hurting countless people, she had managed to achieve a degree of success beyond what she could have imagined. \u201cThat would be the great irony in this story, right?\u201d Steven, the <\/span>Inventing Anna <\/span><\/i>fan, said. \u201cShe goes to jail and makes sketches and possibly becomes an artist. That was never her plan. But it would be a great irony if this was her way to make lots of money now.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDreams come true,\u201d I said hollowly in response.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, exactly,\u201d Steven said, sounding somewhat more enthused. \u201cThey do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite doing my journalistic penance by spending three and a half hours sober at the event, and despite a few emails exchanged back and forth with the show\u2019s publicist, I never did manage to speak with Delvey. I suppose the word I would use to describe my feelings about that is \u201cscammed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWelcome to my partyyyyyy,\u201d a vaguely Eastern European-accented voice drones, as a crowd of reporters, influencers, and hangers-on whip out their phones to capture the magic. \u201cShut up! I\u2019m a masterpiece. I\u2019m a masterpiece. I am Annaaaaaaa. Am I gorgeous or what? And don\u2019t you worry. The wire money is coming. The wire money is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":101207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,3,105,106],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/1653078962_Anna-Delveys-Art-Show-I-Have-Seen-the-Death-of.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/centralrecorder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}