The art show entitled “Allegedly,” was hosted at the PUBLIC Hotel in NYC and it was unforgettable.
Of course, I forgot my notebook, but I was already spit out of the valet parking garage and onto bustling Broadway on the Lower East Side. I couldn’t go back now. I felt a pang of anticipation in my chest. No invite, no notebook and no lipstick.
What a great journalist I make, I thought and smirked wryly to myself.
I was only a few blocks from the PUBLIC Hotel, where Anna Delvey, currently in I.C.E. detention at the Orange County Jail, was hosting a one-night-only solo art exhibit.
“Who is Anna Delvey?” you might wonder.
Anna Delvey has recently renewed her infamy through the 2022 hit Netflix show created by Shonda Rhimes, Inventing Anna. Anna is a convicted fraudster: she resided at luxury hotels without paying a cent, stole a private jet, and almost received a multi-million-dollar bank loan without any financial backing.
In other words, she’s a badass bitch who doesn’t give a fuck. But some would call her a conniving scam artist. And now she makes art.
If you’re reading this and are thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about??” it might be worth going on a quick internet rabbit hole to find out. Binge the show. Take a peek at her art.
Anyway, Delvey had this obsession with creating an art foundation, hence the almost-multi-million-dollar loan. Now, even though she’s behind bars, her dream is closer to reality than ever before, and I was closer than ever to being an active participant in the story.
But first, I needed some coffee. I felt lost and tossed. Welcome to NYC. I craved a jolt of energy and a good pee. So I stopped at Think Coffee and spoke with the barista. I confessed to my escapades, “She’s like this con-artist turned artist and now I’m here to cover the story.”
The barista seemed to understand me right away and this comforted me. I had a long journey to New York – someone had hit-and-run my 2021 Volkswagen rental car at a rest stop. Moral of the story: buy the damage insurance and “you can total a car for $25,” as the rental company’s branch manager put it to me when I returned.
Besides, no good gonzo journalism is done without a bit of well-meaning property damage thrown in the mix.
“Would that be called gonzo journalism?” the barista asked.
I smirked with grandiose, “I would like to think so, yes.”
Some of my inner tension was relieved with this knowing conversation and a few sips of a perfectly crafted near-ten-dollar iced-dirty-chai-oat-milk-latte.
I’m revived and on my way to the PUBLIC.
I get there and I need a strategy, quick. I try to tell the front desk agent that I’m here for the solo exhibition and he smiles and nods, “Yup it’ll be right here for many more hours,” and then he mumbles to himself loud enough for me to hear, “God, they’re all over the place!”
As if all the Anna fans have infested the place, crawling and writhing and hatching before his very eyes.
“Alright, thanks for your help,” I said.
Strange beginnings.
So I sat at the swanky lobby bar because I made eye contact with the bartender and didn’t know what else to do. I order a glass of white wine that I don’t even want, and begin to ponder my next move. I have to blend in. I have to act like I belong. So I study the crowd for what seems like an eternity.
I catch the bartender saying to someone, “Gotta mix up the hum drum, ya know?”
Precisely.
I see a line forming at the doors to another room. I decided to try my luck. I took a sip of wine and walked over to the line. I took out my ID and said hello to the hostess. She held an iPad with the guest list. I told her my name and I watched as her fingers tapped the screen – and the screen came up blank. I was not on the list. I knew this would happen and now all I had was a bit of information and luck. I explained to her that I was here for a friend, Alfredo Martinez. She typed in his name and of course it came up: Martinez, who has been in the NYC art-world for over 20 years, helped to organize Anna Delvey’s whole art career, beginning with an article in Page Six.
The security guard draws something on my left hand with invisible ink and the door opens to the party within.
I’m in. A rush of relief and excitement washes over me.
Everyone’s looking around, chatting and smiling, feigning familiarity.
One guest who thinks I know something she doesn’t asks me, “Do you know where the art is?”
I confess to her that I have no idea what’s going on and that I’ve only just arrived. I don’t tell her that I crashed the party.
All of a sudden the music volume goes down and we all hear a voice, “Welcome to my party, welcome to the VIP party and remember if you’re poor get the fuck out! And remember the wire’s coming, the wire’s coming! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
I am beginning to think I’ve been conned… What if there is no art?
I get the feeling other people are thinking the exact same thing.
I smirk because I don’t even care if there is any art to be seen. I’m just happy to be here, still flying high off my own little con of getting past the guest list.
I feel strangely at home. There is no reason for me to pretend to be someone else. I can be myself. Nobody knows me or cares about me anyway and that’s liberating. I’m not even supposed to be here. Time to let loose. That’s NYC, baby.
Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” comes on and I dance in place – I can’t move much because the room is so packed. No A/C and everyone’s getting impatient.
Suddenly, one of the large glass doors opened and leggy models with black stockings over their faces pranced through the crowd carrying the art in their gloved hands.
I peer down at the art dutifully, as the model gives angles next to me.
Cameras flashing.
Everyone feels famous.
Everyone feels like they got in.
Everyone feels exclusive.
It was quite the scene.
The air soon becomes a little too stuffy and after fifteen drawings make their way through the crowd, I slip out the door where the models were exiting into the main lobby.
The moment I stepped into the lobby, it felt like I stepped backstage of an absurd play.
Models were getting ready to march, stockings getting pulled into place, piles of framed artwork lying face-down in a dimly lit corner.
I sat down next to the art pieces valued at half a million dollars. They were just lying there silently. A fleeting thought crossed my mind: what would happen if I just grab one and run out?
The value of the art would probably skyrocket. Founders Art Club, the art dealership selling the works, would most likely be overjoyed if a piece was stolen. It’s good press.
I ran my finger over the back of the frame.
How curious that the art was just sitting there face-down, inconspicuous and out of the way. I thought it was funny and I said so to a journalist who stood next to me. She snapped a picture of the face-down art. We introduced ourselves and she told me she was a gonzo journalist. I gaze at her in unabashed wonder.
She smirks at my obvious naiveté, “It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, when you do get there. You’re underpaid and it’s a lot of trouble to go through.”
But no one can burst my bubble. It’s my first time practicing journalism out in the world and no one can take that away from me. The gonzo journalist motions for me to follow her to the elevators, Anna is going to give a live video speech upstairs.
We snake through the crowd and I instinctively reach for her hand to guide me through the masses. We make eye contact and I quickly remove my hand from hers, feeling self-conscious.
We make it up to a floor where there is an open bar and skyline views. It’s quiet, we escaped the madness downstairs, and the A/C is kicking. I take a deep breath and sip a glass of water.
All the art pieces are placed on stands around the perimeter of the room. I walk around and look at some of them.
“This place is so badly lit,” one journalist critiques.
A slow trickle of people enter the space until the room is crowded.
I got bored waiting so I struck up a conversation with dad-slash-promoter of an 18-year-old instagram-influencer soon-to-be-famous-indie-pop-singer. His fist clenched a lager bottle and his eyes scanned the crowd. I smirked at his evident discomfort. He told me multiple times that he is only here for his daughter. I think he secretly liked it.
Finally, Anna arrives, live from Orange County Jail, to address her cheering fans.
“Free Anna! Free Anna!” the crowd chants.
Anna grins brightly and hints that this is only the beginning of her career as an artist.
“I feel like you’re gonna be the next Warhol of our generation,” says Niki Takesh, Forbidden Fruits podcast co-host, to Anna Delvey over video chat, “I’m purchasing a lot of these prints because I know they are gonna be worth a lot of money.”
The comparison between Anna and Andy may stem from Anna’s ability to make herself into living art. The ability to create this amorphous hub of contagious, creative energy.
So maybe I’m turning into an Anna fan, or even a stan. I don’t know.
All I know is that I kept tipping twenties to the bartenders and bouncers, just to get in the spirit of things. Watch the show and you’ll see what I mean. Anna always tipped fat.
“Anna has been acting out the ID of women, she’s the Tyler Durden for women,” Alfredo Martinez says, referencing the movie Fight Club. “Men do mass shootings, women do mass shoppings,” he laughs.
But Anna’s story is about more than just mass-shopping. It’s the story of how one woman decided to believe in herself beyond any reasonable measure.
There’s no denying: Anna Delvey is no saint. But Anna moved me.
This is one of Delvey’s talents. Anna’s ex-bestie Rachel DeLoache Williams describes why she became friends with Anna during a recent Red Table Talk episode, “I felt like, ‘Oh, she’s confiding in me, I’m special.’”
Nobody I spoke with at “Allegedly” seemed too concerned with the nitty gritty morality of Anna’s actions. It all comes out in the wash – that was the prevailing sentiment.
Because Anna made us feel special. She gave us a strange sort of hope for the future.
Anna Delvey is the new cult-leader of the dream chasers.
Now, she is bottling up her brazen self-belief and selling it in the form of “primitive prison art,” as one reporter put it.
Her work’s got a perverse sort of charm: combining lurking nihilism with self-aware parody of opulence and social status. Her solo art show, her second chance, signals that the classic American Dream may have gotten some plastic surgery to keep it feeling fresh.
Maybe it’s misguided, but I am tempted to buy one of her prints because Anna reminds me of the power within me. That and I also believe that her art will increase in value.
Good art is never about the piece itself, it’s about how you feel, it’s about the interface between artist and audience. And of course, it’s about the fortune and fame. But what do I know, I’m certainly no art critic.
The night came to a close on the sultry rooftop bar of the PUBLIC.
A couple of hotel guests were there, enjoying the weather. They asked me what was going on. I told them there was a solo exhibition by Anna Delvey – an infamous scam artist. They didn’t know who that was. I told them they could buy a print for two hundred and fifty dollars and that they might go up in value.
“Oh, baby!” the woman addresses her companion with sudden enlightenment, “it’s like an NFT!”
There I sat, gazing out at the cityscape, casually discussing the untapped benefits of DMT with a brand marketing consultant. I got this sudden suspicion that we were only keeping up conversation to appease the general aesthetic of engrossed, meaningful conversation.
Superficiality at its finest: masquerading as substance.
Two young, attractive people who forgot the world around them for a second or two to discuss some important yet ultimately meaningless matter. We fit the vibe perfectly. Anyone who looked over at us might wonder who we were and what was so pressing.
Could this be the American Dream?
