This has been another completely unhinged week in the art world, brought to you by our very own industry. We started the week with the heartbreaking news that Francisco Correa Cordero, founder of Lubov, had passed away. Shortly afterward, an artist interviewed for a story reflecting on Francisco’s life launched a misogynistic online harassment campaign against artnet reporter Katya Kazakina because he didn’t like how he was portrayed in the piece. Then came something many of us never thought we’d see: Larry Gagosian downsizing his gallery empire for the first time, layoffs at another blue chip gallery, and enough gossip to fuel a month’s worth of martinis. Once again, the art world proved that no one manufactures drama quite like we do.
Meanwhile, Daddy packed a weekender, carefully organized a leather pencil case dedicated exclusively to weed vapes, and boarded the Hudson Line for what feels like my first real adult vacation in years. But in reality it’s been about 7 months.
Think an old farmhouse with creaky floors and crooked charm that someone lovingly stripped back into a minimalist dream. The original bones are still there, but now there are soaring ceilings, an open floor plan, a creek running through the backyard, a cold plunge, and sunflowers casually arranged in mason jars like they just happened to end up there. The surrounding towns feel populated almost exclusively by former The New Yorker fact checkers, magazine editors, artists, writers, and publishing people who collectively decided deadlines, opening receptions, and Midtown were out while ceramics, cafés, and the Hudson Valley were in. It’s giving Nora Ephron, if everyone in the movie had quietly quit media, moved upstate, started making art, and developed an expensive interest in pottery, heirloom tomatoes, and exceptionally good coffee.
Daddy is fully embracing peak summer mode. Boxed wine. Learning, finally, to play chess one move at a time on a magnetic chess set with a British expat in Los Angeles. Long afternoons. Strong weed vapes and other recreational indulgences. Views that make you briefly consider abandoning city life before remembering you still need TriBeCa and a decent martini.
One final housekeeping note from Daddy: in honor of being officially OOO, there will be no newsletter next week. Consider this your annual reminder that even Daddy occasionally closes the laptop, wanders into the woods, and takes a vacation. We’ll be back the following week with fresh martinis, fresh gossip, and whatever fresh hell the art world has created in the meantime.
So pour yourself a glass of whatever you’re drinking, mute your group chat, settle in, and let’s get into another week of art world chaos.
Art Daddy’s Birthday Recap
It’s hard to believe Art Daddy turned three only a week ago. Last Friday, Daddy celebrated the only way that made sense: at Mr. Fong’s in Chinatown. Co-hosted with the LA-born, now NYC-based publication On the Rag, it was exactly the kind of night I hoped it would be. Pool balls cracked in the background, the $18 martinis disappeared with alarming speed, and familiar faces kept filtering through the door until it felt like half the downtown art world had wandered into Mr. Fong’s.
One of my favorite parts of the night actually happened before I even got there. Better yet, my ride was a Toyota Sienna, which has apparently become my default vehicle on ride-share apps. The Lyft had such intense Brooklyn dad energy that I half expected the driver to tell me, “Text me when you get inside.”
I spent the cross-borough journey carrying a homemade three-layer lemon cake that leaned ever so slightly to the right and had somehow escalated from a baking experiment into a museum-grade art handling assignment. The cake traveled in a custom rig: the base from one cake carrier, the taller lid from another because the first wasn’t high enough. Apparently everyone just needs two different cake carriers for exactly this reason. The whole contraption was then tucked inside a cardboard box in what can only be described as MacGyver meets preventive conservation.
Meanwhile, I was in the back clutching this Franken-carrier like I’d personally signed the loan agreement. Every pothole became a conservation emergency. Every hard brake required an internal condition report. Somewhere on the FDR, I realized I’d spent almost as much time engineering the cake’s transportation system as I had baking it. The real star of the evening, however, was the cake. Three layers of lemon cake, raspberry filling, buttercream frosting, and fresh raspberries on top. Against all odds, the entire operation worked, and the cake arrived in excellent condition.
Around forty people drifted through over the course of the night. The room was in constant motion: another friend arriving, another introduction being made, another conversation spilling into the next. New York is funny like that. Put enough interesting people in one room with decent martinis and suddenly the distinctions start to disappear. Advisors, artists, writers, curators, and downtown lifers all stopped feeling like job titles and started feeling like neighbors.
I’d spent most of the summer joking that I was entering my Hamptons socialite era. Looking around Mr. Fong’s that night, it occurred to me that somewhere along the way it had quietly crossed Long Island and settled into Lower Manhattan. At one point I realized I’d accidentally created the art world equivalent of an Italian wedding receiving line. Every time I turned around someone else had arrived to say hello, introduce a friend, or quietly whisper a piece of gossip that absolutely does not belong in print. We even had a few discreet Sotheby’s appearances on the DL, which somehow felt perfectly on brand.
There was one moment, though, when I stepped back from the crowd, looked around Mr. Fong’s, and thought, holy fuck... I built this.
Three years ago this was just a weird little account with an even weirder name. Somehow it became a place where people who only knew each other online actually meet, where strangers become friends over martinis, and where conversations keep going long after I’ve wandered away. Looking around the room, I realized it had quietly grown into exactly the kind of community I’d always hoped it could be.
Everyone was so kind, so smart, and so gloriously opinionated. At one point I was talking with two younger grad students and, within about thirty seconds, we’d naturally landed on our shared hatred of Magnus Resch and Jeff Magid. No prompting. No icebreaker. Just pure Daddy discourse.
Eventually the crowd thinned, the cake was mostly gone, and the last martinis had been ordered. I stepped outside onto the Chinatown sidewalk, lit a cigarette, and had a full Carrie Bradshaw moment. Not the glamorous Upper East Side version. The downtown version. Slightly buzzed, smelling faintly of buttercream, wondering how on earth this weird little thing I’d started three years ago had turned into this. Then I stubbed out my cigarette, wandered back inside for one last martini, and figured Daddy couldn’t have asked for a better third birthday.
The Blues Brothers of Art-World Idiocy
I am technically on vacation, and I would like that entered into the record before we proceed. There is an administrative burden to being Art Daddy that nobody talks about, which is that at any given moment there are simply too many grown men requiring Daddy’s attention because they have decided to do something insane publicly. Usually I can manage the caseload, but this week Magnus Resch and Jeff Magid have apparently decided to become the Blues Brothers of art-world idiocy, and I cannot fucking escape them.
I am upstate. I am supposed to be looking at trees, going to Dia, drinking wine outside and generally pretending the art world does not exist for a few days. Daddy is OOO, and yet every time I open Instagram, one of these two has driven another fucking car through the mall.
On one side, we have Jeff, who has spent part of the week documenting the extremely important cultural work of going to the framers, proudly announcing that he is getting works framed, including work he bought from a famous art flipper. Groundbreaking. This is an errand. People have been taking art to framers for centuries without turning it into a content vertical. You dropped off some art and picked a frame. Congratulations on successfully completing a task available to anyone with Google Maps and a credit card.
But just when I thought Jeff had secured this week’s Fuck Ass Man Employee of the Month, Magnus entered the chat, and by the chat, I mean a literal pit of plastic beads. Magnus helped with the new Salon 94 show featuring the work of CJ Hendry, which opened August 6 and is only on view for ten fucking days, and he has already taken to Instagram to proclaim it the “most attended show this summer.”
Sir, it opened 48 hours ago.
What exactly are we benchmarking here? Attendance since breakfast? Did Art Basel and UBS release an emergency Q3 bead-pit attendance report while I was asleep? Are we counting every bead as a visitor? Most attended compared with what, which exhibitions, over what period, and according to whose attendance figures? I need methodology. I need a control group. I need literally anything beyond man involved with show announces show is winning.
Then he got interactive with it.
You cannot climb into a pit of plastic beads on day two, throw them triumphantly into the air and declare that you have won summer. Fuck off. I’m still upstate and I get more views than this. Welcome once again to the Magnus Resch School of Art-Market Mathematics, where every metric somehow becomes evidence of unprecedented success and every ordinary occurrence is delivered with the rhetorical force of the discovery of penicillin.
Which brings us to the actual show, and yes, they are plastic beads. Thousands and thousands of tiny multicolored plastic beads cover the floor, with Magnus sitting in the middle of them, scooping them up and throwing them over his head with the triumphant expression of a man who has either reinvented Duchamp’s readymade or cured cancer. Sir, you are sitting in plastic beads.
And listen, Daddy loves spectacle and Daddy loves camp. Daddy does not require art to be tasteful, restrained, expensive-looking or even particularly serious. But a conceptual framework is not diplomatic immunity from criticism, and neither is calling something immersive. Because visually, this is giving Color Me Mine meets Chuck E. Cheese ball pit meets we’re killing a sea turtle with a plastic straw meets a toddler with a bead up their nose, with absolutely no regard for climate change. There, I said it.
But beneath the drag is an actual question: what happens to all this plastic? How many beads are there? Were they manufactured specifically for the installation? Have they been used before? What happens when a show designed to exist for ten days closes? Are they stored, reused, recycled, or shipped somewhere else so another adult can joyfully fling them toward a ceiling?
Because it is 2026, and if the sheer quantity of plastic is part of the spectacle of your artwork, the lifecycle of that plastic is part of the conversation. You don’t get to make material excess the thing we’re supposed to marvel at and then act like asking about the material itself is somehow beside the point. The installation ends after ten days, so where does the fucking ball pit go on day eleven?
Maybe there is a perfectly responsible answer, and great, I would genuinely like to know it. But until then, I am looking at a temporary installation consisting of a fuckton of plastic while a man who helped with the show throws that plastic into the air for Instagram and announces, approximately five minutes after opening, that it is the summer’s attendance champion. The optics are doing a tremendous amount of work here, and none of it is helping.
And that’s what really sends me about Magnus’s presentation: the grandeur, the tour, the reverence, the bead tossing and the instantaneous declaration of cultural victory. He looks like he has emerged from the pit carrying information that will fundamentally alter the trajectory of Western art, when in reality, sir, you are in a ball pit.
Meanwhile, somewhere else on Instagram, Jeff is at the framers, which is what I mean about the administrative burden. Magnus is in the plastic-bead pit declaring victory while Jeff is documenting errands, and every time I open my phone, one of the Blues Brothers has driven another fucking car through the mall.
And apparently there remains some confusion about the basic terms of our relationship here, because are you insane if you think I’m not going to post about your actual fucking bullshit and tell people it’s insane when it is? You are doing these things publicly, and I am merely unfortunate enough to have Wi-Fi.
I cannot keep doing double duty when Daddy has a newsletter to write, galleries are closing and the art market is having an existential crisis. I am on vacation, so please, for the love of God, stagger the idiocy.
Daddy About Town
Daddy About Town is Daddy doing what Daddy does best. Think TMZ meets Art Daddy, but with better sources, better writing, and more analysis. This isn’t press-release culture or anonymous rumor dumping. It’s what’s overheard at gallery dinners, openings, bathroom lines, fairs, after-parties, and anywhere people start talking once they think the room is safe.
Does Basel Spark Joy, Lare Bear?
Daddy nearly dropped their $18 martini this week when the headlines hit: Lare Bear is... downsizing? Lare Bear, sweetie, are you okay? Do you need a snack? A hug? A little lie down? For decades, your business model has essentially been, “What if we opened another gallery?” The man treated commercial real estate like Pokémon. Gotta catch ‘em all. So hearing Gagosian was closing its Burlington Arcade gallery in London and exiting Basel felt like finding out the Cheesecake Factory had decided the menu was simply too long.
Let’s be clear: Lare Bear isn’t selling Picassos on Facebook Marketplace and the empire isn’t collapsing overnight. But this is another nail in the Daddy Deathpocalypse. Basel isn’t just another city and Burlington Arcade isn’t just another lease. These are trophy addresses. They’re symbols. For decades, the mythology of the mega-gallery was simple: more galleries meant more power. More square footage meant more dominance. Expansion wasn’t just the business model, it was the brand. Watching the industry’s biggest expansionist voluntarily shrink his footprint tells you everything you need to know about where the market is right now.
Daddy has been saying for months that the market was sobering up, and Lare Bear just confirmed it. The Deathpocalypse isn’t about one gallery closing or one dealer struggling. It’s about the end of an era where bigger automatically meant better. If even Larry Gagosian is editing instead of expanding, everyone else is already calling emergency meetings with their landlords. Daddy will, of course, be watching from the corner of the bar with one eyebrow raised and another overpriced martini because when Lare Bear starts Marie Kondo-ing his empire, you know the vibes have officially shifted.
Daddy Loves a Petty Bitch
This week, Italian media reported on what might be the pettiest art crime of the year. A crew of 10 people allegedly used one of the company’s own truck to smash through the gates of Italian fuel company Lilli Petroli, spent eight hours inside the headquarters, trashed the offices, damaged furniture and floors, and walked away with roughly $4.6 million worth of art, including works attributed to Pablo Picasso, Giacomo Manzù, Bruno d’Arcevia, and Mario Moretto. But here’s where Daddy perked up. One art recovery expert doesn’t think this was your standard theft to order. The theory is that it was less about the art and more about sending owner Mauro Lilli a very expensive message.
Again, Daddy does not condone crime. But if that theory is true... it’s giving The Real Housewives of New Jersey. It’s giving Danielle Staub. It’s giving “I didn’t come here for the paintings. I came here to ruin your fucking week.” Ten people. Eight hours. A company truck through the front gate. Absolute chaos. Allegedly. Daddy loves a petty bitch, but this is a level of commitment to revenge that deserves its own Bravo reunion special.
White Cube’s Revolving Door
Daddy first started hearing rumblings about this story last month. Naturally, we started making calls and trying to confirm what was going on ourselves. Unfortunately for Daddy, White Cube wasn’t particularly interested in returning those calls. Now, thanks to artnet we know why. Three senior leaders, including Courtney Willis Blair, Sukanya Rajaratnam, and Jessie Washburne-Harris, who spearheaded the gallery’s U.S. expansion, have all jumped ship and it’s not a good look.
Rumor has also been swirling for months that White Cube has been eyeing a different building in New York, although the gallery has not publicly confirmed any such plans. Daddy asked. White Cube declined to elaborate. Coming on the heels of Lare Bear Marie Kondo-ing his empire, layoffs elsewhere, and a softer market, this feels like another chapter in Daddy’s ongoing Deathpocalypse coverage. White Cube only opened its flagship Madison Avenue gallery in 2023 with enormous fanfare, positioning itself as a major New York player. Less than three years later, the conversation has shifted from expansion to departures and rumors of what’s next. Daddy isn’t saying the sky is falling, but when galleries stop talking about openings and start talking about “strategic realignment,” “leadership transitions,” and “future opportunities,” it’s usually time to read between the lines.
Daddy Remembers Francisco
There are some people in the art world you know because they’re important. Then there are the people you know because they’re genuinely good. Francisco Correa Cordero was the latter. I knew Francisco over the years and had written about Lubov several times, and every interaction with him was the same. Warm. Curious. Funny. Caring as hell. He was one of those rare people who made the New York art world feel smaller in the best possible way. You’d run into him at an opening, on the street in Chinatown, or at Lubov, and somehow you’d always leave the conversation in a better mood than when you arrived.
His fourth floor Chinatown walk up never felt like just another gallery. There was always someone dropping in, another conversation happening, another artist hanging around, another idea taking shape. Francisco always had his hands in a dozen different projects, and somehow he always had time for one more conversation. He genuinely loved artists and was energized by New York and the community he helped build around Lubov. It wasn’t trying to be the biggest gallery in the city. It was trying to be a good one, and that’s exactly what it was.
This week has been filled with layoffs, gallery closures, and people behaving like absolute assholes online. Francisco was the exact opposite of all of that. The city feels a little quieter without him in it, and Daddy is going to miss seeing him around Chinatown. Rest easy, Francisco.
The gallery posted details for a celebration of life ceremony taking place next Saturday, August 15th at the gallery from 4 pm on. Please visit the gallery’s social media for more details.
Artist Kevin Tobin Publicly Harasses Artnet Reporter
What should have been a week spent remembering Francisco Correa Cordero quickly became something far uglier. After Katya Kazakina published a story on Francisco featuring interviews with artists who knew him, one of those artists, Kevin Tobin, decided he didn’t like how he was portrayed. Instead of taking issue with the reporting, he took aim at the reporter. The screenshots speak for themselves. Tobin publicly told a female journalist to kill herself, made graphic comments about gang rape, and unleashed a torrent of misogynistic abuse that had absolutely nothing to do with journalism, criticism, or accountability. You can disagree with a story. You can ask for a correction. You can write your own response. What you don’t get to do is weaponize misogyny because you didn’t like seeing yourself in print.
As a fellow female reporter who has been the target of online harassment myself, this hit particularly close to home. I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of behavior before, and it’s disgusting. It doesn’t just affect one reporter. It sends a message to every woman in journalism that doing her job could result in being threatened, humiliated, or subjected to sexual violence. That’s not criticism. It’s intimidation. It’s misogyny. And it’s unacceptable.
Also, had this not beend directed at artnet reporter, the outlet would ahe written about it as well so do feel that this is important to note. By the end of the week, screenshots had spread across Instagram, Reddit did what Reddit does, and the focus shifted from Francisco’s life to Tobin’s conduct. Tobin’s Instagram briefly disappeared, while additional posts appeared from another account associated with him. As of 8/8/26 the original instagram account appears to be intact and is scrubbed clean of the posts from earlier this week. And this is why receipts exist and why daddy does the work he does.
The Reddit thread has continued to grow and now includes additional allegations, but those remain unverified, and Daddy isn’t in the business of publishing rumors when the documented posts are already damning enough. Francisco deserved to be remembered for the remarkable community he built through Lubov, not have the week hijacked by an online harassment campaign. If this industry actually wants journalists to keep covering it, maybe stop treating women reporters like punching bags every time someone doesn’t like a story. Do. Fucking. Better.
The Daddy Deathpocalypse: Mega Gallery Edition
The Deathpocalypse didn’t begin with the mega galleries. It started quietly, almost politely. One gallery closed. Then another. Then another. Over the last year we’ve watched more than a dozen smaller and mid tier galleries disappear, consolidate, or quietly wind down. Venus Over Manhattan closed. Lyles & King shut its doors. Tanya Bonakdarclosed its Los Angeles outpost, which means Daddy is officially referring to the gallery as just Tanya from now on. Blum & Poe also exited Los Angeles. Every time it happened, people treated it like an isolated incident. Daddy didn’t. I kept saying the same thing: stop looking at the trees and start looking at the forest.
This summer, Daddy heard the unmistakable sound of another nail being hammered into the art market’s coffin. The Deathpocalypse had finally reached the mega galleries.
Pace quietly pulled back in Seoul and London before announcing layoffs in June. David Zwirner closed its Upper East Side location. Lare Bear decided Basel and London’s Burlington Arcade no longer sparked joy. White Cube has lost multiple senior leaders in New York while questions continue to swirl about its American operation. None of these stories, standing alone, signal catastrophe. Together, they’re impossible to ignore. For the first time in years, the biggest galleries in the world aren’t talking about expansion. They’re talking about restructuring, consolidation, leadership changes, and efficiency.
That’s why Daddy keeps calling this the Deathpocalypse. It’s not because I think the mega galleries are collapsing. They’re not. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Pace, and White Cube remain among the most powerful businesses in the art world. What’s collapsing is the mythology that bigger is always better.
For nearly two decades, the playbook was remarkably simple. Open another flagship. Hire another team. Plant another flag in another city. Add another art fair. Add another viewing room. Bigger became the strategy because the market rewarded scale. Cheap money, post-pandemic buying frenzies, and a seemingly endless appetite for expansion made growth feel inevitable.
But empires are expensive. Every gallery comes with rent. Staff. Insurance. Shipping. Storage. Programming. Utilities. Security. Marketing. Every international office comes with another layer of overhead that has to justify its existence every single year. When collectors become more selective, interest rates stay high, costs continue climbing, and sales normalize, those trophy addresses stop looking like symbols of dominance and start looking like line items on a balance sheet.
Daddy’s prediction? Hauser & Wirth eventually has to answer the same questions everyone else is answering. Not because there’s anything uniquely wrong with Hauser, but because the economics don’t discriminate. The Deathpocalypse was never about galleries disappearing. It was always about an entire philosophy of gallery building reaching its logical conclusion. The smaller galleries were simply the first dominoes. This summer, the tremors reached the blue chips. The next few years won’t be defined by who opens the most galleries. They’ll be defined by who has the discipline to admit they don’t need as many. Daddy will continue watching the receipts with an $18 martini in one hand and commercial real estate listings in the other.
That’s all from Daddy for now. I’m officially OOO, which apparently means relocating my poor decision-making approximately 100 miles north and calling it wellness. For the next week, I plan to do absolutely nothing of professional value. Unfortunately, I am in the Hudson Valley, where doing nothing somehow involves walking into a café for an iced coffee and leaving forty-five minutes later with the name of someone’s gallerist, the details of a divorce, and an invitation to see a sculpture installation in a barn.
There will also, inevitably, be men. Upstate men are particularly dangerous because they can appear perfectly normal until you discover they have a motorcycle, three acres, an MFA they don’t mention anymore, and a complicated relationship with someone named Sophie who still technically lives in the city. Daddy intends to exercise restraint. Daddy also once started an art-world gossip account for fun, so please assess that promise accordingly.
My only real goal is to return to New York without acquiring a boyfriend, a ceramic practice, a Subaru, or firsthand knowledge of a gallery dispute that hasn’t become public yet. Four very reasonable objectives. Surely nothing can go wrong. If something does, you’ll hear about it in two weeks.
And if you see Daddy drinking natural wine with a suspiciously handsome man outside a converted barn before then: mind your business. I’m on vacation.
xx,
Daddy
If you laughed, gasped, or immediately thought, “Who is this about?” you should probably become a paid subscriber. Daddy is here every week, and unfortunately, so is the art world.