One perk of Sunday’s New Museum dinner: seeing artist Cindy Sherman (the honoree) outside of her striking photographs.
Rock ’n’ roll stars don’t die, they just take their place on the benefit circuit. I learned about this new rite of passage last week while attending an auction of Bryan Adams’ photography, benefiting Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital at the Calvin Klein store, and a New Museum dinner honoring a slightly more experienced picture taker, Cindy Sherman, with Elton John as the honorary chair.
People need to keep busy, I guess, so Mr. Adams has taken up the camera. He’s the guy with the attractively placed pockmarks and super-.phpy voice whom Tina Turner likes to duet with. As neither fan nor foe, I couldn’t really say what his place in the pop pantheon was, so for a knowledge check I asked four guests to hum one of his tunes. Since then, I admit, I’ve been unable to get the one that goes “Everything I do, I do it for you” out of my head. The well-amplified DJ chose to leave his oeuvre untouched, at least while I was there. In person, though, nicely dark-suited by the book’s co-producer, Calvin Klein, Adams is kind of small and undistinguished, sort of like a medium-sized Chelsea waiter.
Calvin Klein himself seems all but gone from his eponymous shift shack, having near-groped Latrell Sprewell and bought a Perry Street Tower retirement home as parting public acts. So the company has to find new ways to promote itself and draw spenders to the registers.
As people-pushing goes, this event was as good as any other. I’m not a big fan of cocktail parties in stores, but they’re an ongoing necessity. Bergdorf Goodman signed up to host a pre-screening gala for the Tribeca Film Festival, and despite the neighborhood disconnect, the event's plan guaranteed that moviegoers would inspect the store’s wares by making it the evening’s ticket dispenser. What will they think of next?
Austere and minimal as it is, the Calvin Klein store is actually pretty good as a party site. Its main floor is cavernous, and they seem to be able to move fixtures away so that the evening has a social hub. Most stores simply slide the belts away, and there you are chatting over the wallets.
Experience has taught me that drinkers are wisest to head upstairs, where the cocktails are easier to come by, and a balcony view helps with a party attack plan. From my perch I could see the following things: The place was packed with well-dressed types. The photos were simply and attractively hung along the wall for a silent auction, but bidding wasn’t brisk. It seemed a number of guests, like me, opted for the book purchase as a way to support the cancer hospital, rather than be the first on their block to become a collector of Mr. Adams’ somewhat expensive pictures.
By choosing this hospital as beneficiary, of course, the store guaranteed that all of the Upper East Side ladies who lent their name to this prestigious cancer center would show, and show they did (you know their names, do I have to go through them?), adding another colorful tile to this attractive mosaic of culture and commerce. But was it soup yet?
Curiosity may kill the cat, but the desire to see Cindy Sherman in person, after viewing so many of her striking and insightful images (please don’t call them self-portraits, the program admonished) certainly helped fill the seats at the recently re-rechristened Cipriani Wall Street, most recently known as the Regent Wall Street ballroom. The museum’s simple but tasteful program helpfully published an uncredited and presumably unaltered photo of her, looking I guess as she often does, so I was able to identify her. (At least I think it was her.) She’s tall and lean and has long tawny hair, and looked to this viewer kind of preppy and normal. That she was standing next to Mr. (I can’t bring myself to call him Sir) John and her laudator of the evening, John Waters, also helped.
Elton and his boyfriend, David Furnish (whose birthday I think it was—don’t ask me how I know that, there is no useful answer), are well known to me from my previous life, and their power parties featuring “Les Liz” (Hurley and Taylor) at the Oscars and elsewhere are famously extravagant. So I was expecting some rigmarole in getting a quote from the talented singer-songwriter.
Not everyone knows that John is one of the premier collectors of modern visual arts in the world, and his collection of photography is one the very best, and—unlike so much of his persona—underpromoted. (He dropped $50,000 on an acrylic here.) So it was no surprise to me that he lent his name to an evening honoring Cindy Sherman. There he and David were, right near the door, unguarded and unbesieged and looking more relaxed than I’ve ever seen. His ensemble included an embroidered black sports jacket worn over some sort of gauzy duster like Maude used to wear, and very high-tech sneakers. No comments about the hair, I believe, are necessary.
His diminutive but fully fanged press pit bull, Fran Curtis, was ironically nowhere in sight to enforce her no-press dictate, so I approached the often ill-tempered pop king and found him to be in fine fettle. Yes, he owns a number of Cindy Sherman photos. No, he did not know all their names at this exact moment. Interestingly, very few of the well-heeled bidders seemed interested in chatting him up—this struck me as an authentic group of arts supporters…well-dressed and unfamous. When Ms. Sherman and Mr. Waters arrived as I ran out of talking points, Mr. John dutifully went and greeted his fellow event officers, and I was struck by just how normal the whole evening seemed.
This fund-raiser also featured an art auction, but here just 13 diverse works served as the evening’s decor. This was magnificent artwork, expected to yield as much as a million dollars (they cleared $1.19 million, I heard).
But the real attraction from my standpoint was checking out what the Ciprianis had done to their reclaimed downtown catering hall. The answer, to my eye, is very little, which is just fine to me—the room is gorgeous. The giant speaker chandeliers seemed reminiscent, though, of their Midtown space, and likewise did little to help with the impossible acoustics.
All of the Cipriani food and service hallmarks were on display. Simple (tiny cherry tomatoes stuffed with pesto, and crostini with ample shredded tuna were both sublime) and professionally passed hors d’oeuvres. Bellinis (which, though tasty, could have been a tad more chilled). Waiters were everywhere, outnumbered only by bussers. Bars and tables were fitted out with Cipriani’s buttery bread sticks, which to me are better with a cocktail than any gooey item.
At the bottom of the stairs, one captain had a gold-framed version of the seating chart on hand, a trick I was jealous to never have thought of. The house’s new manager seemed friendly and competent enough, but wisely ditched me and the small talk when Elton came sauntering over. The Cipriani people know what they are doing, and though they’re pricey, you get what you pay for.
If I were an aging or bored rock star, I could think of many worse places to kill time.
Posted 04.20.04
Columnist Ted Kruckel is an experienced and opinionated former event and PR pro who ran events for 20 years for high-profile clients like Vanity Fair, Elle Decor, Christian Dior and Carolina Herrera. He shuttered his firm, Ted Inc., in 2003. You can email him at [email protected].
Photos: Patrick McMullan (Sherman, Cipriani Wall Street)
People need to keep busy, I guess, so Mr. Adams has taken up the camera. He’s the guy with the attractively placed pockmarks and super-.phpy voice whom Tina Turner likes to duet with. As neither fan nor foe, I couldn’t really say what his place in the pop pantheon was, so for a knowledge check I asked four guests to hum one of his tunes. Since then, I admit, I’ve been unable to get the one that goes “Everything I do, I do it for you” out of my head. The well-amplified DJ chose to leave his oeuvre untouched, at least while I was there. In person, though, nicely dark-suited by the book’s co-producer, Calvin Klein, Adams is kind of small and undistinguished, sort of like a medium-sized Chelsea waiter.
Calvin Klein himself seems all but gone from his eponymous shift shack, having near-groped Latrell Sprewell and bought a Perry Street Tower retirement home as parting public acts. So the company has to find new ways to promote itself and draw spenders to the registers.
As people-pushing goes, this event was as good as any other. I’m not a big fan of cocktail parties in stores, but they’re an ongoing necessity. Bergdorf Goodman signed up to host a pre-screening gala for the Tribeca Film Festival, and despite the neighborhood disconnect, the event's plan guaranteed that moviegoers would inspect the store’s wares by making it the evening’s ticket dispenser. What will they think of next?
Austere and minimal as it is, the Calvin Klein store is actually pretty good as a party site. Its main floor is cavernous, and they seem to be able to move fixtures away so that the evening has a social hub. Most stores simply slide the belts away, and there you are chatting over the wallets.
Experience has taught me that drinkers are wisest to head upstairs, where the cocktails are easier to come by, and a balcony view helps with a party attack plan. From my perch I could see the following things: The place was packed with well-dressed types. The photos were simply and attractively hung along the wall for a silent auction, but bidding wasn’t brisk. It seemed a number of guests, like me, opted for the book purchase as a way to support the cancer hospital, rather than be the first on their block to become a collector of Mr. Adams’ somewhat expensive pictures.
By choosing this hospital as beneficiary, of course, the store guaranteed that all of the Upper East Side ladies who lent their name to this prestigious cancer center would show, and show they did (you know their names, do I have to go through them?), adding another colorful tile to this attractive mosaic of culture and commerce. But was it soup yet?
Curiosity may kill the cat, but the desire to see Cindy Sherman in person, after viewing so many of her striking and insightful images (please don’t call them self-portraits, the program admonished) certainly helped fill the seats at the recently re-rechristened Cipriani Wall Street, most recently known as the Regent Wall Street ballroom. The museum’s simple but tasteful program helpfully published an uncredited and presumably unaltered photo of her, looking I guess as she often does, so I was able to identify her. (At least I think it was her.) She’s tall and lean and has long tawny hair, and looked to this viewer kind of preppy and normal. That she was standing next to Mr. (I can’t bring myself to call him Sir) John and her laudator of the evening, John Waters, also helped.
Elton and his boyfriend, David Furnish (whose birthday I think it was—don’t ask me how I know that, there is no useful answer), are well known to me from my previous life, and their power parties featuring “Les Liz” (Hurley and Taylor) at the Oscars and elsewhere are famously extravagant. So I was expecting some rigmarole in getting a quote from the talented singer-songwriter.
Not everyone knows that John is one of the premier collectors of modern visual arts in the world, and his collection of photography is one the very best, and—unlike so much of his persona—underpromoted. (He dropped $50,000 on an acrylic here.) So it was no surprise to me that he lent his name to an evening honoring Cindy Sherman. There he and David were, right near the door, unguarded and unbesieged and looking more relaxed than I’ve ever seen. His ensemble included an embroidered black sports jacket worn over some sort of gauzy duster like Maude used to wear, and very high-tech sneakers. No comments about the hair, I believe, are necessary.
His diminutive but fully fanged press pit bull, Fran Curtis, was ironically nowhere in sight to enforce her no-press dictate, so I approached the often ill-tempered pop king and found him to be in fine fettle. Yes, he owns a number of Cindy Sherman photos. No, he did not know all their names at this exact moment. Interestingly, very few of the well-heeled bidders seemed interested in chatting him up—this struck me as an authentic group of arts supporters…well-dressed and unfamous. When Ms. Sherman and Mr. Waters arrived as I ran out of talking points, Mr. John dutifully went and greeted his fellow event officers, and I was struck by just how normal the whole evening seemed.
This fund-raiser also featured an art auction, but here just 13 diverse works served as the evening’s decor. This was magnificent artwork, expected to yield as much as a million dollars (they cleared $1.19 million, I heard).
But the real attraction from my standpoint was checking out what the Ciprianis had done to their reclaimed downtown catering hall. The answer, to my eye, is very little, which is just fine to me—the room is gorgeous. The giant speaker chandeliers seemed reminiscent, though, of their Midtown space, and likewise did little to help with the impossible acoustics.
All of the Cipriani food and service hallmarks were on display. Simple (tiny cherry tomatoes stuffed with pesto, and crostini with ample shredded tuna were both sublime) and professionally passed hors d’oeuvres. Bellinis (which, though tasty, could have been a tad more chilled). Waiters were everywhere, outnumbered only by bussers. Bars and tables were fitted out with Cipriani’s buttery bread sticks, which to me are better with a cocktail than any gooey item.
At the bottom of the stairs, one captain had a gold-framed version of the seating chart on hand, a trick I was jealous to never have thought of. The house’s new manager seemed friendly and competent enough, but wisely ditched me and the small talk when Elton came sauntering over. The Cipriani people know what they are doing, and though they’re pricey, you get what you pay for.
If I were an aging or bored rock star, I could think of many worse places to kill time.
Posted 04.20.04
Columnist Ted Kruckel is an experienced and opinionated former event and PR pro who ran events for 20 years for high-profile clients like Vanity Fair, Elle Decor, Christian Dior and Carolina Herrera. He shuttered his firm, Ted Inc., in 2003. You can email him at [email protected].
Photos: Patrick McMullan (Sherman, Cipriani Wall Street)
