After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, a number of figures in the art world formed the Halt Action Group and started a movement they called Dear Ivanka. The intention was to get Ivanka Trump—who at the time was well known to many galleries as a collector of emerging and established contemporary artists such as Nate Lowman, Dan Colen, David Ostrowski, and Christopher Wool—to act as a moderating force in the Trump administration. There was a letter in Artforum and an Instagram account that collected pleas from artists, dealers, and collectors to Ivanka, begging her to curb her father’s more authoritarian impulses. There was a protest outside the Puck Building, which is owned by the Kushner family and often displays the couple’s artworks in the lobby. There were posters quoting the entirety of Donald Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” remarks. Richard Prince disowned a work in Ivanka’s collection. It was a big, thriving movement that sprang up immediately.
In the days after Trump was elected to a second term this week, with a victory in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, it appears there will be no such Dear Ivanka–style protest from the art world this time around.
“It’s totally different,” said the curator Alison Gingeras, a cofounder of Dear Ivanka. “I think that response is impossible for a whole host of reasons, and I think one of them is the same reason that people rejected the Democrats and Kamala Harris. We’ve become this block of elite power and people don’t want to hear it. We’re going to be talking to ourselves in an echo chamber.”
From the moment it became clear that Trump had climbed back to power, the art world has been trying to grapple with how his return will affect its sphere of cultural production and sales. It’s an event that will once again demonstrate one of the art market’s fundamental dichotomies.
“I think a preponderance of art buyers would be pro-Trump, and a gross, grand majority of art professionals are pro-Kamala or pro-Democrat,” said Adam Lindemann, the collector and owner of the gallery Venus Over Manhattan on Great Jones Street. “And I’ve experienced a lot of people who are in a serious shock and depression over this.”
There’s no doubt that the art-collecting class will cheer on another round of tax cuts and deregulation. Some were optimistic that changes to the capital gains tax could free up some sales-side action and spur on the market—though others pointed out that Trump was the one who made a change to tax policy during his first term that inflicted serious damage to the art market.
And dealers could benefit from collectors having more scratch to spend on art, even if they were rooting more for a Harris presidency than a white-hot art market.
There’s also the very real possibility that Trump’s promised tariffs on goods from China, currently the world’s third-largest market for art, could affect how dealers and collectors approach a fair like West Bund Art & Design, which opened Thursday to VIPs in Shanghai. Any geopolitical unrest isn’t great for an art market that thrives on frictionless global commerce.
“Obviously people will say, ‘Oh, if there’s more tax cuts, then rich people will have money and they’ll want to spend more money on art’—which is not to be discounted versus…a more progressive tax policy where people felt like their pocket books were a bit smaller,” said the art adviser Jacob King. “But on the other hand, the kind of chaos that Trump could unleash is impossible to account for.”
And there’s little sign of resistance that fueled the protests in 2016, or the impeachment in 2021 after the January 6 riot. In fact, even before the election, there were signs that the art establishment might be preparing to work within the system during a second Trump term. No mega-gallery offered an endorsement or hosted a fundraiser for Harris, though Artists for Kamala garnered donations from heavy hitters and held an event at the less-than-mega Jack Shainman Gallery. In 2016 Gagosian hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton that was attended by Chelsea Clinton. Jeff Bezos, a serious collector who walked around Art Basel Miami Beach last year with Pace president Marc Glimcher, has reached out to Trump in the last few months, directed his Washington Post to stop endorsing presidential candidates just in time to spike its Harris endorsement, and promptly congratulated Trump on his victory, just like he did in 2016.
LVMH scion Alexandre Arnault was at Trump’s October rally at Madison Square Garden where a comedian told a bunch of racist jokes days before the election. The collector, who a year ago had reopened Tiffany & Co. in New York with a jam-packed installation of artworks by Basquiat, Daniel Arsham, Anish Kapoor, and Julian Schnabel, has previously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He also attended Biden’s big event at Radio City Music Hall in the spring and a more recent fundraiser for Harris in Manhattan. As a noncitizen, he’s prohibited from donating to any candidate. (Arnault could not be reached for comment.)
It made me think back to Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021, when the Arnault-owned Louis Vuitton invited Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to the Louis Vuitton runway show; it was one of their first public appearances since a mob attacked the Capitol some months prior.
