This particular appearance was brief — the two sides quickly decided on a June 19 deadline to submit written arguments for her plea deal, and that was that — but was the first time those who read Delvey's story had the opportunity to lay eyes on her. Followers of Delvey's story will be happy to know she was still sporting her trademark Céline glasses, but her free-flowing mane had been wrangled into two braided pigtails. You'll probably see for yourself sometime soon, since professional photographers were granted permission to take photos over Spodek's objections. This case, according to Judge Kiesel, had become of such public interest that photos were now warranted, just one of many ways Delvey's life has changed since she became infamous.<doc-sep>The long New York magazine article this week about Purple intern-turned-socialite scam artist Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin) has people in a tizzy. It’s a juicy tale, featuring cameo appearances by the likes of Beijing collector Michael Xufu Huang—whom she swindled into paying for her to go on a lavish trip to Venice—and odious “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli. Yet it remains, after all those many thousands of words, a little unclear just what exactly Delvey’s deal was, the exact proportion of craftiness to compulsion. In any case, it’s very much an art story, in that the entire fable that Delvey was able to spin—spellbinding people into providing the money that fueled her years-long walk on the fabulous side of New York—was that she was raising funds to build “a Soho House–ish type club… focused on art.” Art provided the circulatory system in which the grift traveled: Frieze, Art Basel, the Venice Biennale, openings at Pace Gallery, etc. “The heart of the club would be, she said, a ‘dynamic visual-arts center,’ with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purple days, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin,” we learn in between accounts of Delvey’s pricey dinners and extravagant hotel stays. “For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building.” ☀️☀️☀️ A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on May 31, 2016 at 10:25pm PDT This roster is a thin tissue of celebrity and scene-y artists favored by what my colleague Tim Schneider calls COINs (Collectors Only In Name), who just like to own the same kind of art #brands as the other people in their social set. Kylie Jenner revealed her collection to Vogue this week, and it’s about the same. What interests me in the tale is how the sleight of hand that allowed Delvey to perpetrate her improbably long-lasting scam—flaunting the signifiers of wealth without the reality of wealth—is duplicated in the way a superficial association with art is so often confused with the love and appreciation of art. Nothing in the article suggests it, but it’s totally possible that Delvey had truly interesting things to say about Fischer, Hirst, Koons, and Emin—but one guesses that she didn’t need to in order to convince the audience in front of whom she was waving their names that she was one of them. We’re a long way from the world of John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation (1990), where a con artist insinuates himself into the world of a family of New York art dealers by dazzling them with an intricate knowledge of culture. You can get a sense of Delvey’s world if you look at her now-dormant Instagram, which had been a key tool to project the crisply curated fabulousness that she parlayed into a jet-setting lifestyle. Roomview 🌟 @whitneymuseum A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Jan 30, 2016 at 5:57pm PST “She was a stranger to me, and yet not unknown,” Rachel Deloache Williams wrote of meeting Delvey in a Vanity Fair piece from April. (Williams is the one who ended up putting over $60,000 on a credit card to cover for Delvey’s Morocco resort vacation.) “I’d seen her on Instagram, smiling at events, drinking at parties, oftentimes alongside my own friends and acquaintances. I’d seen that @annadelvey (since changed to @annadlvv) had 40K followers.” Delvey’s story is a kind of apotheosis of the “Instagram Effect,” where everyone projects a more perfect, happier life than they actually have via social media, and the envy generated becomes a kind of currency. Her Instagram life is stuffed full of deluxe signifiers and only rare flickers of actual sociality. The sense they cultivate is of a private and exclusive world. They are, in their arid glamor, both self-aggrandizing and kind of haughty, which is the air she projected according to copious testimony from her victims. And, perhaps more than anything else, @annadlvv used art to project this image. Delvey did not post a lot of photos of herself with art—too basic, I’d guess, for someone who was trying to be taken seriously as an entrepreneur. Instead, she just posted photos of artworks themselves: Félix González-Torres lightbulbs at the Whitney (a prop she returned to more than once); a Laurent Grasso on view at the Armory Show; a (prophetic) piece saying “I’m Going to Be A Very Different Kind of Star,” identified as being by Ed Ruscha, even though it is actually a collaboration between Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis (ironically, since these two first met each other for an interview at Purple). A rare exception that features Delvey in it is of her silhouette projected in a Cory Arcangel work at the Kunsthalle Zürich, from 2015. Her pics are almost always lightly but knowingly captioned, often simply identifying the artist to convey knowledge of the particular art brand (e.g. simply stating “Condo,” meaning George Condo, next to a work by the New York painter). Aside from this, the pictured art is withdrawn from any judgement or thought besides a kind of static enthusiasm. At most, as with a July 3, 2015, pic of a Doug Aitken phone booth at Eva Presenhuber gallery in Zürich, there’s something like this: “Can’t get this #DougAitken out of my head – found my new 212 landline device.” This is a recognizable genre of contemporary social-media image: the flat, head-on, evidentiary posting of artworks. If you want to get all Roland Barthes about it, you could say that the accumulation of these images suggest a certain “mythology.” What Barthes would call the “denotative” meaning is whatever the art in question is: Aitken, Arcangel, etc. Withdrawn from any individuating opinion, however, they are flattened together to the second-order “connotative” meaning, @annadlvv’s connection to another aspirational hybrid signified: something like “beauty-intelligence-status.” That’s a social mythology whose cultivation is hardly unique to Anna Delvey. In fact, it is its very commonness—the way art circulates so widely as an image, as social proof, extracted from encumbering ideas—that makes the fraud so easy to pull off. Ed Ruscha A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Jul 16, 2016 at 11:18am PDT #felixgonzalestorres A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Jun 8, 2016 at 9:56am PDT Laurent Grasso at @thearmoryshow A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Mar 2, 2016 at 3:30pm PST Tracey Emin, 1997 A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Dec 21, 2016 at 8:49am PST #DanFlavin #DiaBeacon #BEACON A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Aug 27, 2015 at 6:00pm PDT #StormKing #NEWWINDSOR A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Aug 24, 2015 at 3:42pm PDT #FelixGonzalezTorres #thenewwhitney #NEWYORK A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Aug 6, 2015 at 9:59am PDT Condo A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Apr 7, 2016 at 8:44pm PDT @alexisrael #Summer #AlmineRech #PARIS A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Jun 30, 2015 at 8:52am PDT ❌Jens Einhorn opening #BERLIN @duveberlin A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Jun 12, 2015 at 10:16pm PDT Obsessed with Nordic pavilion #VeniceBiennale #VENICE A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on May 8, 2015 at 5:25pm PDT 😱 #EdvardMunch A post shared by AD (@annadlvv) on Nov 7, 2014 at 10:54am PST Follow Artnet News on Facebook:<doc-sep>
Jessica Pressler's long, gripping profile of con artist Anna Sorokin (AKA Anna Delvey) has all the making of a first-rate grifter novel, where the likable, unflappable rogue is revealed by inches to be a sociopath, a broken person who can't herself tell truth from fiction. All the more remarkable is "Delvey"'s virtuosity at the con: she tricked the finest hoteliers, finance industry luminaries, restauranteurs, commercial landlords, and even Martin Fucking Shkreli into thinking that she was a German heiress about to inherit an uncountable fortune. She ran up bills good for tens of thousands of dollars at New York hotels, hired the world's leading consultants to help her plan to establish a Soho House-style members' club in a fashionable Manhattan building, even tricked private jet companies into chartering planes for her use. She went to every party and every scene, and flashed around cash she conned out of one mark to seduce the next. Delvey was impersonating a trust-fund kid, a kind of limited Turing Test that is much easier to pass than a full-blown impersonation of someone with skills, perspective and native intelligence. Indeed, one of the early clues that her marks had that she was a scammer was that she was actually trying to do things, rather than just frittering away her unearned, bottomless Gilded Age inheritance. Delvey's story is a kind of parable about the perils of Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking gospel, whose exponents (including Donald Trump and his father) are told to simply act as though their desires had already been realized, declaring victory even before the battle is joined. These people distinguish themselves from the boring farts in the "reality-based community" who insist that (for example) one's inauguration crowd does not grow larger than your predecessors' if you just claim loudly enough that it is so. Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore's and the hotel's own Le Coucou. ("That's what they do in the rich culture, is meals," said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff's attention. "I'd be like, 'Anna, there's a line of eight people.' But she'd keep putting money down." And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn't hesitate to take it. "A little selfish of me," she admitted later. "But … yeah." Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn't grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of. Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It Somebody had to foot the bill for Anna Delvey's fabulous new life. The city was full of marks. [Jessica Pressler/The Cut] (via Naked Capitalism)