The Many Uncanny Splendors of Aspen Art Week, Unfiltered

It’s where I felt myself pleasantly losing my mind.

The travel diary below is an amendment to a W magazine story published on August 6.

A strange thing happens on the flight from LAX to Aspen. You blink, and the barren stretch of desert below suddenly turns into the mountain oasis from The Sound of Music. Touching down in a tiny airport that only accepts tiny airplanes, you drop into this bizarrely frictionless existence: every day is beautiful, everyone is white and rich, and literally nothing matters. This is where high net worth individuals come here to clear their heads, and with enough time, clear heads inevitably turn into empty ones. 

I took the flight last week for Aspen Art Week, an annual event hosted by the Aspen Art Museum culminating in a mega-fundraising gala called ArtCrush. It’s where art workers—critics, artists, curators, and dealers from New York, LA and beyond—are flown in to rub shoulders with art consumers—the ultrarich with gigantic houses here, Brentwood, Montecito, and Chicago, as well as various cities in Florida and Texas. 

When I arrived in Aspen late on Wednesday night, one prominent New York designer was already struggling to compute the contradictions of the ultrawealthy: the abundance of money but lack of style, the collecting of queer Black artists while also hosting Trump fundraisers. He said he spoke to a New York plastic surgeon whose face was so botched he had to avert his eyes to keep from breaking. “Cynicism aside,” he conceded, “it’s very beautiful here.”