The Barnes & Noble bookstore founder and art collector Leonard Riggio hosted a garden party at his home in Bridgehampton last weekend to mark several impressive new additions to his art collection.
The show stealer was a new pavilion and garden built to display four pieces by Walter De Maria, including the circular wall piece There Exists in The Universe More Than One Billion Galaxies (1988), Riggio’s first purchase of his work. “We’re both stargazers,” the collector said of his affinity for the artist.
Guests mingled around the property, taking in the reinstalled steel work by Richard Serra, the pool house built specifically around a Robert Whitman piece, Shower (1963), which involves a constantly running shower, and a serpentine new land art installation by Maya Lin.
Lin herself was on hand just long enough to be photographed with newscaster Katie Couric, although other artists in attendance included Sarah Sze and Glenn Ligon.
“What size are you, a 14?” A non-artist asked the wheelchair-bound Chuck Close at one point, holding up his own shoe for comparison. “I’m a size 14, I always recognise a big shoe when I see it.”
In the centre of the garden, near the platform where the band played fun droners like Someday My Prince Will Come, George Pataki, the former governor of New York, held court.
He reminisced about the creation of Dia:Beacon, which was essentially created by Riggio, a former Dia Chairman—“It really was Len’s baby. I love to go there anonymously and just explore”—but soon talk turned to the presidential race.
“Ahhhhh 2016,” Pataki said, joking as if the election year was a vintage. “That’s a good year. A fine year... it’s this year, isn’t it?” (Pataki himself made a brief presidential bid for the 2016 Republican ticket.) Had he decided whom he was going to vote for? “Yep,” he said. “But I’m not going to tell you who it is.” He got on swimmingly with both Hillary Clinton, a senator during his tenure in Albany, and Donald Trump, but had profound misgivings about both.
“Put it this way,” the former governor said, “It’s not inconceivable that I will vote for someone who is not a major party candidate.” Let’s call it political Minimalism: you have to look at what’s not there as much as you have to look at what is.