Some of the art world’s most powerful billionaire donors and wealthiest collectors were reportedly part of a WhatsApp group that discussed how to shift Americans’ perceptions of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, as well as how to encourage New York mayor Eric Adams to use the police to clamp down on Columbia University students holding pro-Palestine protests on campus.
A log of chat messages was provided to The Washington Post by people with direct access to the private group on the condition of anonymity, according to the newspaper. The contents of the group chat, which was created in the days following the 7 October 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage, were intended to stay private. The group chat was reportedly created on the direction of the billionaire real estate tycoon Barry Sternlicht, a donor to the Whitney Museum of American Art and a collector. Sternlicht never joined the group directly, and instead communicated through an employee according to the Post. A representative of Sternlicht did not respond to a request for comment from The Art Newspaper.
In one of the group’s earliest messages, sent on 12 October, Sternlicht’s staffer reportedly said the group, named “Israel Current Events”, was meant to “change the narrative” in Israel’s favour. One way to do so would be by showing “the atrocities committed by Hamas … to all Americans”, the message read, according to the Post. Sternlicht’s goal was to “help win the war” of public opinion among Americans while Israel worked to “win the physical war”. Since October, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with more than half being women and children.
People in the group chat involved in the arts included hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who with his wife, Margaret Munzer Loeb, have a significant contemporary art collection and have acquired work by Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Mark Rothko and Richard Prince. Loeb is the founder and chief executive of the Third Point hedge fund, which became a major investor at Sotheby’s in 2013 and was among the largest shareholders before billionaire Patrick Drahi took the auction house private in 2019. On 26 October, Loeb sent a message to the group saying, “I’ll be grateful when the perpetrators are dragged off campus”, referring to the student protestors at Columbia, according to the Post.
Another member of the group chat was billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who has an estimated fortune of about £29.246bn according to the most recent The Sunday Times Rich List. He made his fortune in the private energy and aluminium sectors during the early days of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and later purchased Warner Music in 2011. Blavatnik has made multiple eight-figure donations to British cultural institutions, and has building extensions named after him at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern in London.
Another art world player who reportedly took part in the WhatsApp group was real estate investor Joseph Sitt, the chairman of Thor Equities Group. Sitt was a major donor behind the outdoor street art display Coney Art Walls near the Coney Island boardwalk in Brooklyn, curated by himself and dealer Jeffrey Deitch.
Chat logs seen by the Post show Loeb, Blavatnik and Sitt, along with Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, took part in a video call on 26 April with mayor Adams. Chat messages that summarised the conversation show some of those present discussed donating to Adams, and pressuring Columbia officials to allow the mayor to send police to campus to rein in the protestors. Some participants in the group chat offered to fund private investigators to help New York Police Department officers address the protests, according to the Post, which also reported that someone sent a message in the group claiming Adams accepted the proposition.
Adams denied the call had anything to do with “trying to influence the administration” during a press conference on Tuesday (21 May), adding that “not one time on that call with me was any comment made about donations”. Most of the conversations during the 26 April video call centred around “the topic of what was happening on our college campuses”, Adams said.
“I was concerned about the radicalisation of our children. I was concerned about the paraphernalia that we found on the college campuses,” Adams said. “For prominent leaders of a community to say, 'We're concerned about what we're seeing and what we're hearing.' They have a right to do that because I would have done that.”
Adams also denied using private investigators to manage on-campus protests.
“We have the best investigators, but if a private person determines they want to find their lost child, if they want to find out who committed a crime on their block, they have a right to do that. If any information is something that we could use, we will, but we're not soliciting it,” Adams said, according to a transcript of the press conference provided by the city.
Representatives for Loeb, Blavatnik and Sitt did not immediately respond to The Art Newspaper’s request for comment. A Blavatnik representative told the Post he contributed $2,100 to Adams’s campaign in April to endorse his “stalwart support of Israel and firm stand against antisemitism”.
The Post said the chat log shows the group grew to about 100 members. Other members reportedly included Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, a major collector in Seattle, and Joshua Kushner, the founder of Thrive Capital and brother-in-law of Ivanka Trump. Kushner is on the board of the online art marketplace Artsy and is married to model Karlie Kloss, the latest celebrity guest curator for Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction. Billionaire tech founder Michael Dell, who has donated to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and is a photography collector, was also added to the group chat, according to the Post.
Sternlicht told the Post the WhatsApp group was shut down earlier in May.