“The art world has the philosophy that when things are down, it’s time to bet. It’s not time to pull out. You go full throttle. You buy. You throw the elaborate, full-on exhibition.”
MOLLY KRAUSE is the art world’s secret weapon, the stylish social strategist behind some of New York’s top galleries—Marianne Boesky, David Nolan and Lévy Gorvy Dayan—and exhibitions for Sotheby’s, Fotografiska and the Armory Show. Raised all over the East Coast with deep family ties to art world royalty—her husband, Henri Neuendorf, is the son of legendary dealer Hans Neuendorf, founder of Artnet—and a force in arts patron circles (she co-chaired Storm King’s young patrons group and serves as co-chair at the Whitney Contemporaries). JANET MERCEL meets the art world star who bridges the worlds of heritage and new blood.
Art is in your DNA. Your husband, Henri Neuendorf, continues the legacy of his father’s gallery. You must talk art all day long.
We do—and it’s not even annoying. We met in 2016 at Art Basel Miami, at a Ritz-Carlton party. He was a writer for Artnet, I was a publicist. We were in Paris together two weeks later, and I asked him to be my boyfriend. That was it. After that, we were just together.
Have you always had your eye on art?
Even when I was little, I was aware of optics—how things are presented—and coming up with creative ways to show them. I remember doing a tourism project in 3rd grade on Oklahoma City. One girl in my class presented a feature on the city bombing. I remember thinking, that’s a terrible idea, why would you focus on that? Of course, when you’re a kid you don’t know what a publicist is called or that it’s a job.
You understood crisis management in the third grade.
Whenever people ask me if I do crisis comms, I say, well, if I’m any good at my job, you’re not going to know. I was doing internal communications for The Armory Show in 2020 during the earliest days of the pandemic, and we were still arguing about whether to call it Covid-19 or the coronavirus. We say in the industry, “It’s PR, not the ER.” You can’t control everything, but you can control, to some degree, how it’s perceived.
The art market has been shaken up lately. Galleries like Kasmin, Clearing, and Blum closed their doors. The Art Dealers Association of America’s show was cancelled this summer.
The art world has the philosophy that when things are down, it’s time to bet. It’s not time to pull out. You go full throttle. You buy. You throw the elaborate, full-on exhibition. Now, if you’re a gallery operating at a price point that doesn’t align with the footprint you’re taking up, maybe you have investors that will save you. If you’re a gallery that mistreats your artists—and I have plenty of friends whose galleries did, without caring how it looked or if they got caught—it’s harder to have sympathy.
“We were in Paris together two weeks later, and I asked him to be my boyfriend. That was it. After that, we were just together.”
You’re a woman in the male-dominated art world.
Two of the galleries I work with have women’s names on the door—and it’s not easy to be a woman gallery principal. They’ve been maligned in the art world for as long as it’s existed. Marianne Boesky has openly talked about the stigmas against women in the industry—especially pregnant women and mothers. Mary Boone is another woman famously torn down by a male art world. At Lévy Gorvy Dayan this fall, we have a major exhibition with heavy-hitter artists of the 80s. Mary was an iconic part of that scene. For Brett [Gorvy] to initiate a collaboration with her made total sense.
Your personal and work life are intertwined.
They’re inextricably linked. I’m booking a venue for the next social event for The Whitney Contemporaries, basically a happy hour for community building within the young arts community. People join young patron’s groups to support something, but also because they’re new to New York, or they want to meet people. A very wise young patron friend said to me, “Just show up. Go to the thing. You’re never going to regret meeting people.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BFA.com
