Art in a Gilded Peak: the Aspen Festival for the One Percent

The second edition of the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR festival, Figures in a Landscape, opened with a party at a panoramic cattle ranch in Old Snowmass, where Matthew Barney’s ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax (2026) was installed in an open pasture, with Colorado’s resplendent Rocky Mountains visible in the distance. 

The work, assembled as part of the performance TACTICAL Parallax (2025) last year, comprises interlocking stainless steel and aluminum rods that appear to be bowed by barbell weights and flanked by football jerseys. It references an infamous collision between two American football players in 1978 that left one paralysed.

The ranch – referred to as ‘the art barn’ – is owned by Allison and Dan Rose, collectors who made their fortune in hospitality and tech; Allison owns some of California and Hawaii’s top restaurants while Dan was once a senior executive at Facebook and Amazon. The opening event featured horse carriage rides circling sculptures, donkeys wearing floral crowns, a band, open bars and buffet tables. A dour neuroscientist, who would ironically later participate in a panel about the mechanics of laughter at the festival, was asked to put out his cigarette due to the smoking ban in Colorado. He begrudgingly did as he got to the filter. Just one ember could turn the entire mountain into a “tinder box,” an Aspen-based collector, who has a background in tech, told me. “But it’s hard to explain to New Yorkers the concept of not being able to smoke outside.” He then asked me how much I had paid to be there; only people in the $10,000 and up donor tier had been invited. 

Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks, Murderers Bar, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Aspen, Colorado. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

The following morning, Los Thuthanaka, an experimental music group formed by siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, performed a hypnotic hour-long concert at the summit of Aspen Mountain. Drawing on Aymara and other Indigenous cosmologies, the pair used keys, electronics and Bolivian string and percussion instruments.

The gondola that lifted us to the summit, which ascended to an elevation of more than 3,000 metres, swerved wildly at times and made some of us queasy. I said that this wasn’t how we were supposed to die. “What would that Artnews article even look like?” I asked. “Probably something like: Naomi Fry [the more famous among us] and others die tragically in Aspen gondola ride,” another writer said. 

Live music played a role throughout. Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025), a film presented outdoors on a monumental curved screen, featured a newly-commissioned ensemble score by the musician Deantoni Parks, performed by musicians of the Aspen Music Festival and School. The work reflects on the effects of failed engineering, using aerial and underwater imaging techniques to trace the surge of water to the Pacific following the detonation of an antiquated dam along the Klamath River in Northern California. The organist Kali Malone also performed a concert at Aspen Chapel as the shifting morning light seeped through the stained glass, which included a score commissioned by the Vatican for the 2026 Venice Biennale. A viewer told me she didn’t have any particular thoughts about the performance, only that it had kept her thinking throughout. 

Ivan Cheng, 16, 2026. Production still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Aspen, Colorado. Garments: God & Bad. Camera: Arvo Leo, Will Sardinsky. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

Ivan Cheng’s performance 16 at the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center, a facility created to recycle, compost and dispose of hazardous waste, saw the artist perform a self-reflexive and sometimes self-deprecating combination of monologue and song as a videographer followed him around the barren site. The improvisational nature of the performance, coupled with some technical issues affecting the mics, and the at times clumsy audience participation, heightened its appeal. At one point, Cheng wrapped himself around a recycling bag and rolled himself down a hill. He closed the performance by laying his head on a collector’s lap. A writer told me they had periodically looked over at Barney, who was seated in the audience, to gauge if this titan of performance art was impressed. He seemed to be, politely. Cheng’s performance leaned into spectacle, and it was great for tapping into the awkward ways people perform in social settings. There’s always a quiet comedy in being around other people.

Camille Henrot’s Commedia dell’arte, at the Wheeler Opera House, closed the week. The comedy is set in a New York building and follows the story of a set designer struggling to make rent, a poet working as a courier and scrambling to deliver a package to said designer, a miserly landlord, a Marxist pilates instructor, a pompous entrepreneur and a character named Cat, who opened the show by introducing herself as a writer. “Which means I’m bored and have loose morals,” she added. The work satirised the class divide and economic realities facing New York’s creative workers, exposing the tensions between artistic aspiration and financial survival.

Camille Henrot, Commedia dell'arte, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation. Photo: Maria Baranova. © ADAGP Camille Henrot, courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

The only part of the festival that fell flat was the talks programme. A magazine editor commented that the filmmaker Julie Dash, the maker of the celebrated 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, had delivered a keynote address about identity and landscape that was filled with platitudes and art speak; another argued that it was a smartly executed placement because Dash, one of the best-known speakers, had the power to effectively bring the donor class to the festival (Werner Herzog delivered the keynote last year). The director and writer Miranda July also delivered an improvisational talk with the artist Okwui Okpokwasili that left some confused and others offended; a group of women walked out of the auditorium when July began talking about her preoccupation with the “smell of her pussy.” A collector seated beside me looked over, furled her face, and asked me: “Really?” As if she had never smelled her own.

This edition of the AIR festival was overseen by Nicola Lees, the chief executive and artistic director of the Aspen Art Museum, Daniel Merritt, the chief curator, Vic Brooks, the curatorial advisor for the festival and the curators Claude Adjil, Stella Bottai, Mariana Fernández and Eliza Ryan. 

The event coincided with other happenings in Aspen, like the Aspen Art Fair and Intersect Aspen, which brought several blue-chip galleries to the alpine village, and the museum’s annual ArtCrush fundraiser, which honoured the artist Adrián Villar Rojas and raised over $4m this year. A publicist told me that the auction is no longer open to the press; a journalist speculated it’s because someone had likely published the hammer prices, which, due to the nature of the event, are not good reflections of an artist’s market, and therefore not good for the galleries behind them and the people funding this whole thing. 

Lyle Ashton Harris, On Oracle, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Aspen, Colorado. Photo: Elyse Mertz. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

Throughout the week, some people were seen wearing safari hats embroidered with “Collector Camp,” a programme launched with Art Basel that offered access to the festival, discounts on rooftop rentals, dinner invitations, curator tours and other perks based on $5,000 and $10,000 packages. One of the “camp counselors,” Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s global director of fairs, opened the programme with a talk on the “art pilgrimage,” likening the trip to Aspen to one made to art destinations like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1960) in the remote Great Salt Lake. Aspen is famously difficult to reach, not only because it is prohibitively expensive and typically reserved for the one percent, but also because, outside the peak winter season, there are few flights to the airport and Denver is around a four-hour drive away. 

Talking about money during the festival felt crass but inescapable. During a walkthrough of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, an affiliate of the Aspen Art Museum, a guide told our tour group that the average price of a family home in Aspen is $18.2m. Later, a writer tells me that the collector Jorge Pérez, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, owns one home in Aspen, having sold his alternate Aspen retreat earlier this year for around $25m. His remaining home is complete with a mountaintop sculpture park populated by works by artists like Fernando Botero and Robert Indiana.

The AIR festival is an incredible feat; it can afford the best contemporary art available, but it’s something few will have the opportunity to experience in full. In retrospect, its most memorable moments consistently returned to questions around humanity and how we pay attention, how we relate to one another, and how inequality shapes our daily lives. Some of the sharpest critiques of these concepts unfolded within one of America’s wealthiest enclaves, and that was a contradiction the festival never quite managed to resolve. It probably never intended to, and that made it all the more fascinating to observe.