A Day in the Life: Bettina Korek

A Day in the Life: Bettina Korek

A Day in the Life

Gary Tinterow

Christian Deydier

Ken Yeh

Piotr Uklanski

Damien Hirst Robert Longo Chris Burden Lawrence Weiner Liz Larner Lari Pittman Kelley Walker Tate Pats Itself on the Back, Plans Ahead

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If the city of Los Angeles is a great urban sprawl, it also has some great connectors. There’s the Santa Monica Freeway, which runs from the beach to downtown. There’s a nearly universal obsession with Pinkberry frozen yogurt. And, in the contemporary-art scene, there’s Bettina Korek.

Although she is only 29 years old, Korek has already made a name for herself as someone who knows everyone, and has a hand in everything, in the L.A. art world. She attends almost any event worth attending—and at 5 feet 11 inches, she is easy to spot. An L.A. native whose father is a successful land broker, she returned to her hometown after graduating  in 2000 from Princeton, where she studied economics before switching to art history. Korek soon landed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), first in the development and then the communications office. She left the museum two years ago, but while there she witnessed and helped foster the rise of L.A.’s art scene.

With an easygoing sort of determination, Korek has drummed up corporate support for nonprofit art spaces, getting Hermès, for instance, to back a benefit auction in Culver City for LAX Art. And she has cultivated young collectors through events like the bash she threw at the legendary print gallery Gemini G.E.L. for entry-level patrons of LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Los Angeles Opera and the Music Center, with sponsorship from the New Yorker magazine.

After years of applying her talents on an ad hoc basis, Korek recently founded her own development company, For Your Art, and a sister marketing and communications consultancy, FYA World, to coordinate all her activities—think a next-generation Yvonne Force Villareal meets Sara Fitzmaurice. She already has seven employees and a publishing project: an art-world map updated seasonally and distributed through hotels, restaurants and galleries.

Korek remains active with LACMA, where in 2003 she started a young donors group, called the President’s Circle Avant-Garde. On Saturday, March 8, Korek was busy with its first fund-raiser, “One Night Only,” at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), the new art institution on the LACMA campus bearing Eli Broad’s name and, at least temporarily, his collection. It raked in $75,000.

7:15 A.M. Wakes up in her Westwood apartment to what she describes as the “horrible beeping” of her alarm clock.

7:45 A.M. Does about 40 minutes of cardio on a cross-training machine in the gym in her building’s basement while reading the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times— “my BlackBerry is usually with me too,” she says.

8:45 A.M. Gets into her black Volvo SUV and drives to Frédéric Fekkai in Beverly Hills to get her hair cut and blown out by her stylist, Liz.

10:21 A.M. Now back at home, takes a phone call from Frazer Burkart, a vice president of the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group and also her cochair of the Avant-Garde group at LACMA. They discuss how to handle last-minute requests for event tickets now that they have hit capacity with 450 people. He tells her that people have been using the Smallworld Web site, the invitation-only version of Friendster, to find him and ask for tickets. “In one sense it’s good—next year people will get their tickets early,” says Korek, who is clearly in it for the long haul.

11:10 A.M. Dressed simply in jeans, a black sweater and leather flip-flops, she drives to the art gallery Regen Projects for a visit she has organized for a few Avant-Garde friends, mainly 20-somethings in jeans and sneakers.

11:30 A.M. At Regen, introduces Kevin Salatino, LACMA’s head of prints and drawings, who talks to the group about collecting drawings; Korek herself collects works on paper, her last purchase being “a small Robert Longo wave drawing,” from Margo Leavin Gallery, down the street. The young art patrons—standing before works by such artists as Lawrence Weiner, Lari Pittman and Liz Larner—include the hedge-fund manager Nico Mizrahi and the Hollywood producer William Sherak (Daddy Day Camp), who claims he was a member of Avant-Garde before he even knew what it was. “You can’t say no to Bettina—she wants a check, you write a check,” he says. “You have no idea what you’re writing it for.” Korek cops to her dogged persistence: “I just begged and begged in the beginning.”