When I heard in 2023 that Sotheby’s, one of the Big Three auction houses alongside Christie’s and Phillips, planned to buy the Whitney Museum’s old building at 945 Madison Avenue, a Brutalist masterpiece by American architect Marcel Breuer, for $100 million, I worried about the Little People.
I don’t mean the powerless. I mean the imaginary, migratory folks who live in the artist Charles Simonds’s tiny installation Dwellings, a shoebox-scale village made from clay, wood and tiny bricks, that’s been nestled in one of the Whitney’s stairwells since 1981. (Dozens of others once dotted corners of the US and Europe.)