The World’s Thirstiest Art Dealer

Everyone’s saying this is like an episode of The White Lotus or Palm Royale,” said Nick Hissom.

The 32-year-old art dealer is the stepson of the billionaire and erstwhile casino magnate Steve Wynn, and on a recent afternoon he was sitting on a cobalt-blue tufted sofa, surrounded by priceless masterpieces in Wynn’s $75 million Beverly Hills mansion. It had been a tumultuous few weeks since the bust-up of Hissom’s engagement with fiancé Kameron Ramirez, his partner in a Palm Beach art advisory, following lurid cheating allegations that came to light via an anonymous gossip Instagram account.

That Wynn, a major Trump donor, has a gay stepson, and that he had been roasted in an online forum called Large Penis Support Group, was perhaps an irresistible saga for the tabloids, and they seized on it with gusto. The “Dramaaa!” as the Perez Hilton headline put it, traveled from the Miami Herald to the New York Post and the Daily Mail. Far from playing the victim, Hissom, who had done his part to amplify the split on social media, was trying to figure out what to do next. A photographer friend called him with an idea for a shoot.

“He said, ‘I want you to be totally naked. It’s not going to be shot like a porn or anything. It’s going to be done like Tom Ford, like YSL; it’s going to be intellectual, it’s going to be beautiful, and it’s going to be about you,’” Hissom recalled, showing me the resulting pictures on his phone, already imagining coverage that was, at this point, a projection. “The headline is going to be, you know, like, ‘Meet the Art World’s Hottest Dealer!’”

From a pristine white space on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Hissom brokers museum-quality Warhols, Basquiats, and Rothkos to the local plutocracy as the director of Wynn Fine Art, a boutique gallery owned by his stepfather specializing in museum-quality works that sell into the eight figures. As partners, Hissom and Ramirez advised art collectors and represented emerging artists such as Connor Addison and Kevin Hees for Aktion Art, which operates out of the same space. The couple had hit town in 2020 in the wave of post-pandemic arrivals that gave the island a generational refresh and immediately became social fixtures.

“They were young and fun and went out. They had lots of friends from all over the world,” said Jane Holzer. A former Warhol superstar once known as “Baby Jane,” she became a mentor as well as a collaborator and occasional customer. “I helped them mount a show of mostly Warhols, but also Alex Katz, Lichtenstein, and other things like that. Nick is very fastidious. You can say, ‘Okay, I found this,’ and he’ll be looking it up and have all the information on his phone within ten seconds.”

The connection to Wynn, a resident and serial flipper of multimillion-dollar mansions, gave Hissom and Ramirez entrée into a staid, moneyed Republican enclave that trusts few interlopers, and the couple dressed the part, chronicling all on Instagram in shades of double-breasted finery. The breakup was a blemish on their otherwise airbrushed profile and suggested the end of their joint business venture. When we spoke, Hissom’s only adornment besides a snug black T-shirt was a Rolex, a Daytona “Panda” from his father’s collection — “Very rare, very hard to get” — and a bracelet.

“It’s a Love bracelet by Cartier — the first diamond that Kam ever bought me,” he said. “We have matching ones, and I don’t know if he’s still wearing his. I’m trying to get rid of it, but I just can’t yet. I tried today, I went to this jewelry store — but the bracelet has become a part of me that I don’t want to throw away.” He sighed and pressed long fingers against his eyelids. “But my diamond engagement ring from Graff is gone.”

Nicholas Hissom was born in London during the summer of 1992, the elder son of parents Robert and Andrea. “My father’s side is Texas: oil and professional race-car driving and polo,” Hissom said. “He used to have a high-goal polo team” — the elite level of the sport — “and we grew up in proximity to the English royal family.”

A successful financier, friend of the then-Prince Charles, and competitive GT sports-car driver, Robert met his future wife at a polo match. They made a handsome, socially in-demand couple who lived a block from Harrods in the aristocratic enclave of Knightsbridge. Jeffrey Epstein kept their phone numbers in his “little black book,” just above Hoffman, Dustin.

After having a second son, the Hissoms divorced in 2007. Two years later, tabloids implicated 40-something Andrea as the “younger woman” in the dissolution of the marriage of Steve Wynn, who is two decades her senior. Wynn is on record saying “I fell in love after I was separated” from his first wife, Elaine. Andy Warhol predicted the end of that story. In a diary entry from 1983, he wrote that “the Golden Nugget guy from Atlantic City” (a reference to the casino Wynn owned at the time) came by, adding: “He’s really sexy.” He acidly noted that Elaine, who had accompanied Wynn on the visit, was “old enough that she could be traded in soon.” Nonetheless, the first Mrs. Wynn walked away from the marriage with stock worth $741 million, making it one of the biggest-ticket divorces in history. She died in April at 82.

Andrea’s father, Victor Danenza, had been a suave fixture of the Pan Am–era jet set who mixed with Adnan Khashoggi, the notoriously sybaritic Saudi arms dealer, and the Sultan of Brunei. Danenza had a reputation for throwing glittering parties in the south of France and staying one step ahead of the law. When he died, the family scattered his ashes in the Bay of St.-Tropez.

“There was always this very James Bond–y international situation when I was growing up,” Hissom said.

Nick hit the society pages young, photographed at children’s parties by Tatler, the glossy chronicle of Britain’s upper crust. His first school was Thomas’s Battersea (lately attended by Prince George), then it was off to Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, “which is this international school where you go skiing every day.”

While at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied art, history, and anthropology, his wide-set, coal-black eyes (a gift from his mother) attracted the attention of Ford Models. By age 18, Hissom was taking classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and spending the rest of the week working the lower rungs of modeling in New York.

“I get great gift bags at events,” Hissom told his college newspaper at the time, which noted he “often gives hair and beauty products to the girls in his hall.” But that was about all he was giving the girls. Hissom wasn’t out even as his mother’s romantic life became the subject of international press coverage. When she remarried in 2011, “Page Six” reported, “Guests at the three-day event at Wynn Las Vegas included best man Clint Eastwood, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, Sly Stallone, hotel magnate Sol Kerzner, Brett Ratner, Tommy Hilfiger, Garth Brooks, Donald Trump, [and] Michael Milken.” Even her ex-husband, Robert, was there.

A post-college feint at pop stardom obliged Hissom to butch up his image, cavorting in videos with vixens who twerked in smoky rooms and staged “sexy” water-gun fights in the desert. “It’s classic R&B pop melodies over a hot track,” he said about his music in 2017, a period when his look featured a grungy blond dye job, baggy streetwear, and urban swagger for songs like “He Ain’t Better,” which featured references to “sake bombs at Nobu.” The next year, he met Kameron Ramirez, then just 19, at Soho House in the Meatpacking District.

It was love.

Born in Nicaragua and raised in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Ramirez had scored an early film-producing credit (Public Figure, an independent documentary about social media featuring Rose McGowan) and had been the subject of a photo spread on Vanity Teen, a website highlighting aspiring models. Photos he posted from that summer show a gangly teen with owlish glasses and a mop of curls, Hissom hanging bro-ishly on his shoulders.

Hissom’s music career died of natural causes not long afterward, though he dips in and out of the recording studio with the frequency of a Real Housewife. He and Ramirez wanted to settle down and start a business together. “Art presented itself as this great opportunity that I didn’t have to worry so much about,” Hissom said. He became a director in the gallery his stepfather opened after resigning from his company, Wynn Resorts, over sexual-misconduct allegations (Wynn eventually settled the lawsuit against him). That gallery traded in consignments and works from Wynn’s own collection at the high end of the market, and Aktion Art would deal in emerging artists.

Palm Beach has always had money, and in the past decade, Mar-a-Lago has also turned it into a seat of political power. But until recently, its major collectors would go elsewhere to shop for their Magrittes and Monets. (The beauty mogul Sydell Miller filled her oceanfront mansion La Reverie with them; after her death, her collection fetched $216 million at auction.) Most buyers are snowbirds on the market for artworks to decorate second and third homes. The oldest dealership in town, Findlay Galleries, which opened here in 1961, is best known for its distinctive black-and-white striped awnings and matron-friendly exhibits.

Over the years, other galleries emerged to cater to a broad spectrum of tastes. A gold-and-diamond-encrusted supercar engine, remodeled as a coffee table by Tom Bates, could at one point be acquired at the Russeck Gallery, which expanded to Palm Beach from Philadelphia in 1995. (Price on request, but versions without the gold and diamonds start at $130,000.) Holden Luntz (opened in 1999) supplies works by photographer Harry Benson — a Palm Beach resident, 95 years young — who shot the Beatles in their prime as well as Truman Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball.

With the pandemic, the year-round population of a once-seasonal resort town swelled with Manhattan refugees, those in the Trump orbit, and tech and finance potentates, many of them serious collectors like Ken Griffin and Steve Ross. Blue-chip galleries like Pace and Lehmann Maupin responded by opening pop-ups, but those closed when the international art-fair circuit picked up again. Aquavella and Wynn Fine Art are two that held on.

Wynn’s 700-square-foot brick-and-mortar location provided an anchor for Hissom and Ramirez’s fledgling business, which held its first show, an exhibit of works by Addison, in 2021, attended by a mostly young crowd of clients and Bruce A. Beal, the real-estate developer. Their conceit was to draw older collectors with Wynn’s brand-name inventory (such as a show of Lichtenstein “Master Works”) and get them to invest in Aktion’s contemporary roster — for example, an NFT by ThankYouX, a rising artist popular on Instagram. “For that caliber of collector, purchasing something in the $20,000-to-$200,000 range is not a huge ask,” Hissom said. “They’re happy to have fun with that kind of thing.”

The art market cooled in 2024, falling to a four-year low of $57.5 billion in sales, as alarmed gallerists and auction houses reported fewer eight-figure sales and a downturn in volume. Meanwhile, in a sign that the market is getting younger and more affordable, sales at galleries moving between $250,000 and $5 million worth of art a year grew by double digits. Demand for work by giants such as Warhol and Lichtenstein remains steady, and consignors hand over their paintings for resale because they can yield healthy returns.

“Wynn Fine Art provided the foot in the door. People will certainly answer the phone, right? But I learned very quickly I couldn’t survive just being Steve’s stepson. It’s not enough to just be a nepo baby,” Hissom said. “Once you get the art from someone, you have to sell it. You can’t say, ‘I’m gonna take a $10 million consignment of all your best stuff,’ clean out their house, and then say, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t sell it. Here it all is back.’ Once you have that consignment, you have to get it done. You have to market, you have to invest, you have to go to dinners and travel around the world and be in your clients’ houses.”

Aktion’s sales caught the eye of major art dealers, who noted the growing connections to deep-pocketed collectors. In an email from Venice, Larry Gagosian said of Hissom: “I think he’s very passionate and has a good sense of value.” He eventually worked on a few sales with Hissom and found him “very reliable.” “He’s got great energy — he’s ambitious and seems to genuinely love art and the business of art. He doesn’t overplay things. I think he has a good natural sense of how to deal with people, and he’s very much on the case but not pushy.”

For six years out of six and a half together, Hissom and Ramirez were happy. They hosted openings at the Esplanade shopping center in Palm Beach and traveled everywhere. “London, Switzerland, Gstaad, Paris, Korea,” said Hissom, ticking off the stops on the circuit. “Miami, New York, Palm Beach, Aspen, L.A., Italy, the Bahamas. We’re partying in St.-Tropez here, we’re on a client’s yacht there.” Ramirez has “a wonderful eye,” he added. Ramirez described the division of labor in a 2022 interview with the lifestyle outlet Park magazine: “We have very different perspectives and skill sets. I enjoy finding, discovering, and scouting artists. Nick is a tastemaker and is able to see the potential in art and artists. He looks to the future and is great at promoting whatever he’s involved in.”

The flattering press provoked envy within the gilded cage that is cliquey, gay South Florida. It turned out not everyone in the couple’s circle wished them well. Instagram commenters slammed Hissom for supporting Trump on his feed. (He may be a Samantha in front of the camera, but on politics he’s more of a Charlotte.) “The reason I backed President Trump in the election is primarily due to concerns about global stability and national security,” he told me. “I’m hopeful that people who are scared or marginalized in this country have enough support to continue to have a wonderful life. Everyone has to weather different storms, you know. I mean, we had World War I, World War II. You have to just try to do the best you can.”

Hissom and Ramirez were also the subject of a brutally unkind thread, posted by people who claimed to know them personally, on LPSG, a kind of pornier gay Reddit. And friends snitched on them in group chats like self-appointed Twinkterton detectives. The ax finally fell when the contents of one of those chats — containing information about Ramirez’s alleged affair — was published by rosey_confessions, an anonymous Instagram gossip account linked to students at Hissom’s old boarding school.

“I really had no idea. I was totally blindsided” by the allegations, Hissom said. “It was a from-one-second-to-the-next kind of thing.” Hissom responded angrily on Instagram, in a screed reported by the Daily Mail, calling his 25-year-old partner a “cheater, liar, backstabber” who had been “fucking my friend in my own house.” He described the infidelity as a “coordinated, sneaky, and vicious affair.”

“I’ll never understand why you came to hate and disrespect me so,” Hissom continued. “And threw 7 years of the best marriage, a life, a family, and a business away—for a guy who knowingly was breaking us up, clearly with no morals of his own either.” (The two had become engaged on a trip to London in the summer of 2023 but never married.) Hissom also named the person he believes to be the third party (a.k.a. the “new stupid vapid Miami guy”), a then-21-year-old aspiring TikTok influencer. He deleted the posts but defends them now. “I didn’t want to sugarcoat it, and I don’t regret it,” Hissom said. Ramirez, who has been keeping a lower profile on his private Instagram account, declined to comment for this story.

The former couple has not been in the same room since the rosey_confessions bombshell. Following an angry confrontation, Ramirez left their shared apartment in Palm Beach and Hissom flew to L.A. From there, Hissom continued Instagramming thirst traps and musings about how he was enjoying life “without my house full of users, liars and snakes with plastic faces and plastic clothing hanging around harvesting clout and crumbs.”

He wasn’t the only one airing messy interpersonal grievances on social media. On March 31, the painter Kevin Hees shared a lengthy Instagram post itemizing “a list of completed projects Aktion Art/Wynn Fine Art have failed to promote or sell and have failed to pay for.” On the phone, Hees said he had his lawyer draft “a formal notice of breach of contract,” seeking $1.5 million in compensation “for lost sales and business opportunities.” Hissom said Hees was the first artist Aktion worked with but there was never a contract with him. He disputes the artist’s account on Instagram.

Despite such public acrimonies, Hissom intends for Aktion Art to continue as an advisory, but he made it clear that he plans to be the one who keeps the wealthy customers. “We have an international network of clients that I built all around the world through my family upbringing, my grandfather; my father; my mother; Steve. That is my world that Kameron came to inhabit,” he said. “I’m not saying to people ‘Pick a side.’ I’m just saying ‘This is what happened, and we’re no longer going to be doing business together.’”

It was getting late in Beverly Hills. As the sun set on Wynn’s grand compound, a reflection from the glass covering a Lichtenstein moved across Hissom’s face, briefly giving it a perfect frame. He was narrating the soap opera of the past weeks as if he were an innocent bystander. “I saw how quickly media around the world picked up the divorce story, that there was a real audience, that they were following us as young, successful art dealers that were beautiful and gay and in love and built a business and everything else, and how sudden and unbelievable and how terrible it all was, you know, in this one moment,” he said in his unplaceable accent, a roving Euro–mid-Atlantic VPN that flows confidently in long, run-on sentences that rarely pause. The suggestion by a photographer from his modeling days to pose for a nude photo shoot seemed to him a natural segue. Like another permanent Palm Beach resident, Hissom settled on a plan with the potential for the most exposure.

“I don’t know what it says about me that I get dumped and the first thing I do is get on a plane to L.A. and get naked. But, like, what else am I supposed to do? I’m definitely not going to sit in my gallery and cry about it,” he said. “And it might mean someone in a palace somewhere being like, ‘Oh my God, did you see the guy that we sell the art to?’ That’s show business.” He’s even giving music another shot. On Friday, he released a single and music video with a couple of OnlyFans stars. The title is “So Cool Babe.”