Could Sex and the City’s Charlotte hack it in today’s art world?

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

Having spent much of the current lockdown rewatching episodes of Sex and the City, Rakewell was delighted by Sunday’s announcement of a reboot – albeit starring only three of the show’s original four leads. Ten half-hour episodes have been commissioned for the new series, which is titled And Just Like That… and is set to start filming this spring.

Fans have already begun speculating about the fate of Samantha Jones, as the sexually liberated PR executive played by Kim Cattrall will not be returning for the reunion. Your rakish correspondent, however, can’t help wondering what another of the protagonists has been up to since we last saw them in the closing scenes of the second Sex and the City film, released in 2010.

Gallery director Charlotte York-Goldenblatt (Kristen Davis) may have quit her job mid-way through the series after getting married, but she continued to show an interest in the visual arts. It was Charlotte who in the final season took Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) to a performance at a gallery in Chelsea, where they met Aleksandr Petrovsky, a famous and unabashedly self-centred Russian artist who would become a pivotal love interest for Carrie. Fast-forward to 2021, and might Charlotte have reignited her career in the gallery world? If so, how would she be coping with the changing realities brought on by the pandemic?

As the wife of a successful divorce lawyer with a home in the Hamptons, perhaps Charlotte jumped on the bandwagon of dealers leaving Manhattan and setting up shop on Long Island, a more convenient location for the affluent clientele who have chosen to quarantine there this year.

The sweet-natured socialite may have also decided to make use of her WASPy connections to organise events such as a virtual charity auction or a gala raising money for artists affected by the current crisis.

A less likely bet? That she has any dealings with the creepy artist who in season one invited Charlotte to his home in Connecticut before asking her to sit for one of his ‘vagina portraits’. In the era of #MeToo, that’s just one character we can assume the reboot will leave firmly in the past.