My experience of Art Basel Miami Beach this year can be boiled down to one hour, right at the start. Before the chaos of the fair week truly began, as planes from New York and Los Angeles full of dealers, curators, and advisors touched down at MIA, I went to the beach, thinking I’d nuke a winter cold I caught in New York with a dose of salt water and sunshine.
While paddling around, I thought about what the ensuing days might hold. Before heading to Florida, I had spoken with three Miami Basel veterans who decided not to come this year, after attending at least 15 times consecutively. I’ll summarize their positions.
– The first person, an artist, told me that they’d decided not to come because the parties didn’t seem that good this year, so the networking wasn’t worth it. “I mean, there’s the Vanity Fair party, but that seems kind of like it,” they said.
– The second, an advisor who’s been to every first edition since the very first, in 2002, joked that my attendance was like a violinist playing as the Titanic sank.
– The third, a gallery owner who pulled out of the fair, gave the kind of spiel we’ve heard for a while now: “Collectors are much more interested in visiting Paris at this point than going back to Miami Beach after 20 years,” and added for good measure that the “attrition in sales cannot be overstated.”
From the water, I looked over to the tent where Untitled Miami Beach was preparing to open, an ant farm of handlers and installers rushing to put on a show. At least 20 more art/design/tattoo/NFT fairs were about to welcome visitors. Surely there’s still something to be seen here, I thought. And at that exact moment, a used condom floated past me, and I was forced out of the water, screaming into the week.
The new water taxi between Miami Beach and the mainland. An artist told me he took a ride where the driver cut the engine so he could show the riders an Alec Monopoly mural. Only in Miami! Photo by Annie Armstrong.
But as of Thursday night, the consensus is that the Titanic has not been sinking here in Miami. My colleagues reported that sales in the main fair were strong (a new sector for digital art helped) and that optimism was high.
Hauser and Wirth’s president, Marc Payot, reported that in the first three hours of the fair, the gallery’s sales were up 40 percent from their entire haul at the last year. “Christmas came early,” he said. “We’re already fielding inquiries about the works that will be newly installed tomorrow when we switch things up for the second day.”
Non-blue chip entities were enjoying rapid-fire sales, too, but I did hear grumbling from one dealer at a small gallery who was slapped with an $85 fee to switch out artworks. (Here’s a report I wrote this summer about the ways that fairs nickel-and-dime exhibitors.)
As for the artist’s prediction about there being no worthwhile parties? That proved to be true. Vanity Fair’s took the cake as the week’s most sought after invite. The other nights were mostly a blur. But there was still something for everyone seeking a splashy late-night destination. You could probably categorize everyone at Art Basel by which of the following three parties they opted for: 2 Chainz for the red chip-set, Diana Ross inside an Alex Prager installation for the old heads, or Yves Tumor at the Silencio takeover for the cool kids. (Tag yourself!)
Diana Ross performing at “Alex Prager: Mirage Factory,” hosted by Capital One and the Cultivist. Photo: by Bre Johnson and Matteo Prandoni for BFA.
This year, the pop-up exhibitions were the most exciting events on offer. On the mainland, a 20-minute walk from NADA (or a five-minute Uber for pearl clutchers), Nathalie Martin, the owner of Dead End Books in Los Angeles, and Simon Brewer, an associate director at Jeffrey Deitch, hosted a group show at the Rice Hotel with work by 15 artists, including Paul McCarthy, Lita Albuquerque, Brian Belott, Jordan Wolfson, and Hannah Taurins. It’s titled “The Body is The Body.”
The very dilapidated Rice Hotel had been vacant for decades before artist Fared Manzur took it over to use as his studio in the Downtown Miami, but it maintains a weathered appearance. Many of the artists in the show made work in response to its peeling paint and sun-bleached walls. McCarthy’s, naturally, was an exception: a cobalt cherub wearing a dunce cap stood in stark opposition to its surroundings.
Similarly, Wolfson’s video piece, a divisive 2011 classic, Animation, masks, is on view in a blacked-out room. Several different voices flow through the mouth of a bearded CGI man. One snippet: “Love poem. It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell someone you love them when you don’t love them anymore.”
The pop-up of Elliot Templeton Fine Arts. Can you find the clandestine blue-chip artwork? Photo by Annie Armstrong.
“The Body” has the feel of a gritty project space, while Jack Pierson, who currently has a career retrospective on view at the Bass, provided the sensibility of a jewelry-box boutique by shuttling his Henry Street space, Elliot Templeton Fine Arts, down to Miami Beach. It’s presenting a group show just down the way from the convention center in an apartment at Tuxedo Park, a faded Art Deco complex. “Miami is like the best of 10 worlds!” Pierson told me. “I love it here.”
The space has the same homey feeling as its New York headquarters, and the show offered phallic and erotic art from a bevy of lesser-known artists. (Though here’s a Wet Paint exclusive: One of the participants is actually a blue-chip artist using a pseudonym. I’ll leave it to you to guess who.)
I’ll end where I began, on that morning I fled the trash-filled ocean. While power-washing myself with boiling water and Aesop at my hotel, I reached the conclusion that Art Basel Miami Beach could never really be a luxury experience, like its sister fairs. But if it went away, I think the art world would miss all of the kitsch and stone crab, plus the panoply of museums and Latin American collectors.
Just after my ocean incident, I ran into Half Gallery’s owner, Bill Powers, at a Joe and the Juice, and he tried out a bit from one of his stand-up routines on me. “Two art bros are sitting on the beach behind Faena looking up at the stars,” he began. “One says, ‘Which do you think is closer: Basel, Switzerland, or the moon?’ And the other bro says, ‘Duh, you can see the moon.’”