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<\/p>\nAlmost one year into Donald Trump\u2019s second presidential administration, few galleries at Art Basel\u2019s US fair seem interested in overtly broaching the increasingly draconian political climate\u2014albeit with some notable exceptions.<\/p>\n
Arguably the most talked-about piece at the fair (beyond Beeple\u2019s pack of billionaire-headed robot dogs) is the perennial prankster Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s monumental provocation on Gagosian\u2019s stand. The piece, Bones (2025), is a Carrara marble sculpture of an eagle crashing to the ground, a heavy (and heavy-handed) metaphor for the state of the nation. Installed in an alcove painted a dark burgundy, the piece has been attracting flocks of selfie-takers. The work was still available, for an undisclosed price, as of Thursday morning, a representative for the gallery said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Maurizio nails it, Maurizio is the best at capturing in one image what\u2019s going on,\u201d Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel\u2019s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, tells The Art Newspaper. \u201cThe metaphor of the current status of the country\u2014that I dearly love, because I\u2019ve been spending ten years of my life in this country\u2014that metaphor is perfect for the time that we\u2019re living in, and to be presented like that in Miami at the end of the year, it\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the most part, however, political themes are not a focus for most exhibitors at Art Basel Miami Beach. Several galleries are showing works featuring American iconography, typically with an apolitical or ambiguous tone. A Lonnie Holley sculpture of a replica Statue of Liberty suspended in water appears as part of a Kabinett presentation devoted to the Alabama-born artist on Edel Assanti\u2019s stand. Pace is serving up a large Robert Indiana pin-up painting, Ms America (2001). White Cube displayed two works incorporating American flag iconography, a David Hammons African American Flag (1990) priced at $2.25m and a work by Cady Noland, Untitled (Walker). The gallery was still in talks with potential buyers for both pieces as we went to press.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In one corner of Cristin Tierney\u2019s booth, artist Tim Youd will type the entirety of Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s 1973 book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail \u201972 onto a single page<\/p>\n
Liliana Mora<\/p>\n
Platforming politics<\/p>\n
Cristin Tierney, whose eponymous New York-based gallery is presenting one of the most explicitly political stands at the fair, feels that the lack of thematic risk-taking is a reflection of \u201ca challenging year for the art market\u201d more than anything else.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur first priority as art dealers is to take care of our artists, take care of the partners who trust us to do right by them and their art,\u201d Tierney says. \u201cMost of the galleries here are making those choices about what to bring to an art fair based on a variety of factors. But one of them is: what\u2019s the best I can do for my artists?\u201d<\/p>\n
The political statements that are present at the Miami Beach Convention Center are sharp and pointed. Nicholas Galanin\u2019s works on the Peter Blum Gallery stand include Object Permanence (2024, priced at $200,000), a sculpture made from the charred remains of a knockoff totem pole carved in Indonesia, reflecting on past and contemporary abuses against Indigenous cultures. The artist, who is of Tlingit and Unangax ancestry from Sitka, Alaska, burned the object himself and documented the process in a separate photographic work, Reenactment (Inversion) 2 (2024), priced at $35,000. Galanin is also showing a textile work, Imperial Prayer Rug (2025), which interprets the point of view of a military drone as a commentary on the global surveillance state as a form of neo-colonialism (and priced at $135,000).<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of his work certainly is a response to the administration, not only in the US but all over the world,\u201d says David Blum. \u201cWe\u2019re giving the artist a platform to show what he wants to put out into the world.\u201d At the end of the fair\u2019s first day, none of Galanin\u2019s works had been sold.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council is displaying a conceptual work by Andrea Fraser, a stack of posters featuring a list of words that have been banned by the Trump administration from usage on government documents and websites. The work is an edition of ten and the price is not being disclosed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndrea really wanted this work to be shown in Florida. She thinks it\u2019s important to remind audiences of the realities of this administration,\u201d says Kibum Kim, a partner at the gallery. \u201cSo far we\u2019ve only had a positive response, no MAGA people trying to remove it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Why not have a message?\u2019<\/p>\n
In the fair\u2019s Meridians section dedicated to large-scale work, the New York gallery Freight + Volume staged an engrossing work by Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson riffing on the mind-melting nature of the Trump era. The Last Library IV: Written in Water (2020-25) is a trailer-sized cornucopia of banned books, boxes full of hidden documents, pithy posters and timeline charts related to both technology and art history. The work is being offered for $250,000 according to gallery director Nick Lawrence, who noted interest from several institutions.<\/p>\n
The artists referred to the piece as a \u201cthree-dimensional mind map\u201d built from nuggets of information scavenged from headlines, internet rabbit holes, conspiratorial conversations and other dubious sources. \u201cThis is the water we\u2019re swimming in,\u201d Paulson says of the piece. \u201cMaybe someone\u2019s gonna walk through this and have an epiphany. Maybe someone\u2019s gonna feel like, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve been trying to tell my uncle.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cristin Tierney\u2019s presentation features paintings, sculptures and even performance art relating to American politics past and present. The gallery organised the stand around next year\u2019s 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, with an eye towards institutional buyers. Several works were on hold by Wednesday afternoon, with institutional sales pending, according to gallery representatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody even knows what the heck the Declaration of Independence says, certainly not our president,\u201d Tierney says. \u201cThere are a lot of collectors, curators and members of our community who are thinking about the big questions with regard to our government, where our country\u2019s going, what we stand for, what we really believe the United States is about. And this booth reflects that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Featured works included a Jorge Tacla painting of the Pentagon building, BREAKING NEWS 5 (2025, priced at $48,000), and a Dread Scott canvas featuring a world map that strategically leaves out most of the US and blocky text spelling out the piece\u2019s title, Imagine a World Without America (2007\/2025, priced at $75,000). A piece by Julian V.L. Gaines, Emmett\u2019s Last Ride (2022, priced at $35,000), features a pair of US flags on the tailgate of a Ford truck, referencing the abduction and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.<\/p>\n
In a corner of Cristin Tierney\u2019s stand, the artist Tim Youd is busy at work all week on one of his typewriter performances, which involves typing the entirety of Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s 1973 book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail \u201972 onto a single sheet of paper. Appropriately, the gonzo journalist\u2019s account of the 1972 US presidential election reaches its climax at the Miami Beach Convention Center, which held both the Democratic and Republican party conventions that year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no reason that art fair booths can\u2019t be more curated than they are,\u201d Tierney says. \u201cWhy not have a message? Why not give people something to think about?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Carlie Porterfield and Kabir Jhala contributed reporting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost one year into Donald Trump\u2019s second presidential administration, few galleries at Art Basel\u2019s US fair seem interested…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3369,77,3370,1226],"class_list":{"0":"post-22436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basel","8":"tag-art-basel-miami-beach-2025","9":"tag-basel","10":"tag-miami-beach","11":"tag-us-politics"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}