10 December 8-14, 2022 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | Culture | Night+Day | News | Letters | coNteNts | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | High-Priced Flea Market? A look back at what 20 years of Art Basel has meant for the city. BY DOUGLAS MARKOWITZ N o other event in the last 20 years has transformed Miami Beach and the surrounding ar- eas more than the arrival of Art Basel. When the massive art fair arrived in 2002, the city was still known primarily for night- clubs, cocaine, and celebs. (Still kind of is.) South Beach had swelled as a nightlife desti- nation while Wynwood was still derelict warehousing and dingy studios for fringe art- ists like Purvis Young. Private art collectors like Norman Braman and the Rubell family began wooing the fair’s Swiss operators, con- vincing them that an edition in the Americas would be a big deal. How right they were. In two decades, the city has gone from a vacation town to a haven for the world’s ul- tra-wealthy to park their yachts and buy ex- pensive paintings, if only for a week or so each December. Miami Art Week alone con- tributes, by some estimates, around $1.5 bil- lion to the local economy. Over the years, dozens of un- affiliated satellite fairs have risen around Basel, in- cluding Design Mi- ami, NADA, Untitled, and many more. Thousands of people flood in each year to party and chase clout under cover of the avant-garde. Millions are dropped on artworks of dubious quality and provenance. And yet all of this is normal, somehow. Remember when someone let Mauricio Cattelan tape a banana to a wall and sold it for 100 large? That’s just Basel be- ing Basel. Last week, Basel Basel, the one that started it all, almost felt superfluous to ev- erything else going on around it. As Sarah Douglas wrote in ArtNews, “Whatever sprawling entity is now signified by the word ‘Basel,’ is, arguably, no longer depen- dent on artworks shown in a convention center. The fair could disappear, the rest would keep going.” It can all be a bit fatigu- ing. A snippet of overheard conversation at the fair sums it up: “Sometimes I don’t even know why I’m here.” With all this in mind, walking around the Miami Beach Convention Center felt funny. I saw plenty of excellent examples of bad art, some bad in a funny way, most of it absurdly expensive, while walking the maze-like floor. The examples were endless: a portrait of a robotic Elvis by Hajime Sorayama at Nan- zuka; a tacky, solid-gold Vanessa Beecroft statue of a woman kneeling at Jeffrey De- itch’s misguided tribute to “Goddesses”; an interactive piece by MSCHF at Perrotin in the form of an ATM that displays bank bal- ances as if they were high scores (which is admittedly a bit clever); a conceptual ice sculpture of a snowman designed to melt on purpose that felt like an absurd commentary on climate change considering the carbon footprint of everyone who flew into Miami last week. I also saw many examples of good art, mostly devoid of context other than as merchandise, that it often felt like I was play- ing Geoguessr, checking off the names of blue-chip artists as I passed by their work. Yayoi Kusama, yep. Lucio Fontina, OK. Bas- quiat, I’ll take it. Basel has been here for 20 years. It is worth asking now, after all it’s wrought, whether or not it’s worth something for us, the year-round inhabitants of Miami, or if it’s just a bunch of expensive paintings in a convention center hall. Housing costs are higher than ever and now higher than any- where else in the nation. Neighborhoods and communities have been, and are being, torn up for the sake of art. Wynwood be- came a gaudy tourist destination thanks to street art. Today, the murals remain, but un- imaginative nightclubs and expensive con- dos have replaced the authenticity. Allapattah and Little Haiti are new colonies for local galleries, and who knows how soon it will take for the same gentrification cycle to push out the working-class natives. Cul- tural and environmental resources prized by locals — movie theaters, beaches, music venues, the Everglades itself — are being put to the axe by a city government that seems to care more for the tourists than their con- stituents. I think of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you fol- lowed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Nevertheless, local art and artists have, to an extent, benefitted from Basel’s presence. New institutions, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, have opened while older ones have upgraded, often buoyed by the collector class. The Rubells moved their art museum into a 100,000-square-foot former warehouse in 2019, while the Miami Art Museum contro- versially invited Jorge Pérez to stamp his name on its new Herzog- and de Meuron- designed landmark building in 2013 before he opened his own space, El Espacio 23, half a decade later. New galleries, residency pro- grams, and organizations such as Bakehouse and Oolite Arts have given Miami artists space to work and develop their skills. One of the best booths at this year’s Art Basel, lo- cal gallery Spinello Projects, showed work from Reginald O’Neal and Juana Valdes, two Miami-raised artists of color. O’Neal’s paint- ings are compelling, featuring images such as cotton plants and blackface minstrelsy toys that confront American racism with a sorrowful, sumptuous beauty. I stared end- lessly at his portrait of an older woman washing at a sink. Would these artists have the same opportunities if Basel had never come here? I’d say no. The real dirty secret of Basel Basel is this: Away from the spectacle of visual pollution and million-plus sales, there was good art to be had. Much of it, like the Spinello display, was muted or subtle, but it made it even more satisfying to discover. The few Asian galleries at the fair seemed exceptionally skillful at this: I recall Seung-taek Lee’s paintings of long strands of straight, black hair on un- painted canvas at South Korea’s Gallery Hyundai or the beautiful work by Lee Ufan and Tadanori Yokoo at Tokyo’s SCAI The Bathhouse. Many of the best booths were in sections like Nova and Positions, focused on single artists or historical presentations. In Nova, at New York’s Company gallery, John Ed- monds’ gorgeous black-and-white photo- graphs juxtaposed traditional African sculpture with contemporary black sub- jects. Near the Spinello booth at Jerome Poggi Gallery, Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan presented a group of dark, shadowy text- over-landscape paintings the artist appar- ently made while Kyiv was being bombed. An excellent Kabinett presentation showed Izumi Kato’s fluorescent paintings of de- formed, big-headed figures that simultane- ously recall ancient pottery and feel destined to end up in avant-garde memes for zoomer teens. My absolute favorite booth had to be Mer- edith Rosen Gallery’s Survey section presen- tation of an installation by Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl. The booth had been turned into a mini-casino with a working roulette and blackjack table. Everything in the room is fake, of course; the gambling is not for money, and the Dutch old-master paintings on the wall are printed from Wikipedia. But it was fun, and that’s what made it smart. De- spite the piece being from a totally different time and place, the gallery and artist acciden- tally captured the essence of Miami: Every- thing is fake, but it doesn’t matter when you’re having fun. [email protected] ▼ Culture Fairgoers surveying a large artwork on the convention floor at Art Basel. Photo courtesy of Art Basel AWAY FROM THE SPECTACLE OF VISUAL POLLUTION AND MILLION- PLUS SALES, THERE WAS GOOD ART TO BE HAD.
