Art Basel, Miami: The World’s First Egalitarian Art Fair?
Text By Crissa-Jean Chappell
Photos By Harlan Erskine

A crowd had gathered outside the South Florida Art Center, but no one looked inside its windows. The baby buggy that had snagged their attention contained something more striking—a drowsy heap of pocket-sized Pomeranian puppies. The compact little dogs with heavily-plumed tails had upstaged the Art Center’s recent stab at self-promotion, namely, packs of trading cards featuring local artists and curators (minus the stick of Bazooka gum.) While a pack of cards cost five dollars, the puppies were selling at four hundred times that amount.

As the sister event of Switzerland's Art Basel—the world's leading art show—stormed Miami, assorted scenesters and gallery hounds fought for a turn in the spotlight. Like the city itself, with its built-in connotations of seedy glamour, the art fair quickly established itself as a grand moneymaking scheme. Much like the annual Winter Music Conference, Miami offered a prime vacation spot for thawed-out snowbirds to do business under the guise of pleasure.

Art Basel, Miami was a hybrid sort of event—combining exhibits with music, film, fashion, and design. Over 150 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and South Africa exhibited modern and postmodern art throughout Miami Beach. A swarm of frantic collectors, gallery owners, artists, curators, critics, aficionados and groupies from across the globe descended upon the city, cramming five manic days with aesthetic overload. Around 5,000 works by 1,000 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries were on display. Prices began at a few hundred dollars for works by young artists and the mass-produced, while museum-quality masterpieces bore price tags in the millions. All media—spartan paintings, retro-futuristic sculptures, effects-laden photographs, and elliptical video art—was for sale. Last year, before the fair was cancelled for post 9-11 security fears, the city had anticipated 15,000 visitors. More than double that amount arrived this year, exceeding the average number of visitors to Art Basel, Switzerland.

Only two blocks from the ocean, the Miami Beach Convention Center boasts a mammoth 500,000 square feet of exhibit space. Inside, hordes of overdressed women munched sushi and guzzled champagne, the air around them buzzing with chatter. The curators hunched over laptops and tossed out business cards. A sleepy-looking guard slumped in a folding chair outside the so-called VIP lounge, sketching the faces of passersby. From a glass-paned pavilion, high above the mazelike exhibition floor, one could see another conference taking place in a separate hall: the Latin American Food Fair. People drifted past pretzel stands and pin-striped tents, sporting “Hello! My name is…” tags. Hours later, when the convention center had emptied, snowy flecks of popcorn could be found sprinkled throughout its concrete floors.

The usual suspects were present: large-format, stark-eyed Thomas Struth portraits; Takashi Murakami’s carnivorous-looking flowers; Keith Harring’s stick-figure acrobatics; David Hockney’s Cubist renditions of time; suburban fairy tales from Gregory Crewdson and 16,000 garden images looping like subtly-shifting paintings on Jason Rhoades’ LCD screen work, “The Grand Machine.” The fair was an absolute windfall for contemporary art addicts.

Other notable works included wall-length prints of cluttered Italian beachscapes by Massimo Vitali, a former journalist and fashion photographer. Working on a platform several feet high, Vitali’s detailed angles resemble Renaissance frescos. The parking lots and gloomy hotels looming on the horizon shift the panoramic scene from idyllic to artificial. His slippery sun-worshippers seem bound by social conventions (even without clothes) and bring out voyeuristic impulses in the beholder.

Few exhibits received as much attention as the Garry Gross series, “The Woman in the Child.” A mob had clustered around the portrait, which featured a flat-chested little girl preening in a steamy tub. Her face was caked with make-up. Her posture implied that she was already aware of herself as a sexual creature. “Isn’t that Brooke Shields?” said an older lady with a pinched expression, perhaps thinking of the movie, “Pretty Baby,” in which the actress played a child prostitute.

Nearby, João Onofre’s video, “Vulture in the Studio,” incited giggles. Caught on camera, the lumbering bird investigated an empty room, knocking over books and chewing Post-it notes off a bulletin board. This not-so-subtle jibe at the acquisition of art and the corporate world seemed perfect for the fair.

Art and commerce also merged in an intriguing display by the Z Corporation. The company showed off a printer that renders football-sized 3-D models of any kind of object in 64 million colors—in a mere two hours. People stood in line to scan custom-made sculptures of themselves for a couple thousand dollars.

Another highlight was Art Basel’s Video Lounge. Housed in the Miami Beach public library, the program screened more than fifty works daily in three different programs. James Rondeau, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, selected the works. Visitors could also select their own program from over 60 works and view them on geometric, tinfoil-sheathed monitors. In the main auditorium, guests slipped off their shoes and sprawled on a foam-covered ramp to watch experimental films like Darren Almond’s gorgeous and unsettling “A,” shot along the crystalline coast of Antarctica. The film came about when Mission Antarctica invited Almond on their expedition to clear ecological waste from Antarctica's shores in early 2002. He discovered a “landscape simply made up of air, liquid and gas in different states.” His camera lingers over menacing icebergs, skimming their curves like the backs of rounded knees. After a while, it becomes difficult to distinguish sea from sky.

On opening night, twenty avant-garde galleries presented their programs in shipping containers, converted into exhibition spaces. This show, entitled “Art Positions,” resembled a sort of chic trailer park. Near the front entrance of each container, a sign gave the warning: “Before loading the shipper must check the proper condition of the container. This applies especially when poisonous, dangerous or obnoxious cargo has been transported.” Curators did not always heed these instructions. In fact, few took advantage of their innovative housing—though one trailer featured a working beauty salon, complete with synthetic hair, plastic combs, bobby pins, beads, and fake marble floors. “Sorry. Cash only,” said the sign above the swivel chair.

Few people seemed interested in the art as much as the open bar. The mass of partygoers pushed their way through the cramped and stuffy containers, spilling their apple martinis and dribbling interjections. The Setai Bar was sponsored by LO/TEK, a group of New York architects constructing yet another skyscraper on the waterfront. TV crews hopped out of taxis, wielding boom mics like ammunition. SUV limos lined Collins Avenue. In the historical outdoor project, the TRANS organization (Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno) launched sprays of fireworks that blossomed above the boardwalk.

“ The Convention Center had an entirely different feel,” explained Elizabeth Hall, a local video artist. “It was striking to see the blue chip work of art stars spanning the past one hundred years displayed in a true 19th century Salon approach; one blockbuster art piece on top of the other. The work was displayed not for the convenience of making each work look grand or important, but for the convenience of the gallerist—assuming the role of retail salesperson—displaying their most prominent inventory and as much inventory as their cubicles could accommodate.”
With South Beach’s popularity exploding among fashion-savvy South Americans and vacationing Europeans, downtown Miami is brewing a competitive energy of modern style. Ten years ago, who would’ve guessed that a parched landscape of low-rent houses and warehouse space would accommodate some of the country’s most innovative design showrooms and sprawling art complexes? Many critics, however, still hold the disgruntled tourist’s view of Miami’s local art scene. Peter Plagens’ “Report from Florida: Miami Spice,” published in the November 1986 issue of Art in America, said, “Hot housing a major art culture in Miami may be possible, as, no doubt, is growing grapefruit in Alaska—but at what cost?”

“This was a retail art exhibition, as opposed to a museum,” said Richard Shack, the emeritus board chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), now living in Miami. “It will make us much more visible as an art community.” When asked what differences he sees in Miami’s version of the fair, Shack laughs. “It’s less of a trip. Especially for people who hesitated about going to Basel.” There was no negotiating over pieces at the convention center, Shack claimed. Everyone already knew the price tags. And unlike the opening-day rampages in Basel, Switzerland, the fair proceeded with a subtle amount of behind-the-scenes haggling.

“ I think the Basel Art fair was a boon to Miami,” said gallery owner, Bernice Steinbaum. After twenty-two years of operating a pioneer art gallery in New York, Steinbaum relocated to downtown Miami.

“ We are no longer an outpost of New York,” she said. “We have our own identity. People really made a great effort to make this a happening of the finest order. There was something for everyone, in terms of what you wanted to do in these three or four days…beyond looking at art. Certainly, the quality of the galleries was top level. And I think that the parties and the organizational skills that we saw were unparalleled in other fairs that I have seen take place. It was the Olympics of art fairs.”

Miami is finally receiving serious recognition, thanks to private collectors like the Rubell family. Don Rubell (whose brother, Steve, brought fame to Studio 54) and his wife, Mera, have a collection of consisting of several thousand pieces. It is housed in a cube-shaped warehouse, located in a former DEA confiscation building often featured in Miami Vice. For the fair, the Rubells brought out long, white tables laden with puffy croissants, bagels, and orange juice. A rooster crowed in the weed-choked lot next door. Cars eased to the curb. Out popped women who belonged in perfume ads. Across the street, a muscular Doberman paced nowhere in particular. In the seven years since the Rubells had opened their space to the public, never had they received so many people at one time. A surprising number of their visitors were curious spectators from the around city—locals caught up in the Basel experience.

“Everyone is speaking about how this is going to position Miami as some kind of player in the art world,” claimed Mark Coetzee, the soft-spoken curator of the Rubell collection. “But I think that there’s another phenomenon to that…It makes the visual arts more visual in the sense that there’s a community. We had many city officials come through who had never been before. We had people from other professions. For me, the most interesting thing was…the effect.” Coetzee continued, “Everyone has heard about how successful the event was in the financial sense—the amount of people who came, how well the galleries sold, how much the visitors loved it. Not everyone has spoken about…the impact on the local community. Already there’s little grass-roots, small companies springing up because of it.”

There have always been rumors about national institutions looking for branches in Miami. Now there is serious discussion as well. Coetzee calls it “the impact of culture as industry,” which is something Europe has understood for a very long time. “It wasn’t only about art,” he says. “It was like every facet…from the clubs, the restaurants, the hotels, the taxi drivers…so much business for them. We’ll all have to pull our socks up next year.”

Another gem in the burgeoning line of private galleries is the Margulies photography collection. Housed in a. former dress factory, this granite canyon provides an extensive education in contemporary and vintage photography. The Margulies plan to provide additional space in their rambling compound for student work. Interspersed with eclectic modern sculptures—like Ernesto Neto’s “Crossing over…over,” a floor-to-ceiling stocking that resembles pendulous breasts—Eudora Welty’s depression-era photographs of church ladies in birdlike hats hang near Sally Mann’s precocious daughters. Zwekethu Mthethwa’s large-scale color portraits of rural Cape Town immigrants reflect social change and political transition.

Miami’s larger, more corporate galleries took fewer risks. MoCA offered “Yes Yoko Ono,” the first American retrospective of her kitchy, genre-crossing installations. Stretching from her role in Fluxus, the underground movement that developed in the 1960s, to poppy videos like the “Bed-In” with John Lennon, the exhibition spanned over 150 works. Her recent doodles (done while “talking” to people on the phone) suggested an undercurrent of narcissism and silence.
The self-proclaimed biography of Miami by Sarah Morris featured the usual booming TV clichés—flamingos strutting across the race track, SWAT teams sneaking around corners, Cuban coffee stands buzzing with flies and roller-coaster tracking shots of the Metrorail—with the narrow perspective of a sun-torched tourist. No doubt many Basel-goers would absorb the city in a similar manner.

The Miami Art Museum (MAM) held an exhibition called “Currents,” a mixed bag of assorted work from their six-year-old collection. It claimed to share ties to the ‘Natural, Material, and Immaterial’ world, but lacked a strong focus. Among the high points were Oscar Munoz’s ghostly figures hovering on clear shower curtains and Ann Hamilton’s (lineament) projected the busy shadow of a figure on the wall, winding balls of tickertape-style words to record the passing of time. Like many local museums, MAM put up short didactic texts on the wall beside the artwork. This was also the first time they had really drawn from their permanent collection and curated a show in their whole space, as opposed to buying one from somewhere else.

Art Basel Miami commenced in the Moore building, where water fountains overflowed with plastic martini glasses. Cigar smoke sharpened the air. It was unclear whether a line was snaking to or from Ocean Drive Magazine’s sweltering private room. Suited men with Glo-Stick bracelets were harping about the absence of air-conditioning. On the street, a quilt of cars circled with no parking in sight. A salsa band played fluttering melodies with crisp percussion. The alcohol-fueled crowd hit the sidewalks and danced.

When the buses brought everyone back to the Design District, the caterers were already packing up their trucks. They dumped glistening chunks of ice in the street and left them to melt. For a moment, it seemed like winter had finally arrived in Miami. The glow from the streetlights left patterns on the ice, patches of blue. Then the caterers turned away from their trucks, carrying the ice in front of them like an offering. In the morning, both would be gone.