We’re at America’s biggest art fair, where artists, architects, collectors and celebrities hit Miami Beach to buy cutting-edge work by day – and go to parties by night
12.08pm ET
Jason writes: The booth of Andrew Kreps, a New York gallery just on the edge of blue-chip and scrappy, has got one of the weirdest installations at the fair: a mutable, head-scratching affair by Darren Bader, whose art privileges digressions, mistakes, serendipitous encounters, and pretty much anything but clarity. Here he has scattered the floor with dozens of random objects, some everyday—a pile of almonds, an old newspaper, a broken iPad — and others more obscure: antique aviator goggles, a tube of Japanese superglue. In the corner, no explanation, is a rather cute boy sitting on the floor, reading at times, texting at others. (He returned my lecherous smile but didn’t get up.) There’s also a ghetto blaster playing SexyBack by (Florida native!) Justin Timberlake on endless repeat. Go ’head, be gone with it, go ’head, be gone with it ...
A head-scratcher, but all intelligible enough until the dealer tells you the kicker: the work is in an edition of three. The first buyer ($38,000, by the way, and no takers yet) gets to take the present work home, though not the boy. The other two buyers have to then reconstitute the work, somehow, with the same objects or different ones, who knows ... A puzzle, but amid endless blue-chip take away shops a necessary one.
12.04pm ET
It’s ingenious:
12.01pm ET
Art Basel Miami Beach: there’s art, and there’s also Andre 3000 exhibiting his jumpsuits:
André 3000 shares the 47 jumpsuits he wore during the Outkast festival tour at #ArtBasel Miami Beach. Photos here: http://t.co/Po4E4ADb4a
11.58am ET
The booth of Sadie Coles, one of the best galleries in London, has been occupied by a fantastic ceramic installation by Swiss artist Urs Fischer: 1,080 lime-green ceramic raindrops, suspended on vanishingly thin strings. From an artist whose rough-hewn sculptures tend to look much more abject, this is a much cheerier, much more Miami intervention. Prime selfie territory, naturally.
Sadie Coles chatting in Urs Fischer's lime green ceramic rainstorm #ABMB pic.twitter.com/hksM8DWz98
11.56am ET
Jason, who is on the shop floor as it were, writes: Art Basel Miami Beach is enormous, and over the next hours we’ll be looking at young artists’ new work, curated historical presentations, major contributions from Latin America, and more besides. But ultimate this fair is, like its Swiss older sister, a shopping mall for the super rich. Assuming you can write a check for seven figures, you can take home (from David Zwirner’s booth) a fine Chris Ofili, subject of a killer retrospective up now at New York’s New Museum:
11.49am ET
OK, so owing to the fact that it’s the only bit in Miami convention centre that appears to have wifi, this blog is coming to you live from the obscene luxury of Art Basel Miami Beach’s VIP area. Behind me (Alex) is a pop-up store devoted to Davidoff cigars, to my right is a bar for Absolut Elyx, whatever that is, and ahead there’s a wall of Audermars Piguet watches displayed in a gloomy booth decorated with fake rocks. At my right elbow there’s a waiter being berated over a tannoy for dropping a glass of champagne. I haven’t tried to get into the UBS lounge (the main sponsors) but I can see a gigantic Christopher Wool painting hanging there. Until I get chucked out of here, I am right in the midst of the 1%.
11.31am ET
Jason: Last night we were at the opening of the Institute for Contemporary Art, the newest museum in the Miami ferment. Its new building, scheduled to open in 2016, is being spearheaded by kingpin Norman Braman, the mastermind of Art Basel’s importation from Switzerland to Florida. Elsewhere in the city there have been openings at the Bass museum (a disaster, but worth seeing for car-crash fans) and the newish Pérez Art Museum Miami, in a foliage-bedecked waterfront home designed by Herzog & de Meuron (architects based in, where else, Basel, Switzerland).
But can Miami, even with all its wealth, even with its growing Latin American collector base, sustain as much contemporary art as this? The Art Newspaper – a monthly professional publication which puts out a consistently impressive daily edition at this fair and others – suggests otherwise:
Miami finally has a flagship public museum capable of staging its own major shows and hosting important travelling exhibitions—above and beyond what the city’s numerous private museums are able to offer. But an ongoing debate about public funding for the institution has laid bare the single biggest challenge for museums and galleries in the city: fundraising in an increasingly competitive climate. Despite the new museum’s success in attracting visitors, it struggled to secure an increase in public funding which it said it needed to deliver its programme this year.
11.27am ET
Alex: last night Jason and I went to see one of Art Basel’s headline events. A piece of performance art masterminded by Ryan McNamara, it’s called ME3M (ie meme) and bills itself as a ballet about the internet. I thought it was great and have posted my review here.
But does the work really express how the internet feels? There is something about the accretion of images, the endless distraction and the way that one thing segues into another in a logic-warping style that certainly seems like a living Tumblr or late-night YouTube session. The way we’re constantly moved on before we’ve had the chance to get bored with one performance – but at the same time can’t really dig into it deeply – also seems familiar, as does the slippage of categories between high art and popular culture.
It’s also intriguing to watch the responses of your fellow viewers as you’re deposited in different configurations around the performers. Most of them film the action through their phones, or simply send emails in the case of a woman next to me. I found this grossly disrespectful to the performers, who in most cases were mere feet away, but maybe this inability to concentrate on what’s actually in front of your face is embedded in the work itself, if not the whole point of the piece. I also started to think of the other audience members as commenters on Twitter or indeed the Guardian – members of a community who may be either annoying or enlightening, but with whom we now coexist inescapably.
11.09am ET
Jason: It’s 11am in Miami, compañeros, and the doors have swung open for Art Basel Miami Beach, the largest (and priciest) art fair in the United States. Actually, they haven’t really swung open. Basel lets the public in only tomorrow, after an endless succession of graduated high-net-worth-individuals, their private wealth managers, celebrities, chancers, and a few people who actually love art. We turned down the champagne for coffee, lots of it, and I’ll be running around the Miami Beach Convention Center for the rest of the day, where 267 galleries are presenting art from all over the world.
Art Basel Miami Beach, where they ply you with free champagne at 10am (uncharacteristically, I declined) pic.twitter.com/4L36NO4UUn
9.45am ET
Good morning. After a day spent wandering around Design Miami; looking at architect Peter Marino’s preposterous exhibition; pondering the relationship between Marina Abramovic and Tumblr; and watching a ballet about the internet, Jason Farago and I, Alex Needham, are back for the main event, the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach. Inside the Miami Beach convention centre is apparently $3bn worth of art looking for a good home.
But first, some tweets from yesterday which, er, got stuck in my spam filter. Jason says:
Peter Marino live and in the leather-clad flesh at #DesignMiami pic.twitter.com/C7WcvFgpGv
WTF did i do at Scope? Save urself the embarassment. Even repetitive one year on other #abmb pic.twitter.com/HF3E9UmU1Q
6.53pm ET
We’re signing off for today to go to one of the fair’s hot tickets – Ryan McNamara’s “ballet about the internet” ME3M, followed by a party thrown by Interview magazine. Stand by for the sordid details tomorrow – and, slightly more importantly, the opening of Art Basel itself.
Kicking off Art Basel with an @ArtProductionNY picnic #StandardABMB pic.twitter.com/x4fdCJ0IFu
6.50pm ET
The other inaugural show at ICA Miami is a lot less ponderous - downright fun, in fact. Pedro Reyes, a Mexican artist, is presenting a show called Sanatorium: a series of consulting chambers, staffed by “therapists” (i.e., volunteer performers) in lab coats.
The therapies are rather unorthodox, though this being Miami I suppose the patients are too. There is a room for “couples therapy,” featuring fresh fruit and knives, or a “museum of hypothetical lifetimes,” where visitors can play with children’s toys and act out the futures they never had.
6.44pm ET
Jason writes: I’ve left the beach, crossed Biscayne Bay, and come to Miami proper for the opening of the Institute of Contemporary Art — the brand-new museum that’s resulted from a very ugly dispute. As we reported earlier, the ICA has been established by former board members of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, who broke from that institution in an acrimonious, lawsuit-beset showdown with local officials. The new ICA is far from MoCA NoMi, in Miami’s design district, not far from the warehouse showcasing the private collections of Miami’s oligarch aesthetes.
It’s too soon to say whether the outcome is good for all involved, and so far this place is pretty sedate. But this week it was announced that the ICA is building a permanent home here in the design district, designed by the Spanish firm Aranguren & Gallegos Arquitectos and opening around Art Basel 2016. It’s being spearheaded by Irma Braman, one of the former chairs of MoCA NoMi, and her husband Norman—the car dealership king of Miami, who first spearheaded the unlikely importation of the very Swiss, very sedate Art Basel to garish Miami Beach back in 2000.
5.39pm ET
In a sentence you could definitely take two ways, Artnet are asking “What are top dealers bringing to Art Basel in Miami Beach and why?”
Meanwhile, Vulture have an article on “the people who get to Art Basel one night early”. Yes, that was .
Day before the fair pic.twitter.com/jtgAjlKoFs
5.25pm ET
While Jason was hard at it at the design fair, I (Alex) went on the trail of performance art legend Marina Abramović. I eventually found her having lunch with two trestle tables of people who work at Tumblr at the Standard hotel – not a shabby location.
Marina Abramovic and folk from Tumblr pic.twitter.com/ZYuiIMuj97
Slaving away as usual pic.twitter.com/p6fwCsP5DI
I think it’s important to know that technology is great, but it’s also a dangerous thing, because it takes up all our free time, and we need to learn how we can get this free time back for ourselves. And the only way to do this is to really immerse in some long, duration activities ...
It might seem ridiculous, but you need to make time for ourselves, so if you can’t count the rice for three hours, you can’t do your life any good either.
... dedicated to the presentation and preservation of long durational work, including that of performance art, dance, theater, film, music, opera, and other forms that may develop in the future. MAI will foster collaboration between art, science, technology, and spirituality, bringing these fields into conversation with long durational work.
4.05pm ET
Not everything at the fair is so tasteful—this is Miami, amigos y amigas. There is a swanky car spinning on a turntable, and showgirls with gift bags. (I declined. Professional duty.)
3.49pm ET
One of the more piquant works on display at Design Miami: a dresser/wine rack/bookshelf in the shape of one of the most famous buildings of our time, Rem Koolhaas’s tower in Beijing for CCTV (that is, the Chinese state television broadcaster and propaganda centre). The armoire, by Chinese designer Naihan Li, is made of Brazilian rosewood, and even copies Koolhaas’s cracked and striated glass with its surface incisions. Welcome to the art world circa 2014, when even the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party can be transmuted guilt-free into a luxury good.
It’s on the booth of Beijing’s Gallery All and it’s in an edition of only three. Get yours now, comrades!
3.43pm ET
On the booth of R & Company, a New York furniture gallery, are three chairs by my favorite architect of the 20th century: Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-born Brazilian who turned away from International Style utopianism to produce radically blunt buildings for everyday use, often using concrete. Bo Bardi — the subject of a fantastic show this summer at Zurich’s Johann Jacobs Museum — was a polymath. She got her start as a critic, actually (hope for us all!), and also designed theatre productions, directed a museum of anthropology, and made furniture. The folding chair on the right, with a leather seat and a jacaranda body, dates from the 1950s, when she was completing her work on the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the others are from the end of her career, in the 80s, and made of solid pine.
3.39pm ET
Galerie Patrick Seguin, from Paris, has mounted a fantastic display – a proper exhibition, nearly – of furniture for university housing, designed by three leading figures of French applied arts: Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Jean Prouvé. The earliest work comes from a college in Nancy, where in 1932 Prouvé designed mass-produced furniture for 70 student dormitories, built in response to a housing crisis. There’s a simple but elegant armchair, bluntly functional metal bookcases, and a bed made of bent sheet steel, painted a bold red.
3.33pm ET
Jason writes: Art Basel doesn’t open until tomorrow, but across the street from the main event is Design Miami, the applied arts fair that’s celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. Along with NADA, the young dealers’ event (opening Thursday), it’s the most legit of the peripheral fairs that have multiplied like kudzu around Miami Beach.
I’ve been swanning around the VIP preview this afternoon, and it’s looking good. In this first December of the post-Piketty era, it’s hard not to see how the furniture here (and the art across the street) reflects the growing wealth of a small elite, and goodness knows there are some shiny gold things here to decorate your fifth house in Aspen or the Turks and Caicos. Yet under its new director Rodman Primack — a practicing designer who took the reins earlier this year — the fair has tightened considerably, with lots of important postwar French design and a good showing from Latin America. I’ll post some highlights now.
12.57pm ET
Alex is now going to attempt to get into an event which brings together Tumblr and performance art doyenne Marina Abramović over a fancy lunch. More news soon ...
12.51pm ET
Jason writes: the Bass Museum, we should point out, is one of the players in a big shake-up of Miami’s museums over the last 18 months.
During last year’s Basel week, all the talk was about the chaos up the road at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami — MoCA NoMi, to friends — whose board was in full rebellion against city hall. The board members, mostly big-hitting members of the international collecting class, wanted the museum to merge with the wealthier Bass, whose more glamorous location seemed more appealing to them than grittier North Miami. The local government was furious, and insisted that MoCA belonged to the local community, not wealthy collectors who fly in for a week a year; one official called the mooted merger “a modern-day art heist.” (FYI, Miami, North Miami, and Miami Beach are all independent cities with their own local governments.) There were lawsuits. There were accusations of racism. It was ugly. At one point MoCA had two duelling directors: one appointed by the board, the other by the city.
12.50pm ET
We’ve just posted Jason’s take on One Way, the exhibition of architect Peter Marino’s art collection, which juxtaposes some heavyweight works by the likes of Anselm Keifer with footage of fashion shows. Jason writes:
It is, in a word, obscene. And yet there is something almost perversely admirable about the overtness of its obscenity – the show’s unconcerned commingling of art and commerce, its total indifference to history and scholarship, its assurance that art’s recession into fashion and luxury is not just inevitable but something to be celebrated. Philanthropy is marketing, alas, but this show takes it to new heights. Too many luxury brands to count have stumped up to support the show, and here’s something I’ve never seen before: individual galleries bear the names of luxury sponsors. “This gallery is sponsored by Chanel.” “This gallery is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.”
The funny thing is that he actually owns some truly major works of art. Along with numerous Stingels, you’ll see some important photographs by Thomas Struth, a totemic Baselitz sculpture I liked more than I thought I would, and there’s even a Robert Ryman white monochrome if you can find it shunted near the emergency exit. (Women artists are not his thing; I counted just three – Paola Pivi, Claude Lalanne, and Michal Rovner – alongside more than 40 men, though Marino’s wife Jane Trapnell collaborated on the opera.) If a private collector wants to hang such important works in such decadent circumstances, that’s no concern of mine. Whether a nonprofit museum should be the forum for this, though, is a thornier matter.
Even the catalogue has the Marino touch. It is bolted with real leather straps that Mr. Marino fabricated in-house and paid for out of his own pocket.
12.38pm ET
Bloomberg have run down the finances of Art Basel Miami Beach here:
They think that there will be $3bn worth of art for sale when the fair opens tomorrow, with works including a Warhol portrait of Mao Zedong princed at $18m, a Roni Horn sculpture at $3.5m and David Hockney’s iPad drawings at $28,000 a time.
11.39am ET
By the way, if you’ve got any tips on things we should be covering, do feel free to tweet @alexneedham74 or @jsf.
In the mean time, I (Alex) have been perusing the web for tips on how to approach Art Basel Miami Beach.
Art Basel on a budget: free events and free art fairs this week @ArtBasel http://t.co/wyr7xLFkYI pic.twitter.com/BGS5iJU9xy
11.01am ET
On Sunday, the Guardian published an article by my colleague Edward Helmore about the way Art Basel transformed Miami Beach.
He writes:
For [real estate company CEO Craig] Robins and others, bringing art to the city appears to have paid off. It’s got its own name: the Miami Effect. The city is going through a construction boom. There’s a feeling that the influx of wealth will support the development of an indigenous art scene, rather than have one imported for a week every December.
That’s certainly collector Mera Rubell’s hope. This year, on their 50th wedding anniversary, she and husband Don are showing highlights from their collection, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Charles Ray. Founding pillars of Miami’s art establishment, the Rubells moved to the city in the early 1990s. When they first suggested bringing Art Basel to Miami, the mayor imagined a flea market. So the Rubells flew him to Switzerland. “Money, visibility – he saw what a huge scene it was. You have to remember that art is now global and art fairs are the only way to connect.”
The buying power represented by Art Basel Miami Beach should be obvious. After all, money continues to pour into the art economy, with more than $2 billion exchanging hands in New York’s November auctions alone. The Miami Beach fair remains one of the art world’s most conspicuous showcases, drawing more than 75,000 attendees in 2013, organizers said. The fair itself is only one part of Miami Art Week, which now includes two dozen satellite fairs hoping to pull in the moneyed spillover, as well as a dizzying array of brunches, dinners and luxury-steeped parties.
Yet only a small percentage of out-of-town visitors will venture out to explore Miami’s homegrown art scene. Once a prime attraction for Basel-ites, the local terrain increasingly seems to them to be merely a traffic-clogged backdrop. The New York collector Beth Rudin DeWoody said that the events surrounding Art Basel have become so frenetic, many of the collectors she knows fly into Miami for only two days, solely to hit the main fair.
10.45am ET
Later on, Jason and I went to a couple of parties; the first for public art organisation Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), which was celebrating its fifth anniversary with an auction, and the second for the biannual independent architecture magazine Pin-Up, where the attractions included cakes designed by luminaries including fashion designers Viktor and Rolf.
Cakes at Pin-Up pic.twitter.com/WFXGPDmVBF
10.18am ET
Here’s an artist’s impression of the pavillion by the way:
MT @ARTnewsmag A concise guide to Miami art fairs #UNTITLED2014 http://t.co/3NzHudQYL4 pic.twitter.com/6O6m8X6Pdc
Untitled art fair, Miami pic.twitter.com/Q2ORQ6rXsf
10.15am ET
Another slightly odd thing about Untitled - the Sotheby’s Institute of Art stand, which an unkind onlooker described as a finishing school/interns’ clearing house, was showing the work of the avowedly anti-capitalist Alfredo Jaar, whose work This is Not America caused controversy when shown in Times Square. The work consisted of two piles of printouts – which passers by were free to take – saying “for sale” and “not for sale”.
Sotheby's stand at Untitled pic.twitter.com/8kQOCEd4qy
10.08am ET
Alex: Last night Jason and I got our first taste of the artworld madness with a visit to the Untitled art fair, situated in a gigantic white tent here on South Beach, Miami. It concentrates on emerging artists: here’s what it looked like inside.
The scene at Untitled pic.twitter.com/DadE1L0KKQ
Finnish performance art about to happen pic.twitter.com/gQXXpyvWEE
9.47am ET
Morning from a cloudy Miami. Guardian US’s art critic Jason Farago and I are here to bring you the news and reviews from the city’s art week. As well as the famous art fair Art Basel, there’s a bewildering range of art-related events taking in a design fair, rival art fairs, many parties (here’s Vanity Fair’s list of the latter) and, among other things, the possible unveiling of a Wu-Tang Clan album of which only one copy has been made, a private gig by Miley Cyrus and the flogging of a Banksy which first appeared in Folkestone, but which was removed by the council after it was vandalised.
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