Lines in the Sand

...The show included a six-foot-high spring-loaded rat with glowing red rectangular eyes...

...Simple tricks are good to get attention— like a dog apparently walking up a wall and humans dancing on the ceiling— until one realized it was done by just rotating the set or the frame...

...Only five years old, the fair has become a leviathan, a spectacular, glorious, friendly folie en masse...

...Photography can also do the postmodern appropriation dance...

...Andy Warhol said that “everybody’s sense of beauty is different from everybody else’s,” but homoerotic art, particularly a gang in full-scale 3D diorama, really tests that...

...In sculpture, beyond the aforementioned large rodent, a lot of the pieces were teetering (and tottering) assemblies of what, on close inspection, appeared to be true trash, making one long for the vacuum cleaner...

...Video Art was everywhere...

...In another, a silver loop suspended in air between two floor fans was more stunt than sculpture...

...In these panopticons of art, it’s always interesting to see what happens to painting, sculpture, and drawing...

...And all of that floated on and among receptions, opening nights, fetes, galas, cocktail parties, brunches, lunches, and dinners—catering achievements, all...

...One, sponsored by the New Art Dealers Alliance—or NADA—was perfectly labeled for paintings so turgid and encrusted with layers of pigment that they could only make a paint salesman happy...

...An Anish Kapoor polished stainless steel sculpture was priced at $1 million...

...However, there was one unusual piece, where a naked young woman implores the viewer to come hither, which stood out as being in focus, with positive subject matter, and occasional bursts of understandable dialogue...

...Of course, where is the KKK a cutting issue today...

...Before my sudden departure, I can report seeing virtuoso combinations of metal seats and desks in a continuous single twisting M?bius Strip form, executed with extraordinary craftsmanship...

...Drawing, as usual, was sparsely represented, except for a few artists who had painstakingly done exquisitely fine renderings in pencil that were so intensely photographic they seemed archaic in this time of easy digital photography...

...The fair was unquestionably the hottest place to be that week on earth...

...Money, of course...

...And size matters...

...The original Art Basel started modestly in a small, chilly Swiss city, but its American transformation in sunny, hot, pulsating Miami makes it the essential place to be for taking the temperature of the international art market...

...Lines in the Sand Art and commerce in sunny Florida...

...This largely machine-made photographic series, however, raised the perennially troubling issue of authenticity, which underscored all the large photographs that were mimicking still-life paintings...

...Centralized in the Moore Building (no relation), it was really an opening reception with the most people per square foot, all fueled by complimentary SKYY Vodka martinis, suggesting the serious possibility that we would all ignite from the friction...

...Why has Art Basel Miami Beach become such a gargantuan phenomenon...

...Unlike video art, sculpture, and painting, photography—without shame—has rediscovered beauty, with images of such perfect composition, color, and subject that they are the strongest imprints of the fair...

...A badly stained wall along the Seine was mesmerizing, and reminded me of some of the best abstracts of Helen Frankenthaler...

...by arthur cotton moore Art Basel Miami Beach, a polymorphously perverse event if there ever was one, swamped the entire convention center in Miami Beach in early December, and was considerably inflated by more than a dozen large satellite fairs, art collections, private collections, design shows, museum shows, and special gallery events scattered around South Beach and Miami...

...The prevalence of intended (or unintended) primitivism was discouraging, and I do not mean the kind of primitivism from which Picasso and Braque drew strength, but a bad, cartoony, angry crudity often accompanied by bad penmanship offering vituperative scrawled messages of the type usually found on the walls in men’s rooms at bus stations...

...Indeed, the star of the show was photography, particularly the work in the Photo Miami fair...

...The razor sharp resolution of these scraps of food floating in space was spellbinding...

...As at any good bazaar, there were many hawkers, including a nude male shill on a bicycle with carefully placed balloons handing out fliers to more shows, and avoiding sharp things...

...The wide-ranging quality of the art was generally respectable at the convention center, but oscillated wildly at the surrounding fairs...

...The parties were also generously attended—glitterati mashing up against hoi polloi to the thump-thump of the fabulous music, starry skies, warm nights...

...Big-ticket art lets people know you have extra disposable money, and are a cultivated person to boot—in our fluid society, that’s status you can buy...

...For so long, art has been touted as a new religion, and something we cannot live without...

...Photography used to be a lot of little black and white pictures that you had to bend down and squint to see...

...Also provocative was the piggybacked fair, Design Miami...

...Despite a number of arresting pieces, painting did not show its best face, although in this Sargasso Sea, some amateurish pastoral landscapes started to look like Constables...

...One piece, a pack of airborne Camels suspended on a string from a robotic arm, sold for $160,000...

...massive photographs showing the ruin and decay of Havana converted wretched poverty and destitution into pure abstract paintings of subtle color and composition...

...It was so dense that I couldn’t see the exhibits until the crowd seemed to give a collective sigh, and I felt that I had been expelled from the building like the spit pit of an olive...

...We are so trained to relate motion with narrative development, as in the movies, that these videos—which too often focused on endless repetition—rarely seemed to hold an audience for more than a few minutes...

...But outrageous, expensive art that has absolutely no utility except artistic credentials serves to confer on the collector an exceptional cultural status rising above the merely rich...

...The architect Zaha Hadid found the last unoccupied square foot of space, and refused to budge...

...Political commentary was there, although not deeply sagacious, in a picture of a black man in a KKK hood...

...There was everything from priceless Picassos to scribbles on toilet paper for $10,000...

...Arthur Cotton Moore, architect, planner, painter, and furniture designer, is the author of The Powers of Preservation...

...I think because, with incredible ease, you get to see not only the large well-known collections, but also the private collections in the homes of ever-soproud collectors, confirming the observation that, in a society where affluence is commonplace, the quality that sets a person apart is being cultured...

...Things like these: I was transfixed by a 5’ by 6’ still life of oranges and potato peels...

...One gallery showed large-scale photographs that replicated—with a real model and astounding depth—the Renaissance icon, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine,” an intriguing interplay between the idea of the original in paint and the copy as photograph...

...Of course, not everyone came for the art...

...Just as modern painting discovered that magnitude multiplies power, so has photography, and in Miami, its power was breathtaking...

...The Rubell Family Collection exhibition was cleverly named “The Red Eye” because all the artists were Californians, and the curators always flew the “red eye” night planes back from the West Coast...

...Most, in the Warhol tradition, were merely relentlessly boring, but there were enough pieces of sudden, gratuitous, loud, meaningless violence to break the spell...

...More than a few videos achieved the level of home porno flicks shot by someone new to basic photography...

...What was it all about...

...Giant panoramas, created by photoshopping digital jpeg images together, brought a you-are-there super-realism to street scenes and views of entire cities...

...But it has grown up into enormous images known now by their square footage...

...Fortunately, the fair also shows us that we can relax, because unlike diminishing resources and commodities, pricey statusgiving art seems to suffer no decline in supply...