Art Basel Miami Beach 2015, the Noah Horowitz edition: a synoptic diary

 

Day 1. It’s Tuesday December 1st and we just checked into the hotel that for the next four days will host our briskly pit stops and late night after-party room service calls, when we realize that besides art and alcohol, we haven’t consumed anything else all day. Compared to the pictures in its website, the room was disappointing to say the least although this is something we almost expected, since Miami lives on this divergence between expectations and reality that Art Basel Miami Beach never fails to reaffirm.

 

This year’s kick-off was also the most anticipated show of the fair’s parallel program. Art world heavyweights Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian collaborated for the first time and presented the show Unrealism, based on figuration, which is apparently the new black. The boat of zombie formalism has sailed away a long time ago, and this group show presenting works from the Gagosian roster to the very hot emerging artists, is here to prove this point and celebrate its successors. John Currin, Apostolos Georgiou, Henry Taylor, Dan Colen and Chloe Wise were among the standouts, in a show that despite its up-to-the-moment flair, brings again the “hype in art” issue. Shows like Unrealism, codify movements and close down the players that dominate the field right now, the artists that one should own right now. Since art is not fashion and the works are not fashion trends that can be tossed away after they become “so last year”, this controversial practice closes the doors to other artists while in the same time threats the dominating ones with over saturation and consequently hibernation until they become hot again. Of course everything relies on one’s vivacity and prudence, but when the apple comes in the form of a Jeffrey Deitch studio visit, is hard not to bite it.

—

Day 2. Art Basel Miami Beach opened its doors this morning with mediocre sales competing to the figures of previous times. It seems that the previous excitement of the flip-prone art market of 2013 and 2014 left behind a more modest attitude with better thought moves, and thinking is always a good thing. That doesn’t mean that the fair didn’t meet eight figure sales; as artsy. reported on what was sold on the 16th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach “completed transactions as of Saturday evening topped out at around $15 million, the asking price for Francis Bacon’s Man in Blue VI (1954) sold from Van de Weghe’s stand.”

 

Nova section this year gathered some of our favorite booths in the fair; Supportico Lopez gallery presented a vivid booth-installation with paintings by Charlie Billingham based on satirical British illustration books that he collects from the 18th and 19th century, while Cherry and Martin presented a well-balanced duo presentation of new sculptures by Nathan Mabry and split abstractions by Bernard Piffaretti hot out of the studio. Through the main galleries of the fair there were numerous pieces to make the fastidious crowds stop and gaze, among which were the new paintings by Josh Smith and Justin Matherly sculpture at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Camille Henrot at Kamel Mennour, Talia Chetrit at Sies + Höke, Theo Michael at OMR gallery from Mexico City.

 

The cure for the fairtigue is nothing than a healthy meal outside the walls of the Convention Center and Books&Books cafè on the pedestrian of Lincoln Road is one of the few places where we love to take a break from the whole Art Basel frenzy, eat a salad and check on some nice literature.

 

The night found us queuing outside Soho Beach house to attend one of the many private events orientated around -what else?- Art Basel, before we rushed to the Artsy after-party at Nautilus Hotel. The online platform presented an on-site exhibition curated by their own contemporary art specialist, Elena Soboleva. This is where we saw again the twenty-five year-old Canadian-born painter, sculptor, and video artist Chloe Wise, participating not with a figurative painting but with a sculpture consisted of her famous food bags and pastry made out of urethane. It seems like Wise is having a moment, and her work is always fun to watch: she also participates at ‘Our Hidden Futures” a film program presented by Art Basel and curated by David Gryn, Director of Daata Editions and London’s Artprojx, while her first solo show in New York is currently on view at Retrospective Gallery.

 

Other artists to participate at “Artsy Projects: Nautilus” were Dan Colen, Nick van Woert, Mira Dancy, Eddie Peake and Katherine Bernhardt whose vibrant pool painting sums up the whole Art Basel Miami spirit and shows again that Bernhardt knows how to deal with scale.

After a quick pass by at Raleigh hotel where it is always a pleasure to pay a visit, we called it a night with the hope to make it to the Rubell’s Family Collection Breakfast event the next morning.

—

Day 3. Devotion was the most poetic and symbolic breakfast performance that Jennifer Rubell has ever presented in these 12 years that she has been hosting the event at her parents’ museum during the fair. The piece consisted of an endurance test between a newly engaged couple, which was apparently Alban de Pury, son of Simon de Pury and his fiancé, designer Fanny Karst.

 

For three hours Mr. de Pury was slicing large loaves of bread and handing them out to Ms. Karst who was carefully buttering the pieces and giving them out to the guests that queued endlessly for three hours. As Mrs. Rubell said to the Observer, “The performance is about the accumulation of everyday acts over time becoming meaningful love.”

 

Unfortunately the sentimental vibe of the breakfast event did not follow the crowd to the group show “No man’s land” that is this year’s group show, featuring works made by more than a hundred female artists of different generations, cultures and disciplines. There is nothing noteworthy to say about “No man’s land” besides the fact that we would expect something more contemplative from one of the most prominent art collections of the world rather than still grouping artists by race or gender.

 

After a quick stop by at the Marguiles collection to feel tiny in front of Anselm Kiefer’s massive sculptures and installations that were presented in some of the collection’s rooms among other significant pieces -mostly of arte povera- that we had seen again in the collection over the past years, we headed to Fontainebleau, the new house of NADA Miami Beach.

 

Having more than doubled in size NADA waved goodbye to Deauville, the cozy and way cooler set up that has hosted every previous version since 2009. Along with NADA, what also seemed to increase this year was the average age of the emerging artists participating at the fair. There were quite a few artists over sixty whose works apropos with the young art world looked as if they were made by art school graduates. Some of the highlighted examples are the ceramic sculptures of 84-year-old artist Alice Mackler presented at Kerry Schuss’s booth, the Untitled Mosaic by 64-year-old LA based artist Roy Dowell at Tif Sigfrids gallery being sold for 24.000$, and the paintings by the 81-year-old British artist Rose Wylie.

 

As for the booths, the Journal gallery presented a well curated booth with works by Agathe Snow, new colorful big-format paintings by Chris Succo and the stunning new canvas collages by Graham Collins that were sold for about 20.000$ . James Fuentes gallery was showing work by John McCallister, Noam Rappaport, and Tamuna Sirbiladze and sold out the booth quite a few times.

 

NADA was a nice place to pass the day, come across friends and wander together around the booths. Late in the afternoon we left the fair to get ready for Night Gallery’s party at Regent Cocktail bar. The first thunderstorm found us in the room scrolling our instagram threads over the post-apocalyptic images of flooding on Collins Avenue and people crossing the streets with the water over their knees. During the second thunderstorm hours later following a text informing us that the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Party at Nautilus tent was over, we called it a night and headed for some comforting fried chicken and beers at the 11th Street Diner with the hope to wait until the rain ended but eventually got back to the hotel soaked in our party attires.

—

Day 4. The fourth and last day was something like a revision to what we had already seen over the past days plus a quick pass by at Untitled art fair and its dreamy beachfront location, where we managed to miss the “Toiletpaper Lounge,” the product of a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, a maximalist kitsch installation filled with carpets with images from Toiletpaper shootings. During the afternoon of the last day in Miami, after exchanging some typical excuse messages with friends and other people we promised to meet during our time Miami but never managed to do, the time of a last walk by Art Basel arrived, where the incident with the Asian woman being stubbed by another 24-year-old woman, indicated it was about time to leave Art Basel Miami.

 

As the day wore off, the almost post apocalyptic setup from the previous stormy night and the smell of the damp carpets followed the crowds up to Delano hotel where the PS1 Party took place; there you could avoid stepping into the ponds just by jumping into the pool, something that many young people actually did and after they took their destroyed iPhones out of their pockets, they happily posed for selfies.

December 7, 2015