The first guests show up precisely at the 1 p.m. start time. They grab plates of finger food––croquettes, mini sandwiches, and guava cream-cheese pastries––take a few half-hearted laps around the gallery, and leave.
It is the last day of Art Basel Miami Beach. This morning, we are at Andrew Reed Gallery, an up-and-coming space situated between two older stalwarts, Mindy Solomon and Katia David Rosenthal (KDR), in Allapattah, a newly trendy neighborhood on the edge of Wynwood. A young gallerist is suited up and showing off his wares––he leads a few well-appointed clients through a show of landscapes, pointing out dewdrops on fleshy pink flowers.
Art Basel is a bit like New Year’s Eve––a bacchanal of mandatory fun that tends to disappoint. There are too many events; too many performances; too many shows scattered around Miami’s hour-and-half (two hours with traffic) driving radius. However you allocate your time, you will always miss something that someone insists is a “must see.” And like December 31, the end of Basel week often comes with promises to improve for next year.
Within the art world, griping about the breakneck pace of fairs has become an easy conversation starter, almost as dependable as the weather or Larry Gagosian’s sex life. It’s ridiculous, gallery employees tell anyone who will listen, that a mega-gallery with five physical locations must pack its bags, recreate itself on a convention-center wall, and then disassemble the whole enterprise a few days later.
Art Basel is easy to mock. But I wonder how much of the temptation to find irrevocable fault with the fair comes from a need to take some of the pressure off of a week that, while not without its flaws, almost has too much to offer.
On Saturday, I took two friends of mine to “Untitled,” the largest satellite fair. Like most Basel events, it was massive: 160 booths covered the few-hundred-thousand-square-foot floor of the convention center. As soon as we walked in, one of these friends announced that she was “bored” by all of the “bad art.”
And last year, I would have agreed with her.
But as I looked around, I found that much of the cold excess of last year—all the metaverse-adjacent landscapes, for example—had vanished; now, it seemed, the art world was mourning the market’s cooling, perhaps anticipating the crash that everyone insists is looming, expressing its sorrow with a broad spectrum of blues. I stopped first at Jason Martin’s The Fatal Shore (2019, Galerie Forsblom), a nine-foot-long gradient of light blue to dark gray, rendered in thick, relaxed oils; then at a collection of works from Haruna Shinagawa’s Peel off the Paint series (2023, Saenger Galería), showing great slabs of Yves Klein–esque blue escaping from the canvases; and finally at the North Carolinian artist Jason Craighead’s raw, expressive Endings (2023 Makasiini Contemporary), which mixed the omnipresent blues with angry black lines and salvatory rainbows. Even the obligatory “woke” art that has swamped the market in recent years seems to be transforming into something more worthwhile, for instance a broad but poignant pan-Africanism: in Shadi Al-Atallah’s Become the Sky (2023, Peres Projects), two bodies, both brown but partially covered in something bright white, join in an ecstatic union against a washed-blue background. Together they create a sort of globe, limbs taking the place of continents.
I saw one too many paintings that were just large-scale depictions of orgies, Maja Djordjevic’s Panopticon (2023) being the most memorable example. But to Djordjevic’s credit, her pixelated fantasy, bursting with mid-coital couples surrounded by roses and barbed wire, was at least intriguing, even if it traded a bit too much on shock value. Truly horrid art felt increasingly peripheral. It still made its presence known—see Bad Bunny, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of Music in Their Time by Erick Benitez—but only as an aberration.
The trend of surprisingly serious art continued when I finally made it to the main convention center on Sunday. Early on, my friend and I discovered a room of prints by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin behind the booth for Carolina Nitsch Gallery; we couldn’t tear ourselves away, marveling over the rough, sketchy female forms and leaving only once we remembered we had a lot more art to see. Soon after, we ran into Robert Irwin’s Black Painting (2008–09) at White Cube, a pair of stunning black-lacquer canvases, like something coated in Vantablack somehow made reflective. A series of disaggregated nude self-portraits by the late photographer Francesca Woodman greeted us elsewhere, as did one of Francis Bacon’s last paintings of his lover John Edwards, on display by Acquavella.
As soon as I realized that the entire convention center was, in fact, stuffed with “good” art, a sense of exhaustion washed over me. Suddenly, I had an obligation to stay; to engage with the work; to sort through the hundreds of booths with the expectation that they might all have something to offer. And I realized how much I had been counting on the art being “bad” to explain how little of it I was planning to see.
And so I have decided to defend Art Basel. Art Basel is fun. Entrance never comes cheap—tickets to “Untitled” were $35, and tickets to the main convention center were a whopping $75. But both convention centers were packed, with art-world regulars and bikini-clad beachgoers alike, all of whom seemed to be enjoying the show. I saw trophy girlfriends pulling hoodie-clad boyfriends into booths; moms and daughters sharing a cultural afternoon; crop-topped teenagers running around in groups, laughing and gossiping but also pointing out favorite works. On my way out of “Untitled,” I ran into an engineer friend of mine who told me that he had just spent three hours looking at the art. He didn’t love everything he saw. But he could have left anytime he wanted; instead, he found something redeemable.
“It’s heartening,” he mused, “that so many people still care about art.”
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Source: newcriterion.com
