Ruminations....

Art Basel Miami Beach

I spent two days walking the aisles of Art Basel Miami Beach and I can share that it was a surprising and disappointing experience. I’m not sure how this fair stays relevant in the years ahead. The Wednesday VIP opening wasn’t crowded and Thursday it was dead. The Basel fair in Basel is still the gold standard but, and this is a big but, the accommodations and food in Basel, Switzerland are close to the bottom of the barrel-prices are exceeding high for hotel rooms - college-dormitory style hotels (and you are lucky to get ac in your room), you have to enter the shower sideways (Dorint Hotel near the fairgrounds that charges over $700 night but they do have a great breakfast,) and the only high end hotel, and is most cases wouldn’t really be considered 5 stars, is the Grand Hotel Trois Rois on the banks of the Rhine. I’ve stayed in their rooms a few times and they are not what one would think although they have a great bar that the upper-enders like to hang out in. Starting around 4:00pm opening day one might catch Larry G and his entourage and other art market players. Anyway, the best part of Basel is the ability to walk everywhere and see all the offsite exhibitions and museums, which usually are top rate. But, Basel Paris will eat their lunch as well as Miami Beach’s-Paris is too great a city. I attended the first iteration of Basel Paris, then called Paris + three years ago and it was a fabulous experience. There are numerous options for accommodations, numerous excellent restaurants, and off site shows not to mention the fabulous museums Paris has and the galleries…. There is simply no comparison.

Back to Miami Beach. Artnet writers always talk to the same 4 or 5 galleries/people/press people but we all know the art world lies very easily about results. Reading the articles one would think the fair was strong; the truth is the opposite. What likely sold were the easy, visually appealing work either abstract or figurative and quite possibly at expensive price points but overall, in speaking with my friends and colleagues at the fair, it was just OK to bad. I didn’t see anything truly new or interesting, just a lot of the same old and the same old with curb appeal. Now, you must understand that a booth costs $150,000 straight up without counting the lights, moving or building closets or walls not to mention the costs of flying in staff, lodging and feeding them, paying for art installers, paying for shipping and a “dinner” it costs well over $250,000 for a 5 day art fair which means they need to either presell or sell at the fair $500,000 worth of art just to break even. That’s a lot of pressure if one is a mid-tier gallery selling artists at $50,000. And, is it worth it? Did they touch base with their collectors? Meet new collectors? Speak with and meet enough curators? I’m not sure. Worse are the shows at the local museums this year which are uninspiring not to mention that terrible showing at the Rubells whose “museum” I just left. Awful.

There is a lot of chit chat about a Trump Bump. I think it exists but the art world isn’t necessarily partaking in it’s results. However, I do think there is a shift going on, a shift for the good meaning the more seasoned collectors are making their way back to the blue chip and historical artists and getting more serious about supporting and buying the better artists. Within three years we will witness a renewed interest in serious art and all the past market darlings will disappear. This might entail skipping an entire generation of artists that came out of/coming out of expensive graduate art programs these past 10 years. That will be sad for those artists but they can either get serious about their work or move on to other professions. Many will move on. Will the gallery ecosystem stay the same? Will there be new platforms for showing art? That I don’t know and can’t envision at the moment, but I’ll be looking to artists, and younger artists in particular, to teach me a thing or two of what the future might be.