MIAMI BEACH [...] For people locally referred to as V.V.V.I.P.'s that might include,
say, a business breakfast with Steven A. Cohen, the multibillionaire
collector; a lunch given by the art dealer Larry Gagosian; a stop at a Yoko Ono
installation in a hotel lobby; a cocktail party at a $14 million trophy
apartment, which happens to be on the market; a dinner with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones
given by a billionaire Turkish developer; and an after-party given by
Colette Dance Class from Paris at a club called Mansion. After that,
well in Miami Beach the night is always young.
All of these things, of course, are auxiliary to the main event, which is the art fair or fairs.
"Now
you have Pulse, Flow, Aqua, Nada, Scope and the Design Miami fair
downtown," said Mary Hoeveler, who runs Citigroup's art advisory, a
sort of personal shopping service for aesthetically enlightened
plutocrats. Ms. Hoeveler was referring to the satellite fairs that have
sprung up like camp followers to the main art fair, each organized to
accommodate a market segment and each held in one of the city’s
seemingly limitless supply of disused warehouses or boutique hotels.
"Miami
stakes it all on Miami Basel now," she said, and it is certainly true
that where the beach once seemed wreathed in a fog bank of Hawaiian
Tropic tanning lotion, the sweet aroma of wealth now floats in the air. "The money is burning a hole in people's pockets, and they’re here to
spend," Ms. Hoeveler said.
Just to thumb-tap all the pertinent
social data of a day into a BlackBerry might induce torment, seizure or
at least repetitive stress injury. But it would be good pain for the
roughly 38,000 people who descended on this beach town and is easily
cured by opening one's wallet and watching bills fly.
"They're
getting so rich so fast now it's hard to keep up," said someone in the
crowd that formed early on Wednesday, "Supermarket Sweep"-style,
outside the Convention Center, awaiting a signal for the noontime
V.I.P. preview to begin.
When the doors opened, the throng
rushed forward, racing toward favorite dealers' booths. These were not
housewives wearing kerchiefs and rollers but socialites and hedge fund
billionaires and Silicon Valley tyros and Palm Beach matrons with faces
as taut and expressionless as the ones on inflatable love dolls.
"Art
Basel essentially invented Miami Basel to cater to North American and
South American capital," said Nadja Swarovski, of the famous crystal
manufacturing company, who sponsors one of the week's big events. Ms.
Swarovski was referring to Miami Basel's parent entity, a respected
traditional art fair in Switzerland. "The world is flat now," Ms.
Swarovski said. "The borders are breaking down. Cultures are merging." [more...]
I've just spent five days blogging about seven fairs, so maybe I'm too dazed to be commenting here now, but I can't tear myself away from the keyboard. For 20 years I supported my art life as an editor, working on Madison Ave., largely for women's magazines (the pay was good and it gave me enough time to paint) until I had enough and made the leap full time into the studio. What I see in the art world now world is a "fashionization" of art that is just getting more intense: the art trends (like fashion moments, which which keep cycling faster and faster), the age thing (will we all have to be size 0, too, if we want to show or sell work?), the celebrity-ification of artists more intense than it has ever been, and now what seems to be an insane ramping up of the art fairs. As I was schlepping from venue to venue, I was thinking how like Fashion Week it was, with a bit of The Academy Awards thrown in, what with the celebrities, the parties, the who-what-where is hot, and the art must-haves this holiday season. Eek.