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12/10/2007: "ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007: THE REAL STORY" by Michael Corbin
This isn't the story that I had planned to tell about Art Basel Miami Beach 2007. It's the real story.
As I approached Exhibition Hall D outside the box office to buy my $65.00 permanent, four-day pass to the fair, I crossed paths with Miami Beach
artist Alfred Perez.
"Can I give you a card for my show?" he asked. "Sure," I said. He told me that his show was running from three until seven that evening. "I'll be there," I said. He was wearing a harness holding his paintings ... one on his chest, the other on his back. He also had a huge stack of postcards and was standing close to the exhibition hall, but he left a respectful distance that screamed he wasn't connected to the fair. In short, he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to promote his work. Art Basel hadn't even opened yet and the moment that I saw Perez standing there handing out postcards for his show, I knew that I had the real story. More on that in a moment.
The weather couldn't have been better for what is now America's largest, flashiest indoor art fair. Not that it mattered, but it was a sunny, balmy 75-degrees outside. Perfect. Miami itself looked like a postcard. It was almost noon and I stood amid the crowd of hundreds of people just itching to get inside. I felt like one of those goofy groupies who wait outside a rock concert all night to maybe get a 15-second look at the star attractions as their stretch limousines zoom by.
At exactly noon, the guards opened the "velvet ropes." People poured into Art Basel Miami Beach 2007 like it was a Black Friday Christmas shopping bonanza. Oh, my bad, did you actually think you were going to get a great deal on Jean-Michel Basquiat's "The Dingoes That Park Their Brains With Their Gum"? It's a stunning 110" by 114" sky blue, kick-ass canvas piece that can be yours for $3.9 MILLION. That's how much Van De Weghe Fine Art wanted. I kicked myself for leaving my American Express card at home.
Another piece that blew me away was Eric Fischl's "Scenes From Late Paradise" series of five paintings. They are breathtaking, humongous images of everyday people on the beach. To me, they look like a fantastic cross between impressionism and (almost) photo-realism. They're all roughly 78" by 96" oil on linen. One of the Mary Boone Gallery guys told me that a private collector bought the entire series. How much? $2 million each.
Are you catching my drift here? Art Basel Miami Beach is NOT a poor collector's art fair. In fact, here are just a couple of the things that I overheard people say "The galleries from London are really hardcore!" one guy said. "(They said) 50K! If you don't like it, don't buy it!"
"She told me to stop spending all of her inheritance," I heard one woman say on her cellphone as she sauntered through the galleries. I'm not making this up. The woman was serious.
"Can you believe it? After all that, she backed out!" I heard an art dealer tell a colleague.
If you really want to have fun at Art Basel Miami Beach, watch the art dealers. They have on their best game faces, but you can tell they're absolutely on edge and sometimes they're pissed. I stood and watched one dealer pull out a large, framed c-print while a couple slowly mulled it over. The dealer stood there, showing the lovely work, with an exasperated expression on his face. At one point, he rolled his eyes.
Before this incident, I heard a male attendee actually say, "It's so much easier when someone tells you what to like! Ha! Ha! Ha!" This is what art dealers have to deal with. People don't know what they want. Many people just want to flip their art for a profit. Shame. I seem to recall someone telling me that dealers pay in the neighborhood of 30-grand (at least) just to be here. The cost of doing business is a bitch.
I toured Art Basel itself three different times. Once, by myself and at two other times, with two different artists. It was fun seeing the art through the eyes of Florida artist Deborah Bigeleisen (and her hilarious husband Marvin who is deeply disturbed by minimalism) and Chicago artist Bruce Noel Mortenson. The official photographer for Art Basel Miami Beach took several photos of Deborah and I admiring a Kenneth Noland piece. During my time with Bruce, I had to run outside to refill a parking meter. Even though I knew where he was, it took me at least ten minutes to find Bruce once I arrived back inside the fair. That's how BIG it is!
I have to admit, there wasn't much at Art Basel Miami Beach 2007 that really knocked me out. As a collector, I'm always looking for that one thing that makes me pee my pants. Not this time. The fair is a little too snooty anyway. Don't you love it when you get snubbed by someone who themselves can't afford whatever they're trying to sell you? What's with the attitude? You're fooling no one.
That's why I highly suggest some of the satellite fairs like Bridge, Flow and Red Dot. They're so much more accessible and fun. They take up actual space in some of the hotels' rooms along Collins Avenue and the dealers are nice and not at all uptight. At these satellite fairs, you actually feel like you're talking to real people who like art. The art is fresher, more exciting and much more affordable that's if you choose the "lay away" plan. Emerging artists rock. Institutionalized art is tiring. My new friend Dan Fear of Art-Collecting.com agrees. "The dealers are very accessible in the smaller fairs and I really like that. They're really open to talking anyone and everyone," he said. "Overall, I think the quality was very good and only occasionally did I enter a hotel room that didn't have a piece of art that interested me." It was great touring some of the fairs with Dan as well.
For future reference, you need to pick and choose which fairs you visit. There just isn't enough time to see them all in four days. I visited Art Now (their first time), Basel, Bridge, Flow, Ink, Pulse, Red Dot and Scope. The fair that excited me the most was (drum roll please) SCOPE. For me, everything there was fresh, progressive, hip, edgy, contemporary, insightful, cleverly slick and professional. I don't think that I saw anything there that I hated, which is amazing. Also, the dealers at Scope were nice AND the gallery floor plan didn't confuse me.
Here's another thing. A few of the satellite gallery people told me that because the number of fairs had doubled from last year to roughly 25 this year, their traffic was diluted. One female dealer said, "We're doing a lot of emailing and j-pegging this year." Hopefully, this won't force organizers to scale down the event next year. Art lovers everywhere should witness this spectacular. You may recall that I coined the phrase, "The Superbowl of Art," two years ago. This year, it truly lived up to my title ... in terms of scale anyway.
Which brings me back to Alfred Perez (www.alfredperez.org). He's an outsider artist in the most literal sense. He was literally on the street trying to promote his work. This is the real story. This is what contemporary art is all about. I visited his studio briefly and saw his work, which is absolutely fantastic. I have no agenda other than to help a struggling artist. What was it like for him outside that exhibition hall?
"I honestly did not know how Art Basel officials would react. After about the first 15 minutes, I was turned away from the front entrance ..." Perez said. "I was very happy to be there taking all this in. I couldn't help but think of the many well heeled people passing me by with not even a glance in my direction. My comfort came with the realization that if I were Jean-Michel Basquiat or Andy Warhol in their formative years wearing this harness and exhibiting their pieces for all to see, the Prada contingent would still pass them by in the same fashion. In my mind, they seek out art in the same way they seek only designer labels and if it doesn't sell for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, it's not art to them. That said, I hate to generalize, and there were some of the same faction who were open and showed interest in what I was doing, although few and far between."
Art Basel Miami Beach is a fantastic event that has an even brighter future. We should support all art venues. As for Perez, he plans to keep pounding the pavement. Few big collectors saw him, but he was one of the stars of the entire week. Which makes one wonder ... is the art world really doing its job if all of its talented artists don't have venues? That's the real story of Art Basel Miami Beach 2007.
MICHAEL CORBIN IS AN AVID ART COLLECTOR AND AUTHOR OF "ART IN KING SIZE BEDS: A COLLECTOR'S JOURNAL." CHECK IT OUT AT WWW.ARTINKINGSIZEBEDS.COM
