Art Basel Miami Beach returns, smaller but ready to party

MIAMI BEACH – It’s back. The annual Art Basel Miami Beach fair, which was canceled last year due to Covid-19, returns next week and takes place across the region. It starts on Tuesday with opening times by invitation only and is open to the public from Thursday to Saturday. 253 galleries display work in the city’s convention center, as well as a dizzying number of accompanying satellite art fairs, pop-up shows, and celebrity-occupied private dinners.

It’s a sprawling cultural circus that has come to be known as “Miami Art Week”, complete with corporate branding exercises, from a sculptural forest by set designer Es Devlin (on behalf of a Chanel fragrance) to a “Yacht the Basel” “Festival, hosted by the snack food Cheetos with” dynamic original works of art created from Cheeto’s iconic orange dust “.

The return of the Basel Exhibition Center in Miami could not have come soon enough for gallery owners from all over the world to flock to Florida. While contemporary art auctions are breaking records again, overall gallery sales remain sluggish. A report by the economist Dr. Mid-year Clare McAndrew from Art Basel and UBS found that nearly half of the 700 retailers surveyed saw sustained sales decline in the first half of 2021. Mega traders like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner with blue-chip lists and several outposts recovered quickly, the report said. But many smaller retailers who had relied on Art Basel to attract new customers and introduce emerging talent struggled.

Marc Spiegler, Global Director of Art Basel, can determine the moment when Miami’s revived art craze took off: On September 20, when the US government said it would lift the Covid travel ban for most visitors from Europe and Asia in November and thus the Miami Messe is the first truly international trade fair in the USA since the beginning of the pandemic.

Spiegler’s phone immediately burned with messages from dealers who had not previously participated: “By the end of this week, more than 30 galleries had ‘not been canceled,’” he said, not yet a digital substitute for buying and selling art in the flesh. Almost half of the exhibitors at the fair will now be from overseas and Latin America. “I’ve read all the predictions that the art fairs are over, that nobody will travel anymore,” Spiegler continued. “We have a show that is only slightly smaller than the one in 2019.”

This is undoubtedly a relief for the owners of Art Basel, the Swiss MCH Group, whose shareholder reports show they have lost more than $ 109 million since the pandemic began. However, if the return of the Miami fair is cause for MCH to cheer, the future remains of its two other art fairs – Art Basel Hong Kong, slated for March 2022, and the flagship Art Basel in Switzerland, slated for June 2022 – uncertain. Put aside the growing wave of state repression and censorship in Hong Kong, visitors entering the city are subject to a quarantine of up to three weeks. In March, if the quarantine persists, it will be difficult to imagine that a full-fledged Basel trade fair will take place, said Spiegler. And with Covid infections swelling again across Europe and triggering new bans, one can only imagine what June will bring.

These potential sales losses for Art Basel make the smooth running of the fair in Miami all the more important. To avoid crowds, tickets are now limited in time and require proof of Covid vaccination or a recent negative test and the wearing of masks. These logs may sound familiar – and comforting – to visitors from New York or Los Angeles, but they are almost nonexistent in all of Miami. Local officials have been overruled by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has tried to make himself the face of Republican opposition to the Biden administration’s viral policies. For Spiegler, however, the topic is not up for debate.

“When you bring together thousands of people from all over the world, the only thing that makes sense is wearing masks,” he said. What if a trade fair visitor, for example an art collector worth billions, refuses to accept the order for a mask? Would Basel’s security physically kick her out of the convention center? “That means a mask mandate,” Spiegler replied firmly.

Beyond Art Basel, the mood in Miami’s year-round art scene is anything but timid. Superblue, a joint venture between heavyweight gallery Pace and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, opened in a 31,000-square-foot renovated warehouse in the Allapattah neighborhood last spring. Fotografiska, the privately owned global group of photography museums, has announced that they will be moving their David Rockwell-designed kit to the 42,000-square-foot warehouse directly across from the Rubell Museum to open in 2023.

And business is strong in the city’s outstanding galleries. At the Fredric Snitzer Gallery, director Joshua Veasey said things were as busy now as they have been at any point in his six-year tenure. He attributes to the established collectors who fled cities to the north or west and wiped out the coronavirus in their new residences in Miami, who first visited the gallery.

“There was a lot of renovation going on after being stuck inside for so long,” Veasey quipped. “These are the problems of the rich.” But the fresh faces in the gallery did not emerge from Miami’s newly arrived “Tech Bros”, from the up-and-coming new media mogul Bryan Goldberg to PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who moved from here amid a wave of Silicon Valley cheerleaders to become the city’s mayor . New, less important customers come with the more typical collector backgrounds of finance and real estate development.

What has seeped out of the tech industry is a love of everything NFT related. Art Week hosts a bewildering array of NFT-themed meetings, including the all-day NFT.BZL conference, which has a jam-packed list of NFT artists, tech figures, and city and county mayors. One of the many new NFT marketplaces, SuperRare, has even commissioned the SuperWorld engineers to install 20 3D sculptures in the entire Art Basel Convention Center, which can only be seen there in their app – a new way of attracting influential eyeballs and see the fair’s curatorial committee and booth fee of around $ 60,000 (and more) at the same time.

“I was skeptical at first, I wanted to see if NFTs had a lifespan of more than five minutes,” admitted Miami multimedia artist Carlos Betancourt, one of the few established local talents who have embraced the new blockchain-based medium. He said the key to his comfort is finding a platform, Aorist, with a curator, Ximena Caminos, who has been a longtime supporter of his work. That, and Aorist’s willingness to produce a real-life version of his NFT track “What Lies Beneath,” which can only be seen on a screen that illuminates the rapid melting of the polar ice caps caused by global warming. The result, the sale of which will benefit a local underwater sculpture park, is a pair of man-made icebergs – one of which is 6.10 meters high and 9 meters wide, wrapped in collages by Sven-Olof Lindblad’s photos of real icebergs and placed in the pool directly by the sea at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach.

While room rates at the Faena – starting at $ 3,300 a night to $ 5,500 for an ocean view – can limit audiences for “What Lies Beneath,” it will still be hard to see Betancourt’s artwork and its diverse styles in next week To see miami. “Into The Everglades,” his animated silhouettes of Florida wildlife, will swing over the side of the 35-story InterContinental Miami Hotel in downtown each night. “Milagro!” A 38-foot chain of 245 handcrafted charms commissioned by the City of Miami Beach will hang over a busy city boulevard; and two of his photos – homoerotic portraits of him and his long-term partner and colleague, the architect Alberto Latorre – are shown in a group exhibition “Skin in the Game” in a beach shop.

Its ubiquity, Betancourt said, is evidence that Miami’s museums and collectors have finally embraced the city’s own artists, spurred on by Art Basel’s attention to work produced in Miami. “People had an inferiority complex here for many years,” he continued, remembering arriving from Puerto Rico as a teenager in 1980, where he discovered an art scene that too often looked elsewhere for direction. The shift will be evident next week as local institutions proudly display work embedded in Miami’s social fabric.

For starters, Anastasia Samoylova’s “FloodZone” photos in the HistoryMiami Museum capture an often surreal visual interplay of flora, fauna and crumbling concrete; Gary Monroe’s “Refuseniks” photographs at Florida International University’s Miami Beach Urban Studios offer a poignant study of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s who were building new lives for themselves in what was then an unraveling South Beach; and Jared McGriff’s otherworldly paintings at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale show visions of black life that are both troubled and hauntingly adorable.

This seriously minded piece of art will be showcased as part of a weeklong tropical party. If that seems contradictory, Betancourt believes that is exactly what made Miami its self-worth as an art city, Betancourt believes, “We enjoy the party and that manifests itself in our work,” he said. “That’s what Miami brings into the equation – we do everything without an apology.”

The post Art Basel Miami Beach returns, smaller but ready to party first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

from Daily Florida Press https://dailyfloridapress.com/art-basel-miami-beach-returns-smaller-but-ready-to-party/