At Art Basel Miami Beach, Less Heat
By KATE TAYLOR
MIAMI BEACH – The crowds that used to form more than an hour before the opening of the “First Choice” portion of Art Basel Miami Beach—the four-hour window between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. when only elite collectors can enter and browse the fair—are gone. Gone too are the speculators who before the financial crisis used to race down the aisles as soon as the doors opened in order to snag a work that they thought they could flip at a profit a few months later. Indeed, on Wednesday during “First Choice” things seemed sedate compared to the years before 2008. Some described the giant convention hall as “empty.”
That doesn’t mean that things didn’t sell. The extreme caution and modesty of 2008 and 2009, the hesitation to be seen spending, is gone, too. Pay in the financial world is roaring back to pre-crisis levels, and art is increasingly seen as a safe place to park money, like gold.
So galleries including Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace and Andrea Rosen all reported making several sales, and major collectors like Steven A. Cohen, Peter Brant, and David Tieger wandered around the fair, often being stalked by journalists hoping to catch them in the act of closing a deal. (The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Cohen bought Adel Abdessemad’s “Mappemonde” for approximately $300,000 at Zwirner and a work by Tim Hawkinson for $180,000 from the gallery Blum & Poe.)
But although many dealers and collectors cited a renewed optimism and exuberance—“I guess maybe the art world hasn’t heard about the recession,” said Don Rubell, the major Miami collector—later in the evening a more cynical European collector described the fair as relatively anemic. He recalled how, in earlier years, he had to arrive by 9:30 a.m. to have a chance of getting through the doors by 11:30. This year, he arrived at 10:45 and was the first in line. It worked out well for him: He walked right in and bought a piece.
Even after 3 p.m., when the fair opened to a wider crowd, the atmosphere was still so relaxed that Peter Benedek, a co-founder of United Talent Agency, whose clients include “Sopranos” creator David Chase and, more recently, the 24-year-old auteur Lena Dunham, actually sat down on the floor in Zwirner’s booth to contemplate a Neo Rauch oil-on-paper work resting against the wall in front of him. Apparently, his communion with it was gratifying, because he ultimately bought it.
In some peoples’ eyes, a positive consequence of the slower pace is that institutions have more of a chance to buy. Tanya Bonakdar said that she had sold a Haim Steinbach sculpture to the Hammer Museum at U.C.L.A., and the Mexican gallery kurimanzutto said it had a major work on hold for a museum.
Among the people who visited those booths was Anne Strauss, an associate curator in the department of 19th century, modern, and contemporary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who said she was at the fair with a very specific goal: catching up on Latin American contemporary art, an area in which she said the Met was “way behind.” She had recently been to Brazil for the Sao Paolo Biennial and to visit Inhotim, the art park created by the iron magnate Bernardo Paz, but she said that Art Basel Miami Beach was “indispensable” as a way of further educating herself about the current trends in Latin American art, and would save her multiple other trips abroad.
She had visited a small group of galleries—in addition to Tanya Bonakdar and kurimanzutto, Anton Kern, Galerie Lelong, and the Brazilian gallery Fortes Vilaca—and looked at work by Ernesto Neto, Tomas Saraceno, Valeska Soares, and others. Asked where her directive was coming from, she said the Met was interested generally in becoming less Euro-centric and more global. A particular impetus, she said, was the Met’s possible lease of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Breuer building on Madison Avenue (which the Whitney may abandon, at least temporarily when it moves downtown).
“If we make this move, even though it’s temporary, it will offer an opportunity” to acquire and show new work, Ms. Strauss said. Curators in the 19th century, modern, and contemporary department, she said, are working with others in photography and Asian and African art to conceive of a museum-sized exhibition of art made after 1960 from around the world. The Whitney may collaborate on the program, as well.
By 6:30 p.m., the cluster of Latin American galleries was definitely the most relaxing and pleasant place to be, as people with tired feet eagerly climbed inside a nylon sculpture by Mr. Neto that looked like a giant tomato and was the size of a small room, with a circular bench surrounding a drum that people were encouraged to strike upon entering. “If they would now deliver some hot tea, that would be perfect,” joked Julian Zugazagoitia, the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, who hung out in the Neto sculpture for 40 minutes, chatting happily with people in English and Spanish.
Which is not to say that everyone was resting. At 8:30 p.m., 20-somethings jostled outside the Raleigh Hotel, hoping to get into the Vogue party. A bit later in the evening, at the Raleigh’s beachside party site, the band LCD Soundsystem blasted its music to a large crowd at the MoCA L.A. party — the former Deitch Projects party, retooled to fit Jeffrey Deitch’s new role as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
“I was always central to Miami,” Mr. Deitch had said earlier in the day, confessing that he was “nostalgic” for his days as a dealer there. “They didn’t even replace my booth – it’s a group of benches now.”
This article is from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/at-art-basel-miami-beach-less-heat/?partner=rss&emc=rss
