Art Basel Miami Beach 2007--What a trip!
Click to download the Article printed in the Grenadian Voice Newspaper
Press Release—For Immediate Release
Art Basel Miami Beach Dec 06-09, 2007
A Global Attitude (almost).
Susan Mains
At Art Basel at the Miami Beach convention centre, more than 220 galleries from around the world put their best face forward and lured in collectors from everywhere.
On display, lots of art--from international superstars who have already passed away--Picasso, Dubuffet, Basquiat, to works created this year by brand new entrants into the market. Paintings, sculpture, photography, installations, video, and combinations of all of the above provided a feast for the eyes and the imagination.
The "fair" part means that it is commercial--these galleries are here to sell. Nothing on view was particularly controversial, obscene, or offensive. This is different from a biennale, that mostly exhibits with no intention to sell, just to increase the perceived value of the artists’ work and the prestige of the gallery that represents them, or the home country of the artist. This is where more artists will take a risk with something that would be considered “cutting edge”. If successful at the biennale in getting the attention of the art world, you will then start seeing it appear for sale at high prices at the over 200 Art Fairs on the yearly world calendar.
Again, even after 6 years, this art fair that perches on the edge of the Caribbean Sea every December seems to ignore Caribbean art; not so Asian and Indian. Since the 1st edition in 2001 which was largely European and American, the East has made inroads. It's not a Tsunami--more like a persistent, gentle wave. Noticeably a Korean gallery lured visitors to the booth with works by Calder, Richter and Warhol, then presented a range of very competent contemporary Korean work. While in the booth, I observed a large photography C-print, 1 in an edition of 6 sell for U.S. $18,000. Their strategy of value by association seems to work. A proliferation of new print Magazines about art from the East and Middle East have come to the fair—the documentation of this excitement about contemporary art.
Art Basel makes Miami a magnet for other art fairs on that weekend. Over 20 others, with as many as 50 to 80 galleries each were represented in warehouses, super-sized tents, hotels, and converted shipping containers all over the city of Miami. That’s well over 1000 art galleries, each representing 5 to 20 artists. (You do the math.) Local galleries stepped up to show their best. The Miami airport registered a record of 220 private jets for that weekend, never mind the thousands who flew in on the packed commercial flights. The brand new 228 foot luxury yacht, the SeaFair, was parked at the Miami Beach Marina, giving access to the 26 high end galleries that make it their home. There wasn’t an empty hotel room, and restaurants and clubs did non-stop business. Probably it is fair to say that this was the largest gathering of galleries, collectors and artists in the world to date. The competition for attention was fierce.
In just a random sampling from “over-listening”, I heard that a Picasso sold for $14 million to a private individual. Confirmed with the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery of New York, Mark Bradford, American artist featured on the Art 21 series from PBS on TV, sold a painting for $185,000. An installation by Lothar Hempel, Plant of the Lonely Apes, 2007, sold for $49,000. to the Honard Museum, Tehran, Iran. These are just a tiny sampling of the many art sales, apparently not dampered by vacillating world stock markets.
Searching for a Caribbean representation in this melee was daunting, but finally I found it. A public forum for discussion about Caribbean Contemporary Art was hosted by Miami gallery, Diaspora Vibe. Director and Curator Rosie Gordon-Wallace pulled together a diverse panel. Participants in the discussion: the curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Infinite Island” exhibit, Tomelo Mosaka, Artist and Lecturer, Deborah Jack of St. Martin, Professor and Art Critic, Annie Paul of Jamaica, Artist and Writer, Christopher Cozier of Trinidad; a span of minds as wide as the Caribbean is long from Trinidad to the Bahamas. Touching such topics as race, identity, nationalism, as usual with any Caribbean discussion, conclusions were not singular. The panel sparked spirited discussion among those who attended that continued long after at the gallery during the reception. Most works displayed at Diaspora Vibe were by artists of Caribbean heritage who live in the United States.
Also of Caribbean descent, Cuban born Jose Bedia is making his presence felt in Miami. Represented both by a gallery inside the convention centre, and in a one-man show in the design district, he is known as the rising star of the new generation of Cuban artists. On the last day of the show, the gallery Obra Grafica from Barcelona, Spain, had sold 10 of a limited edition of 50 of an etching on paper, “Dos Castellos” Gallerist Jose Alay said, “He is becoming so well known that people who cannot afford an original painting are willing to spend $2500 for this work on paper, just so they can have something made by him.”
At the Art Basel "Conversations" Panel in an early morning session at the convention centre, the issue of nationalism and collecting artists’ work was raised. Patrizia Re Rebaudengo of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation of Turin, Italy replied that since globalisation has become such a part of world culture, it is almost impossible to collect work by nation. She noted that artists now often live in more than one place. Another very telling Eurocentric remark was that "now we see the entrance of Indian and Asian Art into the market - before there weren't any artists from there." Surely if the point was pressed she would have acknowledged that there were artists and work being created there before being discovered by the International Contemporary Art Scene, but the attitude prevails that it is art only if a critic, collector, or museum nominates it as such. More interesting is that this Italian lady was the executive producer of Steve McQueen's video entry in the 2007 Venice Biennial, Gravesand. (You will remember that Steve McQueen is of Grenadian decent. His parents moved to England in the migration of the 60's, and he grew up there.)
The initial financial investment made by Miami to host this fair in 2001 has by far paid multiple dividends. In the development of the new Grenada we see just beyond the horizon, (or let’s be real, just around the lagoon), who will be the beneficiary of the potential art collectors who come to our shores in their luxury yachts and private jets. Can we as a country maximize the potential of our visual artists to step on to the world stage of art from right here in Grenada? Would a Grenada Pavilion at the most prestigious Venice Biennial in Italy catch the attention of these collectors? Or, closer to home, perhaps sending a representation to the newly commissioned New Orleans Biennale in October of 2008. Can Grenada become a place that is known to produce the finest in Caribbean Contemporary art? The answer to these questions, of course, is yes. The requirement is investment—both from government and the private sector. Is the investment viable? Ask Miami.