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Art Basel - the list
Updated 5:57 pm, 12/01/09.
Preparations are under way all over town for the Main Event, starting more or less this Wednesday morning. Tents have sprouted over the generous undeveloped portions of Midtown Miami for many of the larger satellite fairs, art delivery trucks are fighting for unloading spaces at the hotels housing the less fortunate fairs, and the din of hammering and unwrapping is emanating from the Convention Center. It’s that time of the year where the New York Times runs stories about Miami that neither mock or pity. It’s the time of the year where the average IQ of the tourist arriving at MIA spikes unexpectedly, and when the cool kids from all over the world wish they were here. It’s Art Basel Miami Beach, y’all, and the weather this year (give or take a stormy Thursday) looks to be cooperating.
But for now we wait, not unlike Robert Chambers’ giant slingshot (pointed at the Bass art museum). Today brings the list below, which will to be updated throughout the week. A few more tidbits and links tomorrow. Wednesday comes a first look at the convention center, with stuff from the rest of the fairs daily probably into next week. Friday brings the perennial Art Basel guide for Normal People. Also follow me on twitter, as updates will be live and glorious. (Note: I’m indicating Miami galleries showing at each fair on an ‘as I notice’ basis — not comprehensive.)
Main fairs
- Art Basel | Miami Beach. 1900 Washington Ave / 1901 Convention Center Dr, Miami Beach. By Vernissage invitation (try to get one!) 6 – 9 pm Wednesday, $35 after that. (Miami galleries: Snitzer, Bruk)
- The Oceanfront, formerly known as Art Positions, by popular demand without shipping containers of art this year, though with all the other usual wackiness promised, courtesy of Pae White. (Hint: 3D glasses!) $0
- Scope, 2136 NW 1st Avenue, Miami (there have been a few different addresses floating around, but this is the correct one! Same place where Pulse was last year, which should be pretty sweet. $20
- Pulse moves to the Ice Palace, 1400 North Miami Avenue, Miami, where NADA was last year, which is sort of a bummer because NADA was my favorite place to send people who’s budget is $0, and this year it’s in a crappy hotel. $15
- Art Miami, Midtown, NE 1st Avenue between NE 32nd & NE 31st Street, Miami. Probably the biggest and best of the tents. $15
- Aqua abandons its Miami Beach hotel namesake and moves all exhibitors to the Wynwood location, 42 NE 25th St. Not sure if the space will be larger. $15
- NADA, Deauville Beach Resort, 6701 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. Should still be cool and everything, but a little out of the way, and the free admission looses its shine after you get your car towed. (Still, features Miami favorites David Castillo Gallery and Twenty Twenty.) $0 (I’ve bumped this back up to the major fairs category after comments here. Persuasive.)
Smaller fairs
- Miami’s Independent Thinkers, “a multimedia art festival dedicated to South Florida’s premier and emerging artists.” Dig the artist list, alpha by first name. Mitrani Warehouse, 222 NW 27th Street, Miami. $15 (via)
- Pool, a fair of independent unrepresented artists. The Cavalier Hotel, 1320 Ocean Dr, Miami Beach. $10 “suggested donation”
- Art Asia, 2136 NW 1st Avenue. Next to Scope, and probably admission to one gets you admission to the other.
- Photo Miami, a tent at Midtown. You would expect a fair dedicated to photography to be great, and you would expect wrong. There is better photography elsewhere, and unless you have lots of time and money, the few gems that were to be found here in years past are not your while. $20
- Design Miami, NE 39th Street & 1st Ct, Miami. Fun for fans of DWR, this has usually been nice for a quick stop, and looks even more promising this year. Price impossible to find on website.
- Red Dot. A website with text you can’t copy or search, and an incorrect address. Should be awesome. One of the tents at Midtown, $10.
- Ink, 1850 Collins Avenue Miami Beach. Some nice things, but also plenty of cartoons, so discretion is advised. $0
- Verge (formerly Bridge), The Catalina Hotel, 1732 Collins Ave, Miami Beach. $10 (tho supposedly free if you friend them on Facebook, which should be all you need to know on this world pertaining to how worthwhile this will be.)
- Fountain, 2505 North Miami Ave Miami. 13 mostly New York galleries. $5
- Sculpt Miami, 46 North West 36th Street, Miami. Probably not a good idea, but who knows? Probably free.
- Green. A complete disaster last year, FWIW. Midtown. Price unknown, probably too much.
- Focai, 3000 North Miami Ave. $10
- Nobe 67 wtf?
Special projects, local endeavors, etc.
You can just assume that all these are free admission, and many will have an opening reception with free drinks. Quality tends to be very good, tho many are up for weeks after Basel.
- Primary Flight (more info here ..): mural project featuring several notable local artists, and Shepard Fairey(!). Street art, plus a show at Art Center South Florida. Video.
- FALLOUT, 23 artists mostly from around the US, showing work in the actual fallout shelter of the old Burdines building (now Macy’s) at 2 W. Flagler Street in downtown Miami.
- Littlest Sister, “smallest art fair in town,” Spinello Gallery. 50 artists, 8 booths, 1 store-front space. 155NE 38 St, #101, Miami.
- “He Believes in a Beauty” — your pal Nick Cindric is back, and curating this oddly named exhibition. Includes work by Christina Pettersson, Gavin Perry, Carlos Betancourt, and Cristina Lei Rodriguez. So, worth checking out despite any web presnece. Buick Building, 3841 NE 2dn Ave, Miami.
- Subtropics’ Autonomous Sounds, sound art performance/installation, Thursday and Friday, 7 – 11 pm, 2100 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach (just northeast of the Convention Center).
- Art | Baselita / Zones. Lots of local art, both fine and funky.
- Dark Night of the Soul / It Ain’t Fair, the former being the collection of photographs by David Lynch with accompanying music by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse that you’ve heard of and the latter being, well, another show with a bunch of artists. At OHWOW, which is getting mad buzz, 3100 NW 7 Avenue Miami.
Events
Wednesday
- Art Loves Music: Ebony Bones, free concert at “Oceanfront,” 9 pm-ish. Free.
Thursday
- Vivian Girls perform at Pulse at 7pm, with locals Little Beard playing at 6. Don’t miss the whole list of art performances at Pulse, which sound impressive. (thanks, misael)
- Atlas Sound at Stages, “invite only,” whatever that means. 888 Biscayne Blvd. Miami. (via)
Friday
- G. Love at Fountain, 7 pm, $5
- Art Film: ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child’, at Oceanfront. This is apparently a rough unfinished cut of the documentary. Free.
Saturday
- Chairlift at Fountain, 7 pm, $5
- Kinky and Mala Rodriguez at Awarehouse. I’m skeptical of anything that’s “presented by” a shoe brand, but be my guest. Free with online RSVP.
Posted: Monday November 30, 2009 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [3]
Weekendly clickables XIX
- Assholes U2 played a concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall with a metal barrier to keep people without tickets from being able to see the (free!) show.
- Holy shit, smoking voids your Mac’s warranty. That’s it, fuck Dell, fuck apple, and fuck all that bullshit at Best Buy. Your next computer is a cheap no-name mini-desktop with a fancy monitor and Ubuntu.
- Something you don’t usually think about when you see a photo: where was the photographer?
- Sort of related: is Sarah Palin’s publisher mocking her with the cover of her book?
- JD Salinger’s stories, collected online.
- Microsoft Security Essentials. If you’re running windows, here’s the free anti-virus software Bill Gates has been owing you.
- Marc Garanger’s pictures of Algerian women from the 1960s.
- Noted: NYC bicycle nerds.
- You should fix your terrible passwords, but probably not like this.
- Did you know that if health-care companies compromise your medical information, they can decide if the breech is serious enough to inform you?
- Speaking of fucked up medical news! Gary Schwitzer, editor of Health News Review, was on On The Media recently to discuss medical coverage on network TV. It’s more than predictably bad, and he took time to single out Dr. Nancy Snyderman, chief medical editor for NBC News, as a particularly shameless shill.
Posted: Monday November 23, 2009 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
Gladwell-bashing
Pinker takes Gladwell to task (Malcolm responds, tho he focuses on football, which is mentioned just in passing by Pinker), and Tkacik is even harsher:
But in examining Gladwell’s success concurrently with his prescriptions for achievement, even his harshest reviewers damned themselves with faint criticism. […] when The Economist embraced the book’s “engaging” and “intriguing” case studies while wryly enclosing the overarching “big idea” in quotation marks, it overlooked Gladwell’s refusal to engage meaningfully with the world of ideas at all.
But all I’m hearing is “This collection of essays
Posted: Friday November 20, 2009 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
Bike hanging from ceiling
So, that worked out, at least for the moment. The kit of course tells you to screw into a ceiling stud. But it turns out that finding a ceiling stud, at least in my old Miami Beach apartment, is not as easy as advertised. Even the stud finder I borrowed (which worked great on the wall) gave all sorts of crazy readings, and was just generally unreliable. After some hunting around, I decided that toggle bolts might be worth a shot.
They work! You need to pre-drill big-ass (3/8”) holes, and be careful not to screw up the installation (i.e. screwing with the drill in counter-clockwise mode, which will basically ruin one of your toggle bolts in about .5 seconds), but this setup has 4 bolts holding a 30 lb. bike, and seems to be pretty effective.
Posted: Wednesday November 11, 2009 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment [2]
The Times’ 100 best films of the decade. Great list! But!: I like the Bourne series too, but number2?! Also overrated: Slumdog Millionaire (#6), Borat (#11), and Bad Santa (#54). Underrated: The Royal Tenenbaums (#88), Milk (#53), and the films of Spike Jonze, of which Being John Malkovich is #29, and Adaptation and Synecdoche, New York are missing. Also missing: Rachel Getting Married. (via)
Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet enables intimacy: Not exactly earth-shattering news, but there’s something sweet and compelling in the way Broadbent describes these changes.
Stupid internet tricks: a guy RFID-tagged his cats and wired his cat door to only open for them, then added a camera and an internet connection. Result: Twittering cat door.
Here’s a bizzaro idea — Invest in a human being. You: a rich person. Them: broke but very promising. The terms: You give them a big chunk up front for a percentage of their pay for the rest of their lives, maybe with a buy-out clause. This is perfectly reasonable as a thought experiment, but it’s also a slightly creepy real thing that actually happens, with actual contracts and numbers and I guess audits. Not related, but fun anyway: how to sell a dollar for more then a dollar, and what it means for politics.
Weekendly Clickables XVIII
- Ritual cleansing of child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
- David Hanson is spending three months canoeing the Chattahoochee River.
- Choire finds some gems in the coming auction of the Lehman Brothers art collection.
- Having a pet can be as bad for the environment as an SUV
- The 10 worst food trends, DEBUNKED.
- When is the film better than the novel? Maybe when it’s one of these. But I think there’s a distinction to be made between movies made from classic literature, and movies made from pulp thrillers. I’ve never read Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, but I think comparing its quality to the (pretty great!) film is a much less interesting exercise than comparing, say, the film and book versions of Catch 22.
- I am not sure if I believe Slate’s battery tips. Keeping your laptop unplugged while using it? Trying to stay between 20% and 80% at all times? FISHY.
- So, I gave in and paid the $5 for Brushes, the famous iPhone app, and let me tell you it is great. Doodling and painting, together like never before.
Posted: Monday November 2, 2009 by Alesh Houdek · Permalink · Comment
