Category: Miami

Win: At Basel, the Art Kabinett booths were almost all good. Elmgreen & Dragset created a sort of virtual art gym, with lockers and whatnot, and this sculpture, which was taller than me and for all I know had real blood.

Lose: Tracy Emin, who was in town and appeared on two of the Art Conversation panels (the video is online), was not at all well represented in the fair. There was a 5-part piece in one booth that included memorabilia from her abortion, a letter, and a couple of watercolors.

Win: Mac Premo, The Dumpster Project, at Pulse. This was not just a “create clutter, pile crap on top of crap until the effect is overwhelming” type of thing, eh? This was a craftsmanly constructed Rauschenbergian space.

Lose: Crap like this. Mostly at Art Miami. It’s the “another artist got successful making something like this, so let’s make something similar but easier to collect, and rake in the buxxx.”

Win: Olafur Eliasson. In addition to the two pieces I had on the Atlantic piece, there was this beauty.

Lose: Tables of Basel. This year it was all tasteful mid-century modern wood stuff. One or two notable exceptions, especially this one, proved the rule.

(Oh right, also this one.)

Win: David Rohn set himself up as a fortune-telling automatron just inside the entrance to Scope. A long line formed, with no visible activity. I thought the joke was just to get people to stand there while nothing happened, but in fact — he was writing these lengthy full-page fortunes for them.

Lose: Glenn Kaino’s outdoor performance, part of the official Basel program, had him inviting passers-by to help hold up a large vessel “for all of Basel if we can.” He seemed like such a nice guy, but by Saturday morning the thing was smashed and abandoned.

Win: Collectors. (But then, they always win.) In this panel, a couple of them (I think it was Norman Braman, video here) claimed credit for getting Basel to come to Miami 10 years ago. In the Q&A, someone asked their opinion about the MAM renaming. The question got completely shut down by Bonnie Clearwater, “I don’t think we want to get into that.” Bizarre, because I for one most certainly DID want them to get into that.

Lose: Gabriel Orozco. Well, maybe not: he also spoke at one of the Art Conversations, and I’m a huge fan of his photography and his more recent work. But this World Trade Center painting, done in a machine-made Seurat-type style, seemed gratuitous.

Win: The Barry McGee Rule says that if you bring a whole van to Basel, anything else you do is gravy. Over in Art Positions, Paulo Nazareth took that shit to heart.

Lose: Ana Mendieta. The turkeys at Galerie Leong took it upon themselves to take this piece, meant to be displayed outdoors, and show it on sod they dragged into the convention center. You’ve just made it about the fact that you brought sod indoors, dude. NOT I think what she had in mind.

Win: Whoever made this painting at Mihai Nicodium Gallery at NADA. Damn, dude.

Lose: Design Miami. For me it’s a waste of a half-hour. For the people who get tricked into paying admission (when you buy tickets to Basel they offer a package deal for $55, vs. the regular $40 Basel-only price, which may sound like a good deal if you don’t know better) it’s a damn shame. It’s (1) only a few booths, actually, and (2) NOT ART. Snooze. And that’s from someone who does design for a living.

Win: Taking photos at Art Basel. Used to be verboten, and I felt extra lucky for having journo credentials for hauling around a camera. But lately they’ve sort of given up, and everyone’s walking around with iPhones and pocket Canons. How else can you remember what you liked?

Lose: Dicks. They’re around every year, but this year they were in force. WHAT. EVER.

Win: Teresa Diehl. Her installation kicked ass at Pulse.

Lose: Wynwood. I got there 10-ish on Thursday and everything was shutting down already. Came back earlier and most of the good galleries hadn’t even bothered to open. Mostly just skeezers everywhere.

Lose: Me. There were signs, and two BIG guys, very much not permitting photos of Miru Kim’s performance. I asked for permission, and was told that NOBODY was getting to take photos. Woke up the next day to find photos at the Herald’s site and the New Times site. Boo.

Lose: Photography and video art. You literally could not throw a rock and hit a piece of video art at the Convention Center, that’s how much less of it there was than past years. This photo, by Alain Delorme, was at Pulse.

Lose: Gerhard Richter. Just KIDDING, Richter is always winning. This painting, from 1984, probably looked like it had aged very poorly by 1988. But it came early enough that I guess you could call it one of the spearheads of the terrible 80’s Ab-Ex painting excesses. I SO wish I’d asked what this was selling for.

Art Basel opened with a whimper yesterday. After walking around the fair for over an hour I suddenly realized that I had seen no art of any particular outlandishness, it suddenly hit me—everything about the fair this year is subdued. The infrastructure of the fair, including the highly-stylized viewing pods in the vide lounge and the tote bags distributed with catalogs, were the same as last year, the first time in the fair’s ten years. (The Oceanfront looked like its lowest-budget incarnation ever. NO Art loves Music performance.) The mood in the air was boisterous, but toned down several notches even from last year. And the art, by Art Basel standards, was downright conservative.

Heading out this morning to catch Gabriel Orozco at Art Conversations, then off to the satellite fairs.

Optic Nerve is this Saturday: the MoCA’s annual showcase of the best of video art, submitted from all over South Florida. It’s one of the highlights of the Miami yearly art calendar — not to be missed. Except that I’m not going to be there. And neither are you.

Unless you’ve gotten your tickets way ahead of time, that is. When I went to the website on Wednesday to RSVP, I realized that all the tickets — both screenings — were sold out.

This is absurd. This event grows more popular every year; why doesn’t MoCA add more shows? Why not do a friggin’ week of Optic Nerve? Or, heck, a month of screenings, like they do for Pablo Cano?

Please don’t tell me that I can go night-of and stand in a line to vie for one of a small number of day-of tickets. I’m not 21, and this is not an indie band that needs to be in Atlanta the next day for another gig.

Also do not tell me that it’s some sort of deliberate scarcity thing, where MoCA is deliberately trying to make Optic Nerve cooler by making it hard to get into. MoCA’s mission statement is to make the arts accessible to “diverse audiences,” which ought to include casual art fans who do not plan their outings a week ahead of time. C’mon, MoCA — add some shows!

Update: Valerie Ricordi of MoCA says: “We will have an auxiliary viewing area set up so that folks who do not have tickets will still be able to see the films. … Also wanted you to know that the Optic Nerve videos will be on view in the MOCA Lobby next week and on Uvu website. Also the de la Cruz Collection will be screening them September 10-October 8.” Good news!

Thom Collins, the semi-new director of the Miami Art Museum, has a video blog, which he opens by apologizing for the crappy quality of: “I’m a rank amateur!” It’s shot at the construction site of the new MAM building, and it’s actually pretty good!

A few years ago I was on a panel of Miami arts writers at Locust Projects with Anne Tschida, Omar Sommereyns, and a few others (my qualifications seemed a bit sketchy, but it was certainly a good discussion). Probably the biggest takeaway from the (sizable!) audience was that they were clamoring for more local arts coverage and, in particular, criticism.

Since then, as other locally-oriented writing has flourished, art criticism remains stuck in a rut. The New Times continues to regularly run criticism by Carlos Suarez De Jesus. But the Miami Herald hasn’t had a full-time art critic for years (I hear Elisa Turner has a blog somewhere on the Art Circuits site, but good luck finding it. South Florida Daily Blog lists four “Art Blogs,” but they are mostly dedicated to listings and brief descriptive posts. The notable exception is Artlurker, which has been running surprisingly substantial art reviews by a number of writers since 2008. But Art Lurker has been averaging one or two posts per month, so not sure what’s going on there.

Meanwhile, the art scene is flourishing — art schools are pumping out MFA and BFA art majors, artwalk is a huge monthly cultural event, and there are more galleries and private collections open to the public than ever. So what’s happening? Where’s the criticism?

I think the explanation is perfectly explained by a George Orwell quote I heard yesterday (on the Slate Culture podcast). Orwell apparently had written a scathing review of a book by Stephen Spender, only to meet him at a party and end up liking him quite a bit. Smitten with guilt, Orwell wrote the man a letter in which he said,

[W]hen you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to[.]

Now look at the Miami arts community — exactly to the extent that someone is involved and interested to where they might be willing/able to write some criticism, they’re hanging out with the artists and gallerists they’d need to be critical of from time to time. The scene is just not large enough that you can have a few dozen friends and another few dozen acquaintances and still have most of the scene left to impartially cover. I was talking to Misael about this, and he pretty well said as much about why he doesn’t write criticism. (By the way, all this probably applies to other art scenes — I’m addressing Miami because that’s what I know.)

Franklin Einspruch used to write some great criticism at ArtBlog.net. But Franklin was pretty well recognized as being in the camp of the Miami AbEx’ers, so his constant rear-guard action as all things PoMo was sort of taken in stride.

One solution of course is to write anonymously. Artlurker actually started out at least in part as anonymous. But in the long run it’s not sustainable for most people. One of the payoffs that seems to be a necessary reward for consistent blogging is a level of name recognition and attention. Too, anonymous or pseudonymous criticism is inherently less credible.

I still think there’s a role for a site of one or two consistent writers (hello, art/art history majors at UM, FIU, et al.) that pursues advertising more aggressively than Artlurker has. A financial reward would be a decent motivation to take a page from Orwell’s book and stay away from associating closely with the folks in the art scene, the better to show it intellectual brutality when necessary.

Update: Leyden pointed out just as I was posting this: A new golden age for art criticism? at the Knight Arts blog. A promising title — but it doesn’t offer any solutions! It just says we need a golden age of art criticism. Still, there’s a way forward here: a few people interested in writing criticism start a site (maybe mix in some other sort of coverage), and apply for a Knight grant to jump-start them. Would make it much easier for them to attract advertisers with the Knight name behind them, and tide them over before the site is self-sustaining.

The gallery walk has become a completely different thing over the last couple of years. As more and more people show up each month, it’s become a positive street fair, where the majority of the people have minimal interest in the actual art, and the galleries are almost just along for the ride. Stores have begun to open up along N.E. 2nd, and the food truck / street vendor thing has positively exploded. Some of the art is responding by reaching for out-sized dimensions and spectacle, while other galleries determinedly stay on course. The number of galleries has also expanded — seems that every space near the Wynwood nexus is open and displaying art these days (with the exception of die-hard Harold’s Body Shop). But nevermind all that—let’s look at some art.

Finally the Jillian Mayer show at Castillo, which was unexpected and wonderful. In particular the grandma video, which you need to not miss.

Across the street, there was lots of interesting stuff happening at the O, Miami space, including performances and a number of audience-participation writing projects. Applaudable, with the possible exception of the booklet titled “a modern anthology of miami poets” which contained exactly 13 poems?

Over in the UM space, Sean Smith’s paintings, created by serving meat with sauces. Delicious, delicious meat. The end result gets a coat of varnish and goes on the wall. There were a few completed smaller pieces (which were pretty interesting), and some of his “regular” paintings (which, not so much).

As always, a rockabilly band in front of Harold Golden.

Peggy Levison Nolan’s show at Dina Mitrani is a must-see. Here’s walking the photography walk rather then talking the photography talk. You can see a few photos at the website, but try to catch it in person.

Across the street, a tres fancy plant store, with air plants quite literally stuck up a horse’s ass. Future Plants, indeed.

Miguel Paredes, seen previously, has moved into an even larger and more ostentatious spot. This is Britto for guys with wallet chains.

No over-the-toppedness is spared—the space is replete with one painting velvet-ropped off and a “wet paint” sign, two free bars (when most galleries have done away with booze), and this crazy installation with real stairs and dioramas inside the windows. I looked for a single work that’d be memorable on its own unsuccessfully, but the overall effect was something.

At Dorsch, Paul Myoda shows a large group of chandelier-like objects, many animated, motion-sensitive, and sound-making.

In another part of the gallery, Brookhart Jonquil reflects an entire room.

A solo show by the consistently great Agustina Woodgate at Spinello. Remember the hopscotch game painted all around Wynwood? Yep, that was her. Here are pieces made out of human hair (that huge tower!), videos, a gigant quilt made out of teddy bears, and a new piece from the fruit stickers. Along the wall is a nondescript row of boxes — the contents of Woodgate’s studio, which will be available for trade(!). Information should be available soon at a special website, which though is not live as I write this.

Finally, my pal Catalina Jaramillo’s fantastic installation at Dimensions Variable. She collected every single object her mother owned when she died of cancer. Poignant and quite lovely.