Occupy Museums thinks the art fair model needs to be reworked. Occupy Wall Street’s art offshoot has announced a new initiative, DebtFair, which seeks to radically deconstruct the commercial art fair. After essentially sunning themselves in a distant corner of Frieze New York last May, distributing flyers for Un-Frieze and other protest literature, the activists have decided to go for a more radical overthrow of the heavily commodified fair model. Whether or not this alternative has legs remains to be seen.
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Puzzled. That’s a good word to describe my state of being for my first Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB). One of the primary things I learned is that art fairs can be fun — when you’re standing on the right side of the velvet rope and you have all the right RSVPs and a prepared partinerary printed out.
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As a longtime reader and admirer of Slate, I’ve often lamented the fact that there’s pretty much zero visual art content on the site (although, to be fair, they’re only one of a handful of culture publications that ignores the category, and their new photo blog is great). So I was excited when I saw they had published a piece about the art world and Art Basel Miami Beach yesterday — until I read it.
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Thanks to the efforts of organizations such as Primary Flight and Wynwood Walls, the Wynwood district in Miami is undergoing a radical transformation through art.
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MIAMI — With Soutine in mind, and the world’s best galleries around me, I culled a few great works by mostly 1950s US artists that have Soutine in mind.
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Okay, so, this week is New York City’s art fair week. This may sound like a carnival replete with Ferris wheels, clowns and cotton candy, but it’s not, at least in the literal sense. An art fair is like a carnival in that there’s a lot of excess noise, visual information and people yelling over each other. But an art fair is actually a clearinghouse for art works, a pow-wow of dealers, galleries, curators and collectors that’s part tribe meeting and part shopping mall. n the US, the major players are basically Art Basel Miami Beach, a sister fair of Art Basel founded in 2002 occurring annually every December, and New York City’s Armory Show, founded in 1994 and taking place in March.
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Brooklyn-based artist Jacob Krupnick had the opportunity to spend the day after the Art Basel Miami Beach fair closed inside the convention center dodging forklifts and documenting the breakdown of the fair. “It’s that rare moment when lots of valuables are at risk and in motion,” he told me over email. “The amazing piles of crates and packing materials make it hard to pin down what, exactly, an art piece is. (One forklift operator pointed at a stack of shipping containers he’d arranged, and said without sarcasm: ‘This is my art.’)” [PHOTO SERIES]
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The vibes being sent up North from Miami to the now-snowy climes of New York City over the past week have carried with them a message: the contemporary art market may just be back into something like its previous swing.
Gleaned from tweets, news pieces written from flashy parties and a newfound sense of optimism, is this intuition of market return reality, or just self-fulfilling prophecy? Check out a collection of picks, pics, links and insights into Art Basel Miami Beach 2010 below.
Continue Reading → Lindsay Pollock has a report from this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach that gives us some insight into the state of the art market:
Sales echoed what the recent New York auctions had intimated: the uppermost tier of the art industry is chugging along.
Though I like this quote more:
“Last year, there was much more death and skull imagery,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen one skull this year. I like it better without the skulls.”
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There’s no point in giving you a “review” of the mothership of art fairs in Miami, Art Basel Miami Beach, so I thought a photo essay with some observations were more appropriate.
I admit that I got a little bored after three hours of wandering around. I found myself seeing the same thing and getting the same numbness I get during marathon holiday shopping trips or walks through ancient souks … there’s only so much merchandise you can see in one stop.
It was still refreshing to see some galleries display the prices of their wares freely, and examples of excellent abstraction by names mostly absent from the art history survey books, but I was most shocked to discover what must be the most awful Basquiat I have even seen in my life.
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