The art fair Art Basel Miami Beach, and the satellite events that have emerged around it, collectively known as Miami Art Week, have been held the first week of December every year since 2002, except in 2020 because of the pandemic. But even that year, Libbie Mugrabi, the ex-wife of the art dealer David Mugrabi, riding high from an enormous divorce settlement, threw a lavish dinner at the Faena Hotel. (“I can do whatever I want with it,” she told The New York Times of the payout. “And this is what I want to do.”) Last week, one gallery owner from New York summed up the purpose of the fair to me succinctly: “I need to make money,” he said. Miami is especially good for gauging the mood of the art business, and the direction it might be heading in. Prices at art auctions have been declining over the past two years, but a lot of people did indeed make money. And there was some evocative art on view, too. Below are a few takeaways.
Sculpture depicting everyday items is in
At NADA, a smaller art fair held at Ice Palace Studios, over the bay from Miami Beach, I was impressed by an abundance of quirky sculptures of commonplace objects. There was a ceramic piece by Piero Penizzotto on a table at the booth of the New York-based nonprofit White Columns that lovingly depicts a Styrofoam takeout container of chicken, fries and a dipping sauce. At Milwaukee’s Green Gallery, Michelle Grabner installed a blue floor sculpture in the shape of a metal book end. At the booth of the New York gallery 56 Henry, Al Freeman’s “Soft Camels” — a vinyl sculpture of a pack of nonfilter Camel cigarettes — hung on the wall. When Ellie Rines, the gallery’s owner, placed a clementine in my hand, I had seen enough simulacra that I stared at the fruit and asked her, sincerely, “What’s this?”
Figurative painting is still dominant, for now
Throughout Miami there was a surplus of unremarkable abstraction on view, perhaps a sign that figurative painting — one of contemporary art’s most popular modes over the last decade — is falling out of favor with curators and collectors. But some of my favorite works were portraits. At NADA, Adam Abdalla, a publicist whose firm was doing P.R. for the fair, had a booth for the art and wrestling magazine that he co-founded, Orange Crush. He was showing works by Lee Moriarty, a professional wrestler for AEW, the sport’s second largest promoter in the United States, who painted humorous scenes of Lucha Libre wrestlers engaged in mundane tasks, like manning a barbecue grill. (Moriarty himself was at the booth, carrying his championship belt.)
I also liked the Calida Rawles exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum in downtown Miami, her first U.S. solo museum show, for which she painted portraits of the residents of Overtown, the historically Black neighborhood nearby. Elsewhere, a talk by Kate Capshaw — a painter and retired actress who is married to Steven Spielberg, and who spoke in front of one of her portraits at the museum — drew a crowd that included John Travolta. More exciting to me was seeing Jana Euler’s “Whitney” (2013), a hilarious and oddly moving portrait of Whitney Houston beside a rendering of the Breuer Building, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Hard-to-classify works stood out
There were a handful of masterpieces at the main fair, which is not always the case, and many of them didn’t fit easily into familiar genres. Hauser & Wirth sold — for nearly $5 million — an enormous, untitled acrylic painting by David Hammons from 2014, which the artist covered entirely in bundles of black tarp, obscuring the paint and making the work look as if it were under construction. Hammons, who typically makes conceptual work and is exacting about its presentation, is a surprising artist to see shown at an art fair, where artists generally have little control. Gorgeous ceramic sculptures by Brian Rochefort at the dealer Sean Kelly’s booth looked like alien jelly fish that had washed up on the beach. And Gladstone Gallery showed a 2024 work by David Salle called “New Pastoral With Ladder,” which he made by using an algorithm that learned his painting style and combined imagery in what might be an entirely new art form: the A.I.-generated, metatextual mural.
It was business as usual
Perhaps the biggest trend in the art world lately has been the amount of protest, from climate activists throwing soup at the Mona Lisa to demands for museums to cut ties with certain collectors and corporate sponsors. But whether by design or by accident, there wasn’t much political art on display in Miami this year. When Donald Trump, who has been running his transition from Mar-a-Lago, about 90 minutes north of Miami, was the president-elect for the first time, in 2016, there was a small but palpable sense of urgency at the fair. The conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, made a text painting with the words “The Tyranny of Common Sense Has Reached its Final Stage” scrawled across a page of The New York Times from the day after the election. There was no equivalent this year.
In fact, one of the most overtly topical works I saw was a nearly 40-year-old painting by Ed Ruscha — “Plenty Big Hotel Room (Painting for the American Indian)” from 1985 — at Gagosian gallery’s Art Basel booth. It shows the American flag sagging in the breeze against a brilliant blue sky, surrounded by black boxes that the artist refers to as “censor strips” and that call to mind redacted phrases from a declassified government document.
Reality found other ways of creeping in, too. At a party hosted by the same gallery at the restaurant Mr. Chow’s, white-jacketed waiters carried silver trays of Champagne, and Larry Gagosian sat at a white-clothed table, a spread of seafood in front of him. In the outdoor smoking area, I watched someone fail spectacularly at parallel parking a Tesla Cybertruck, damaging a bush in the process. If anyone else noticed, they didn’t seem to care.
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