NADA PRESS
One big art party in Miami Beach, International Herald Tribune, November 30, 2005
One big art party in Miami Beach
By Julia Chaplin of the The New York Times
…Such are the growing pains of what has become the biggest contemporary art fair in the world and increasingly a "must-stop" on international social calendars. Last year more than 35,000 people attended the fair, according to the director of Art Basel Miami Beach, Samuel Keller. This year, thousands more, with their asymmetrical haircuts, platinum cards and/or European accents, are expected to descend on the convention center in Miami Beach where 195 galleries from São Paolo to Tel Aviv will be exhibiting. And that doesn't even include the ever-expanding sprawl that has cropped up around the show, with alternative art fairs, rogue openings and parties held in slickly designed hotel lobbies, boozy dive bars and warehouses in emerging arts districts across the bay in greater Miami.
But when too many people arrive at the party, especially when an increasing number have more interest in the open bar than in buying art, is that a good thing?
"Its starting to feel like Cannes Film Festival," said Jeffrey Deitch, the New York-based gallery owner whose party, the "it" event for the 10 p.m.-to-2 a.m. time slot on Wednesday night, was scheduled to have the Citizens Band, a loose collective of 26 artists, performing cabaret-style around the oh-so-chic Raleigh Hotel pool. "But I think it's healthy for the art world because it creates a dynamic situation."
If anything, the fair's appeal reflects a general mainstreaming of contemporary art. Art Basel Miami Beach is a trend-spotter's paradise, where the latest ideas in art, fashion and music are on display in one electric setting.
Naturally, the corporate world wants in. Gift bags stuffed with T-shirts, corporate banners and logoed invitations are now staples at the dizzying number of after-parties and receptions as brands including DKNY, Bombay Sapphire and Gucci piggyback on the fair's reputation. And Ferragamo will be host for a luncheon for area socialites on a yacht rented out for the fair by Esquire magazine.
Furthermore, the next young art star probably has better and more cutting-edge parties to attend. And the obsession with discovering this new talent has reached a frenzied pitch. At least four alternative fairs will showcase "emerging artists" this year. Scope Miami has 70 exhibitors set up in the guest rooms of the Townhouse hotel; Aqua Art Miami will have 35 at the Aqua Hotel; 60 galleries will try their luck at Pulse in the Wynwood district of Miami; and the New Art Dealers Alliance, a favorite among the hip cognoscenti when it made its debut at the Ice Palace Film Studios in downtown Miami last year, is a cooperative effort involving 83 galleries in 18 countries.
Still, the best place to spot new talent will likely be in plain view right on Collins Avenue in South Beach. The French proprietors of Le Baron, the Paris nightclub of the moment, are taking over the divey karaoke bar in basement of the Shelborne hotel for five nights, the perfect place for the art world inhabitants to collide late into the strobe-lighted night.