Art Basel 2011 – Miami, Florida

For the last ten years, Miami has served as the warm-in-December outpost of Art Basel, the big art market where the premier galleries of the world gather to sell modern and contemporary art. It’s a centripetal force in the cultural world that pulls in not just the blue chip artists and the well-heeled buyers, but the fairs of emerging artists, the museum curators, and then the brands that host open bar parties with up-and-coming performers. The key factor? It’s fun.

Miami’s edition of Art Basel has a strong street art flair to it. Tony Goldman, the well-known realtor who set the model for gentrification with SoHo, envisioned a similar arts-driven neighborhood transformation in Miami’s Wynwood district. The walls there are a magnet for graffiti artists, and this area was teeming with artists painting full murals day and night, along with gawkers, hawkers and events. And Mr. Brainwash, made infamous in the Banksy-produced Exit Through the Gift Shop, took over an entire building, complete with cardboard storm troopers peering down from every floor.

Inside the satellite fairs like Pulse, the emerging art world pulls from many veins, including street art. David Ellis, at the Joshua Liner Gallery, has tapped into the ephemeral nature of painting with his moving paintings, where he videotapes a large area for weeks as he paints over it. A scene, then words, then animals, then abstractions, each new articulation temporary, and yet sellable – stills from the video can be bought in single editions for thousands.

Other video works, as always, challenge the art market. Whereas Art Basel itself was flush with Warhols and Rauschenbergs, little video or installation work showed up as collector’s items. The most talked-about was Barbara Kruger’s bold wallpaper, proclaiming in loud black-and-white, inthe midst of art world excess, “Plenty Should Be Enough” and “Bleed Us Dry,” at Mary Boone Gallery. Doug Aitken, one of my favorite video artists, had large still works at 303 Gallery. There were some video works in the Art Nova section of Basel, which showcases emerging artists. A mesmerizing work by Ragnar Kjartansson at i8 Gallery showed three young blonde women eerily singing one line from a Ginsburg poem for six hours. Although the storyline didn’t shift, the vision was hypnotic and I ended up watching about 1/24th of the video, which is quite a commitment in a convention center with thousands of pieces to see.

Outside of the fairs, high and low culture threw caution to the wind. MoMA PS1 hosted a Kim Kardashian look-alike contest, Bing hosted the bands Young the Giant and Theophilus London poolside while champagne flowed, and Fendi strong-armed anyone without heels and fur out of their party line.

Navigating Art Basel and the satellite fairs — Scope, Pulse, Art Miami, NADA, to name a few — was easier than ever this year, with handy iPhone apps that let you identify which artists and galleries you wanted to see before you even set foot outside of your ocean-front hotel. And with Twitter and Foursquare, it was easy to find the happening spots in a jiffy. One of my favorite Twitter posts proclaimed “It’s 9 am and everyone looks like they’re at a cocktail party #artbasel.” Bring your highest heels and your smartest phone and you’re set.