Miami news: Art Basel's outpost in Florida is brash, hedonistic, expensive—and packed with New York's art set, Louise Nicholson was there

Apollo, Jan, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

The first week of December, it seemed that New York's art world transported itself wholesale a three-hour plane ride south to Florida and into Miami. more famous for its vice, its drug dealers, its Cuban immigrants and its Art Deco seafront than for its serious art.

There, in the idyllic island area of Miami Beach, with a backdrop of coconut palms, white sand, warm sunshine and mesmerising cobalt blue sea, the art dealers, collectors and would-be collectors gathered to exhaust their eyes, feet and minds in a frenzy of art inspections and art gossip. There was plenty of art buying, too. Nights were more of the same, with added cocktails, live music and tango dancing in the streets till dawn. As one merry participant put it: 'Miami is simply a playground for grown-ups'. In this case, grown ups who like art. For this was Art Basel Miami Beach, now in its third successful year and confidently dubbed by its promoters 'the international art world's favourite winter meeting place'. The only complaint was the cost of a hotel room.

And yet ... And yet most of the core 190 galleries from twenty-four countries exhibiting in the Miami Beach Convention Center failed to ignite a sense of being at the cutting edge of contemporary art. They were indeed 'distinguished'. 'international' and 'significant'--but too often they showed familiar artists and familiar works, from Picasso and Maillol at Marlborough, to Matisse and Freud at Acquavella. It was enjoyable also to see Thomas Struth's and Andreas Gursky's now familiar large supepreal contemporary photographs including Struth's Paradise 26, Bougainvillea and Gursky's Sac Paulo, Se. This was all top quality, but safe.

More interesting was Franz Gertsen's mystical portrait Silvia, a huge but finely worked woodcut on Japan paper at the Haas & Fuchs/Contemporary Fine Arts stand, and Richard Deacon's Individual, a twisted piece of ash wood evoking an outsized wood shaving, exhibited by Goodman Marian. Better still, down in one corner nestled the section called 'Art statements'. Here fifteen galleries each presented a single young artist. Steinmetz showed Ronald Moran's furnished room apparently under snow, wonderfully still and silent in all the bustle. We could have done with more of this.

Art Basel Miami Beach has arrived at a moment when Miami is blossoming artistically. It seems that the fair and the city feed off each other. As David Dermer, the youthful mayor of Miami Beach, observed with pleasure at one party: 'This is just the sort of conference we like: people come here, spend lots of money and behave wee They are not all like that.'

The city's conservation movement is strengthening; South Beach's Art Deco hotels, such as the Raleigh, Delano and Tides, have received lavish makeovers; and art is being both created and collected by locals. Over on the Miami mainland, an alternative fringe art fair fired up its own energy. New galleries and artists' studios in the still fairly derelict Wynwood district held open houses. The Bakehouse, with more than seventy studios, served orange juice and home made brownies to visitors. Resident artist Stephanie Jaffe Werner said she loves Wynwood for being 'so run down, like South Beach in the 70s and 80s. yet full of energy now the artists have moved in'--indeed, so much so that the New York dealer Bernice Steinbaum has set up a gallery here.

For fair visitors. Wynwood had two special attractions. One was NADA, the New Art Dealers' Alliance. where dealers' stands of mixed quality offerings claimed to be serving artists and 'making taste rather than following it'. By contrast, as one dealer there argued, the official fair 'is commercial, of course. It's not a place for artists. It's for dealers and collectors.' Yet collectors were the other attraction of Wynwood. Two of Miami's biggest have vast warehouses of art there. Both opened to swarms of loudly critical art lovers during the fair. They were hard on the 'Rubell Family Collection' for being less exciting than in previous years, but heaped praise on 'The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse', gathered by Miami developer Martin Z. Margulies and expertly curated by Katherine Hinds. Indeed, it stimulated some of us to make the Sunday morning journey to the city's fringes to enjoy the Margulies sculpture collection--more than seventy five pieces by Caro, De Kooning, Lipschutz, Judd, Serra and others set among the buildings and trees of Florida International University, where Wan Weymuth (who worked with I.M. Pei on the Louvre's pyramid) has designed the new museum building, to open in 2006.

Then, back to the winter chill of New York.

As so often with cultural festivals and fairs, it was the satellite exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach that provoked. At 'Art positions', twenty young galleries from Madrid, Berlin, Los Angeles and elsewhere exhibited in shipping containers parked right on the beach, open-ended. One was the Parisian Galerie Kamel Mennour (above). Here, Kader Attia (who showed The dream machine at the Venice Biennale in 2003) presented his installation Illegal studio hallal. Brilliantly devised and executed, this was a spoof designer sweat shop producing t shirts with the label 'Hallal', which ironically is Arab for authentic. At the front the goods were exhibited, complete with designer labels; at the back, seamstresses worked at their sewing machines, framed photographs of their families on the tables and of the Virgin on the wall. As a critique of brand obsession and consumer fashion, it was a masterpiece. Mr Attia, an Algerian Parisian, cast local Hispanic seamstresses as his company, but paid them a fair wage rather than authentic sweatshop rates. Nevertheless, the local police raided his installation: 'They were very nice', he said smiling calmly, 'once they knew it was all legal.'