Art is great, but it's also preposterous.
If Miami Art Week has a downside, it's the fact that for seven days, every single event — art fair, music performance, fashion show, bar crawl — is Serious, with a capital S. The city dresses in its finest gowns and sport coats and doesn't so much as crack a joke for a full calendar week. But there's a hell of a lot of silliness and absurdity that goes on during Art Basel Miami Beach every year. For example: Someone covered a Jesus sculpture in avocados outside the Bass in Miami Beach this year. It certainly had a point, but if you're unable to see how wonderfully silly the sculpture was, you need to lighten up.
So with Basel 2016 formally behind us, it's officially time to take the piss out of the whole affair and point out the straight-up silly things we witnessed this week. So whip out your tuxedo T-shirts, everybody — it's time to hand out some awards.
Many of these pieces are not safe for work.
1. The "Best Use of Bodily Fluids" Award: This looping video of a woman squirting milk from her breasts.
If this doesn't fill you with absolute glee, please remove yourself from society, enroll at a Zen monastery, and take a lifelong vow of silence.
2. The "Urban Outfitters Memorial Unnecessary Pop-Culture Reference" Award: A tie between this painting of Hulk Hogan, which corners the market on buyers who are cool with fawning portraits of roided-out pro wrestlers who use the N-word liberally and sued a media organization into the ground,
and this spray paint and/or finger paint and/or magic marker piece of the Pink Panther trying to hypnotize himself to quit cigarettes:
3. The "I Know I Agreed to Come Check Out Your Art Collection, but This Tinder Date Is Officially Over" Award: This diorama of a mass shooting:
4. The "Thing That's So 2016 It's Already Passé" Award: Abstract Pokémon.
Remember Pokémon Go? That was awesome, right?
5. The "Obligatory Use of Mickey Mouse Ears as a Metaphor for American Corporate Greed" Award: Here's a fat, naked guy in mouse ears. And oh my God I'm yawning, I'm yawning so much, am I falling asleep, no wait I'm actually dead now. This was so on-the-nose it crushed my nose into my brain and now I'm dead. Are you happy?
(Bonus: You win points whenever you un-ironically reenact a Portlandia skit.)
6. The "I Know This Is About Sex but I'm Not Sure What You're Going for Here" Award: These two deer having passionate sex, people-style. It's a piece for the discerning buyer, who really wants to make it awkward when he or she reports that his or her $10 million collection of erotic art has been stolen.
7. The "Best Use of Food" Award: These huge pickles, presented without comment:
8. The "Let's Never Go Back to That Coffee Shop" Award: This glazed-doughnut painting, which also seems ripped straight from a Portlandia skit, is guaranteed to jack up the price of actual doughnuts at whatever silly third-wave coffee shop pays to hang this in its bathroom.
9. The "Fisher Price Memorial Best Use of Plastic Kitchen Gear" Award: Wall toast!
10. The "I Think This Is Political?" Award: Farah Fawcett, but also a tank, but also maybe it's about white women and the election, or maybe also gentrification in Miami?
11. The "Thing That's Just Here for the Stoners" Award: Toiletpaper's Spaghetti Installation.
Real talk: This was actually the best thing shown anywhere all weekend. The room was full of boatloads of real spaghetti that was cooked and replaced periodically throughout the weekend. It was awesome.
The piece was also very clearly designed to intrigue inebriated people, who make up anywhere from 30 to 110 percent of Art Basel attendees, who spend seven straight days either stoned, hammered on prosecco, or scrubbing cocaine into their gums.
(It also wins the coveted "Chicest Place to Take a Selfie"Award.)
12. The "I Genuinely Can't Explain This" Award: Behold Duck Rembrandt.
"Mom, Dad, Aunt Marnie, Uncle Jim, various cousins: I'm sure you're wondering why I've gathered you all here today. Well, I'm here to talk to you about Duck Rembrandt. The minute I laid eyes on the Feathery One, I knew what I had to do: drop out of college and follow Duck Rembrandt around the country, extolling his eternal wisdom to everyone I know. No one is sure how Duck Rembrandt came into existence, or why, or when. Maybe he was painted one week before Art Basel. Maybe he's been with us for eternity. Maybe he never existed at all. All I know is that Duck Rembrandt is me, he and I are one and the same, and I need $3,000 to have a tattoo removed from my back that may or may not be this painting."
13. The "This Is Just a Picture of a Butthole" Award:
This is just a picture of a butthole.
