Art Basel Miami Beach Was Short on Gimmicks — and That's a Good Thing

Finding a coherent narrative at Art Basel Miami Beach is like catching water in a bucket during a rainstorm. Maybe you'll eventually fill it up, but it will have taken so long, and so much water will have fallen outside the bucket that the effort will have hardly been worth it. There is so much art of so many disparate styles, mediums, and thematic leanings from all over the world that it's impossible to make sense of it all.

To make it easy on myself, I always look for the banana — that is, the most outrageous work of conceptual art that makes a complete mockery of the art world and its annual year-end ultra-shindig. Since Mauricio Cattelan sold his Comedian — a literal banana duct-taped to a gallery wall — at Art Basel for a six-figure sum in 2019, the fair has become notorious as a launchpad for attention-grabbing art world shenanigans. Take the ATM with a leaderboard from two years ago. So, after braving the very long lines to get into the convention center on Wednesday morning, I began scouring the floor for the most ridiculous, absurd, hatefully frivolous art I could find. I felt like one of the aliens from the anime Dan Da Dan — give me your banana, earth humans!
Surprisingly, I did not find a banana. To be sure, a few people tried their best to grab attention. There was a woman, presumably an artist, walking around in a clear plastic dress with broken iPhones stitched in and a fluorescent sign covering her breasts that read "iPorn." Besides that, Basel this year felt pretty tame — no big gimmicks or surprises, just the same blue-chip art from the same feted artists: Warhol, Picasso, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ai Weiwei, Zhu Jinshi. Maybe it's a sign that the show is moving toward respectability, or perhaps everyone's just fatigued with the silliness. Even Perrotin, the gallery that sold both Comedian and the leaderboard ATM, kept it relatively low-key with some vaguely cubist paintings of women by Danielle Orchard. One work by Peter Liversidge at Sean Kelley Gallery featured a neon sign that read "Enough is enough." It also featured the signed proposal for the work typed up by the artist, specifying that the piece was made specifically to be displayed at Art Basel. As in, cut the bullshit, Miami!
Indeed, I found the presentations that said the most were the ones that spoke the softest. In the single-artist Survey section dedicated to underappreciated, later-career artists, Piero Atchugarry Gallery devoted its booth to 100-year-old Linda Kohen, an Italian-born painter of Jewish heritage. Kohen's life has been defined by multiple flights, first to Uruguay to escape the Holocaust and again in 1973 to avoid her adopted homeland's military dictatorship. Her sedate, meditative paintings of suitcases, household objects, and various body parts feel liminal, as if the viewer is seeing through this person's eyes for whom displacement has been a constant theme in their life.

That theme could also be said to resonate in the work of Palestinian-American Jordan Nassar, whose landscapes incorporating traditional tatreez embroidery were displayed in a Kabinett booth by Anat Ebgi Gallery. Integrating elements of Western minimalism with the artist's endangered cultural heritage, it was one of the most powerful presentations at Basel, a quietly defiant statement of resilience from a people for whom existence is a political act.
Fabric art, such as Nassar's embroideries, was a strong theme of the show, with larger pieces like Sarah Zapata's installation for the UBS Art Studio and a group of tapestries by Lee Shinja in the Meridians section for large-scale works. Garth Greenan Gallery had a sculpture by Cannupa Hanska Luger of a partially disemboweled deer resting on a claw-footed, red-cushioned bench, and the Cairo-based Gypsum gallery showed tapestries by Dina Danish referencing current events in Positions for emerging artists. The emphasis on fabric extended to brand activations: In the Collector's Lounge, for instance, next to booths for Netjets and Nordictrack, a charity called Parley for the Oceans displayed a limited-edition Pierre Paulin sofa made with reused rope from Christo and Jeanne-Claude's posthumous work L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped. Price: You can't afford it.

There were a few other conspicuous themes — ceramics by Theaster Gates at Gray Gallery, Chung Hyun at PKM in Survey, and local artist Nina Surel at Spinello Projects. I felt I was seeing a lot of cars. There was a massive monolith in one plaza made of motor wreckage and a figurative painting by Robert Cottingham at Waddington Custot showing a parking lot. Jeffrey Deich fronted his booth with a Robert Longo drawing of a vintage Cadillac, executed in the artist's typically dramatic grayscale style. It wasn't the only Longo piece on display. Thaddeus Ropac showed a similar drawing of an F-16 fighter jet. The coincidence is fortuitous, a reminder that the military-industrial complex, like a classic Caddy, is as American as apple pie.
On that note, I didn't see much explicitly political art. One piece by Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho at ROH Projects featured a comic strip where two characters discuss politics in broken English. "What you think about this country?" one of them says. "It's just shit country," the other replies. The joke, to me, seems to be that, in our age of neoliberal political stagnation, where even radical politicians falter next to the largesse of the international capitalist order, this could be about any country. Not that the VIPs attending the fair seemed to be thinking much about politics.

Let's go back briefly to the banana. Two weeks ago, Sotheby's sold Comedian to a crypto CEO for $6.2 million. After the hammer fell, the New York Times interviewed the 74-year-old fruit seller who supplied the banana used in the work. Upon hearing the price, he burst into tears. "I have never seen this kind of money," he said. That's the ultimate truth about Art Basel Miami Beach. Far from being a showcase of the world's art, it's a testament to the ability of the wealthy to blow millions on things simply to demonstrate that they can. If you do walk around the fair this weekend, perhaps ask yourself why we in Miami continue to support this. You may find yourself thinking enough is, indeed, enough.