As the story goes, a teenager visiting a Florida tourist trap bought a baby alligator and flushed it down the toilet. Months later, it emerged from the sewers, as big as a school bus, to stalk unsuspecting humans. Well, Lloyd Goradesky’s gargantuan Gator in the Bay was never dropped into…
In the sea of impressive and eye-catching displays coming this winter to Miami during Art Basel, one country will make its overdue debut. Often described as an ethnic melting pot, Malaysia’s rich art culture will join Miami’s sweaty, glitzy stew for the first Malaysian art festival. South Florida resident and…
There are a lot of satellite art fairs in Miami during Art Basel Week, so many that you might even be one and not realize it. Are there people in weird glasses trying to talk their way into your colon’s VIP section? No? Safe for now, then. One of the…
Every year around this time, news begins filtering in about the biggest Art Basel art projects. We mean “biggest” in the physical sense; the giant projects that take months or even years to plan, such as last year’s 230-foot “Gator in the Bay” or giant inflatable psychic dog at Lords…
Nobody’s happy with Florida these days. And for good reason: the George Zimmerman verdict has convinced the better part of the country that there’s little more going on in the Sunshine State than a huge, ongoing, racist murder spree. A MoveOn.org petition urges travelers to boycott the state until Stand…
Bad news for mainland-based lovers of art and haters of causeway traffic: Scope Art Fair, which housed its Miami editions during Art Basel in the tents at Midtown up until last year, is moving to Miami Beach in 2013. “It is with tremendous enthusiasm that SCOPE announces its new location…
Art Basel Miami Beach gets bigger and bigger every year — and while December may seem like a long way away, the days of art-speak study and Basel boozing will be here before you know it. And this month, the powers that be announced the appointment of the illustrious Nicholas…
To say that Art Basel has become significant for Miami is a bit of an understatement. Do we even remember what Miami was like before this major event elevated it from vacation destination to cultural hot spot? Those of us that had never been exposed to million dollar art suddenly…
Just when you finally taught all your friends to pronounce the word Basel correctly, the ginormous art fair has news for you: It’s rebranding. Art Basel, which stages high-profile art fairs in Basel, Switzerland, and Hong Kong in addition to the long weekend of culture and shmoozy, boozy parties that…
Here we thought we knew everything there was to know about painter Kenny Scharf, and then he surprises us. He may not be a Miami native, but Scharf lived in the city during the ’90s, which during the time his pieces were exhibited at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale,…
Marko Mäetamm’s warped children’s book, Our Daddy is a Hunter, and paintings of houses with blood spewing made him one of the breakouts of this year’s NADA art fair. The Estonian multimedia artist has twice represented his country at the Venice Biennale, so he’s not exactly coming out of nowhere…
Artists in the 305 are a creative bunch. They find new and unique ways of creating and also performing art, not to mention displaying it. Multimedia artist Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez has done just that — projecting her avant garde film project onto the exteriors of houses during Art Basel.Says…
When Julian Lennon began photographing U2, he was granted unusually intimate access and took quite a few images. “Then I went to look at them,” Lennon told Cultist at the Morrison Hotel gallery’s Art Basel popup at the Dream Hotel. “And I went, ‘Shit. They look like fucking holiday photos.’…
As Miami lies panting in a puddle of its own steaming art juices, we must take the time to single out the heroes that made Art Basel Miami 2012 safe for all to enjoy: the Art Cops. Officers Matt Vis and Tony Campbell of the International Art Police (and also…
Bloggin’ ain’t easy. A common misconception is that bloggers spend their entire day sans pants behind their Macbook pros aggregating culturally relevant blog content to maximize web traffic. Au contraire, mon frères. Sometimes–not often–we have to wear adult clothes and venture out into that scary unknown old folks call “the…
Alejandro Cartagena shot his “Car Poolers” series by waiting for pickup trucks to drive under a highway overpass in Mexico. The resultant photographs, which we saw last week at Kopeikin Gallery’s booth at Miami Project, show fleeting but surprisingly intimate glimpses of laborers in the beds of the trucks, heading…
A lot inside the eminent Scope tent at Art Basel appealed to the “shock factor.” Like that very detailed line diagram of a woman giving a man anal pleasure. Or the massive installation display of dead fetuses strewn about a child’s nursery. Or that “thug fountain” so generously bestowed upon…
Congratulations, reader. If you’re seeing these words, you made it through Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, the event’s biggest, glitziest, and most spectacle-packed edition yet. There were dozens of fairs to check off your list. There were parties galore each night, with free-flowing booze and D-list celebrities in abundance. If…
Celebrities, the ultimate in public commodities, are common fodder for the creative set. Whether it’s a garbage painting of Honey Boo Boo or a velvet recreation of the King, the A list, B list and D list are all over the art world. See also: – Miami Art Museum Receives…
Art has the power to give voice to the voiceless, and few among us have struggled to find a place in society more than Shitman has. Fortunately, Italian artist Laurina Paperina explores the existential plight of her own sociopathic anthropomorphic cartoon feces in her video piece, “Shitman and the End…
Formerly Miami-based photographer Lee Materazzi is back home for Basel, or at least some of her art is. Images from her new series “Finding Myself at Home,” at Quint Contemporary Art’s Miami Project booth, show Materazzi embracing peeled sheets of wallpaper; buried, her legs and head stick out of the…
“JUST SHUT THE F*CK UP!” …Or so insists one of Mel Bochner’s large, mixed media text-based pieces. It’s currently in the home of one of a collector, where its “beautiful muted pinks and yellows look great on a grey slate wall in his living room,” according to Sarah Trujillo-Porter. Her…
