Art Basel’s Best Street Fashion

Art Basel is like the Olympics of people-watching, because rich people buy special licenses to dress funny. But there’s also a lot of great fashion sashaying around Miami’s sidewalks for Miami Art Week. Here’s a few pages of the best dressed from last week. The big trends? Red, fur, busy…

Seven Miami: The Highlight of Art Basel

After roaming dozens of art fairs’ hundreds of rows, the whole Basel experience started to feel a little, well, manic. And it also started to feel a little alienating. The trade-show booth set-up only intensifies our estrangement from the art-world, a place where buying a Brillo-pad sculpture for 50,000 Euros…

Soothing Art Basel Heartbreak with a Couple Haikus

For five days, the world treated Miami like it mattered. It bought us flowers and told us it liked our new haircut. It held open doors and called us at night just to say goodnight. But the smooth-talking world is shipping out today, and the only way we know to…

Today’s Best Basel Events

Wham, bam, thank you, mam? In the morning, the crowds will be gone, the pop-up shops and nightclubs will be empty storefronts again, and our city will have to reconcile the fact that it’s no longer an uber-chic, hipster Atlantis, but a metropolitan city with tons of stinking problems. What,…

Today’s Best Basel Events

Ready for another Basel day post-mortem? We’ll keep this quick as we have hangovers to nurse and art fairs to attend. The super secret The Island exhibit was either shut down by the city or they ran out of boats. We’re trying to find out. Artist Ryan McGinness turned Club…

Fountain Miami 2010: Donnie Darko, Styrofoam Boobs, and Urination

Now in its fifth incarnation and featuring 25 spaces, the Fountain Fair draws the type of unruly installations and unsettling performances that make it an unpredictable must-see attraction during this week’s chaotic art muddle.It’s perfect for jaded art lovers wondering where they can stumble across fresh, anti-corporate, stick-it-to-the-man hijinks in…

Barbara Hulanicki: Dresser of Rock Stars Turned Art Basel Star

​​Even though artist and designer Barbara Hulanicki calls exhibiting her work in galleries “a new career for me,” she’s been bringing beauty into the world for years and years. Hulanicki began working as an illustrator for fashion magazines like Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily in the swinging 1960s. She then…

Artist Maria Builes Jogs While Wearing 60 Lbs. of Animal Fat

Artist Maria Builes wants to make sure you are tuned in to Twitter today. The location for her Art Basel pop-up exhibit, “Satiation,” will be announced only on the day of and only through tweets.  Builes’s “Satiation” is a commentary on our obsession with food, weight loss, and appearance. She…

Today’s Best Basel Events

Art Basel, AKA “hipster spring break,” continues. Your feet probably hurt, and you’re nearing your saturation point for all this pretentiousness. We say, enjoy it while you can. Come Monday, we’ll just be Miami again instead of the capital of the contemporary art world. It’s so quick, it almost feels…

New York Graffiti Pioneers Write Up Wynwood Walls

Tonight is the opening reception of Hyperbolic Aerosolic: The Roots of New York City Underground Art 1972-1975 at 2501 NW Second Ave. A couple of days ago, Miami native, gallery owner and show curator Eric Firestone gave us a brief tour and introduced us to the exhibition’s stars, P.H.A.S.E. 2…

How to Get Laid During Art Basel Week

You came for the art. But art can’t scratch that itch. You can’t spoon with art. And you definitely can’t fuck art. But you know what you can screw around with? Hoity toity Basel, er, “beaver,” and there will be plenty of it this week.But these highly-literate, ego-driven creatures won’t…

Today’s Best Basel Events

How is everyone holding up? Eyesight blurring from too much art-looking? Ears aching from too much rocking? Art Basel festivities go through Sunday, so save some juice. Yesterday was a big day. Design Miami/ and Scope opened to the public. The fancy folk (including us) attended the Basel Vernissage (French…

Highlights from Scope Miami 2010

Last night, Midtown Miami morphed into an overwhelming visual arts playground. On a terrace in front of Art Miami, what looked like eight-foot-long indigo stalks of licorice swished around with visitors passing through it. Purple-caped girls handed out tiny kites, advertising the Cirque du Soleil show Kooza (in Bicentennial Park)…

Highlights from the Subdued Design Miami/ 2010

The Modern Primitives installation is a collaboration between famed Italian design house Fendi and architecture and design firm ArandaLasch.​This year, something about Design Miami/ seemed stuck, as in not moving forward. Appropriately it’s being held in a parking lot. Besides the move to the Miami Beach Convention Center’s asphalt (in…

Art Miami 2010: Red Pants, Bestiality, and Lowbrow-Highbrow

View photos of Art Miami 2010 here.When are art-world types going to stop wearing red pants? Aren’t they basically just conforming at this point? Now an artist wearing some nice modest chinos: That would be a fashion statement. We managed to get into last night’s VIP opening of Art Miami…