"It was as if one of those storybook fairies children love so much had waved her wand over Miami … and – Wanderflash! – turned it into Art Basel Miami Beach," writes Tom Wolfe in Back to Blood, a book so truly bad, I don't think Miami quite deserves it. The Chinese market – as reported widely last month – had committed a staggering $13-billion in fraud (mostly through unpaid-for, but reported as paid-for, purchases). Last year, China became known as the world's largest art and antiques market, except it wasn't. In what other mega-millions industry is the buyer the same person as the seller? No week goes by in which I do not read of a dealer being sued in some gargantuan amount, usually for selling counterfeit work or fixing a price. "Besides drugs," said the late critic Robert Hughes, "art is the world's largest unregulated market." In 2005, a Forbes article advising banker dudes on art investment quoted collector Greg Allen saying that, in his experience, "people coming from the finance world into the art market tend to be shocked by the level of opacity and murkiness." Now there's a new kind of dealer in town, and not so much has changed. "Gun runners, rum runners, Cuban immigrants, coke," says Mickey Munday, last living kingpin of the latter trade, in the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Maybe even paved it: In a city of speculators and suckers, there's always going to be something shady for sale. ![]() The wages of culture, wrote Fredric Jameson, are "blood, torture, death, terror." Miami paid its way to Art Basel. You can't bury much in Miami Beach the sand simply will not hold. In one year, there were more than 600 homicides. Through two major recessions – in the late '70s and from 1990 to '91 – Miami, the city reputed to have more bars per capita than anywhere else in America, built almost as many banks. ![]() In the nineties, it was ground zero for the war on drugs. From the late 1970s through Didion's '80s, Miami was the cocaine capital of America. In Miami the money has long been play money, albeit in deadly games. Joan Didion, visiting mid-1980s, described "the famous new skyline, which, floating as it did between a mangrove swamp and a barrier reef, had a kind of perilous attraction, like a mirage." "Miami Beach was founded on the idea that people wanted to use their money to pay for their toys," says Micky Wolfson in Fool's Paradise, a crane's-eye view of Miami penned by journalist Steven Gaines. And yet, while everybody talks about what Art Basel means for Miami Beach, and for the newly cool City of Miami, the bigger deal is what Miami reveals about the art market. The last decade has seen Miami morph from a strangely sunny underworld to a demi- mondaine destination. Last year, total sales at the fair more than doubled those of the year before. ![]() In retrospect, it makes too much sense.Īrt Basel Miami is – to use a suitably glamorific Bret Easton Ellis-ism – the "post-Empire" fair, an illicit, hallucinatory bacchanal where ambitions are writ neon and the bottom line is lucite-clear. The first, slated for 2001, was cancelled after Sept. This would have been the 12th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach: Slutty teen sister to a 33-year-old Swiss institution North America's largest contemporary art fair the art world's all-inclusive resort.
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