Art Basel Miami mystifies with its ‘genius’

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John Varoli attended ‘Art Basel Miami’ – an art fair or just 'the hippest place to be seen'?

Almost two months have passed since the largest American art fair, ‘Art Basel Miami’, closed on 8 December, and so the smoke has cleared on one of the most raucous art events of the year. My observations are a mixture of initial visceral reactions tempered by time to reflect on the underlying currents and themes of that grand art event in Florida.

This was my first time at ‘Art Basel Miami’, and I was not prepared for the incredible amount of socializing at dinners, receptions, and parties of all kinds. Indeed, ‘Art Basel Miami’ is more than just a fair. It’s a grand social event in the best American tradition and held on one of the finest strips of beach in the world. Add in the 25ºC weather in early December, and you simply can’t go wrong.

Lets not forget the art, however! Indeed, it’s very easy to do so in Miami. I had the impression that most of the approximate 50,000 visitors who packed the fair over five days had little concern for what they were looking at and were more occupied with being seen at the hippest art event in the Americas.

The fair featured about 250 galleries from 30 countries, with artworks by major commercially viable post-war artists such as Warhol, Picasso and Jeff Koons; though there were hundreds of less-well-known artists who still managed to fetch high prices. Art Basel Miami offered for sale more than $3 billion-worth of mostly post-war and contemporary works. This value is possibly a 20 per cent increase from two years ago, underlying Miami's growing might as a centre of the global contemporary art scene.

And it was not just ‘Art Basel Miami’. In addition, there were about 20 satellite art fairs taking place, such as ‘Scope’, ‘Pulse,’ and ‘Art Miami’. There were also many openings at Miami’s sizable list of private museums and other art institutions. To attend even 20% of the happenings, I think that one would need the assistance of a clone or two.

Many contemporary art works at the Art Basel Miami were, to put it mildly, intellectually challenging. Toilet paper rolls piled almost two metres high in the form of a pyramid; a supersized cardboard Big Mac sandwich that came up to my waist; wooden café chairs carefully piled on top of each other and perfectly balanced; about a dozen copies of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette stacked on top of each other; construction bricks inscribed with orbiting satellite numbers; a perfectly recreated fruit stand made of metal; and a pair of ladies boots with an excessively and rather ridiculously long heel.

Even more stupefying, most of these items were selling for between $40,000 and $350,000. Indeed, you couldn’t find a ‘bargain’ under $20,000 at Art Basel Miami. I won’t even begin to speak about the ‘sculptures’ by Jeff Koons that sell for a perplexing $5 million to $30 million. (I personally ‘love’ his Hoover vacuum cleaner series most of all. Indeed, it’s merely a Hoover vacuum cleaner encased in a transparent plastic light box. And this wonder of the modern world can be yours for about $4 million.)

One’s first reaction is to revolt against this apparent swindle. ‘How could anyone in their right mind buy that’, was indeed a sentence I heard often. Perhaps our minds are limited and unable to comprehend the ‘genius’ of such contemporary works of art? Yet, soon after, the true genius of these works suddenly dawned on me. I mean, if artists and their galleries can sell these items for those fantastic prices, then perhaps they are truly geniuses. Not artistic geniuses, but certainly marketing geniuses. Or perhaps it's because there is a large supply of easy and naive prey to act as buyers?

Yes, this species is apparently in abundance, and their problem is that they have loads of cash that they don’t know what to do with. So where is all this money coming from? Russian oligarchs and Chinese billionaires eager to get their money out of the country; Qatari royalty building a museum; but perhaps the best source is President Obama’s stimulus policies, whereby he dishes out credits that settle in the hands of Wall Street financial institutions.

This cash is looking for a home, and slick financial advisers have convinced naive investors that contemporary art is a ‘valid alternative investment’. How else do you explain that in November almost $2 billion-worth of post-war and contemporary was sold at auction in New York City. Christie’s auction house alone sold almost $700 million on one night, including Francis Bacon’s $142 million triptych, which was bought by Elaine Wynn, the American casino billionaire.

Can this continue? Only as long as major governments continue printing money. As soon as there is a brake on the credit spigot, expect the whole pyramid to come crashing down. But you can bet that by that time the crafty purveyors of all these cardboard Big Macs, well-balanced wooden cafe chairs, carefully-arranged bricks, and other nonsense will be long gone and nowhere to be found.  And someone will be left holding a lot of worthless junk.