Day One: Miami Art Fairs

I’m narrowing my focus on the fairs this year in order to be able to speak with a little more depth on subjects – don’t worry, there will still be a bunch of half baked ideas floating around for everyone. I have four basic areas I’m going to focus on; the state of the artworld, the Vogels, Interesting art works, and oddball stories I stumble over.

Things I desperately want to own – Aqua Art Fair (Aqua hotel version)

Lisa Neighbour; LN does these amazing etched or engraved knife blades with text, usually snippets of poetry. This is a horrible description. Represented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects.

Mark Todd; MT uses a comic book vernacular to create his small scale artworks. Using Jack Kirby as a jumping off point, his work seems to respect the past, while at the same time look towards the future. I saw his work at Billy Shire Fine Arts

Richard Hell/Christopher Wool; Psychopts. I want all of them – it’s like a disease. They are probably available many places however I was treated so nicely by the folks at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller that’s where I’d spend my money.

Peter Dayton; The Stella paintings. These are just the greatest things – a month or so ago I spoke of seeing his work at Winston Watcher where he uses old surfboard techniques to work in and around color field artwork – this is similar except it uses the Stella black paintings to the same effect. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (again)

Lori Nix; one of my favorite artists has a new series she is working on – its a continuation of her most recent work and even more ambitious, but seems to be heading thematically to everyday kind of places, in this case a laundromat. At Miller Block Gallery

Jerry Saltz is very different when you hear him speak
Caught the conversation with Jerry Saltz at ABMB This is the End: The Rising Tide of Money Goes Out of the Artworld and All boats are Sinking love him or hate him, this was a great talk. It has singlehandedly made me happy about the current state of the art world for easily the next 48 months. Essentially we are in the art world not the art commodities world. Art is still going to be made and art will still be sold. The big difference is that the talk about art as investment, art as high priced ornament, etc. will go away and we can actually talk about art again. I’m already seeing signs of this and could not be happier.

I am putting together a larger post on the sales aspects of the fair – I don’t expect that to be ready for a few days.

Things I desperately want to own – Art Basel Miami Beach

Mark Tansey; MT looks better and better especially with the post I will have on the big show tomorrow or friday. At Gagosan

Elsworth Kelly; The new EK print at Gemini G.E.L. is just a masterpiece – it’s bananas as Rachel Zoe would say. At Gemini G.E.L.