Art Fag City at The L Magazine: Reporting From Art Basel

Photo AFC

I wrote the following Miami round up for the L Magazine this week. I’m traveling for most of the day, so please forgive the slow comment moderation.

Miami art fairs took the shape of pre-existing NYC real estate pretty quickly. Although Art Basel is only six years old, its center aisle in the convention center this year hosted the heavyweight contemporary galleries Yvon-Lambert, Gagosian, Gladstone, Metropictures and Marian Goodman, all of which have ground-floor spaces in Chelsea or distinguished locations in Midtown. Neighbors in both Chelsea and at Basel, Gladstone Gallery and Metropictures transplanted their offices with surprising precision.

In fact, with the increase of satellite fairs like NADA, PULSE and INK, to name a few, so striking is the similarity to the larger gallery scene that one has to question the benefits for an art audience. As gallerist Bert Green wisely pointed out on artfagcity.com early this December, “”¦the saturation point is being reached, the fair phenomenon is suffering from the same thing that it meant to be an alternative to: browsing the galleries to find the gems buried among the large number of mediocre offerings.”

Indeed, the only people I met during my stay in Miami who weren't bothered by copious amounts of average-to-bad art watering down the fairs were non-participating dealers researching venues for the following year. Even Art Basel, the most prestigious of these outfits, suffers from being larger than it needs to be: it takes several hours to just walk through the convention center, let alone absorb it all. The fact that there are 23 additional fairs for a gallery-hopper to see, in addition to Basel, can be a little overwhelming, to say the least.

To read the full piece click here.