Like most art fairs, Art Basel Miami Beach is conspicuously unaware of its past. The fair closed yesterday, and already its website header has begun hyping Miami Beach 2013. As an art fair, with its accompanying talks, lounges, and VIP access, it’s something between a market and a luxury brand, and neither markets nor luxury brands have much use for memory. In the business of selling “the very best,” you shouldn’t say whether it’s more or less “best” than last year; this is most true of “the very best price.”
So if you missed it, you missed it, and good luck piecing it back together. Thankfully, AFC is here to help, chiseling snide remarks into the bedrock of history. We went to the fairs and then wrote about what we saw at the fairs, which means this: If you say you saw the things we wrote about, some people will believe that you went to the fairs, yourself. Try it out; it’s fun. When art fairs give you false forgetting, give them false memories right back.
