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By Anne Tschida
Special to BT
Art Basel Miami Beach decides not to return after 2010, maybe leaves for greener pastures in California. What would this mean for Miami?
The question - hypothetical for now - gets to the essence of what Miami’s art world has become in the five years since the huge fair and its countless satellites first landed here. Hypothetical, yes, but Art Basel’s director and biggest Miami booster, Samuel Keller, leaves the organization at the end of this year. And in fact Basel has not committed to doing anything here beyond December 2 - 5, 2010.
Miami has been transformed from a relative backwater to a real artistic destination - at least for one week in December. But what will remain of this destination if the big engine from Switzerland disappears? Will Miami emerge stronger, with a sustainable art scene, or will it fade back to black? It’s a significant question for the future of culture in Miami-Dade.
It’s impossible to overestimate the impression Art Basel has left on the landscape and psyche of Miami. The fair’s inaugural in 2002, back then only filling up the Miami Beach Convention Center and shipping containers on the nearby beach, rocked the southern peninsula. Here was world-class work stuffed into a single, albeit massive, venue - a genuine embarrassment of artistic riches for a city whose art scene was, at best, nascent. Locals and visitors alike swallowed up the excitement, the energy, and the parties. We’d never seen anything like it.
Since then, more and more satellite fairs have joined the main show, setting up in boutique hotels and tents and warehouses, with the whole happening that is Art Basel Miami Beach now setting the standard for art fairs the world over. Yes, it’s crass and commercial and over-the-top. Still, there’s nothing like it.
But has it changed us in a profound way? Many artists say it has, and in a positive way.
Artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, 34, has been living and working in Miami for most of his life, and will have several of his sculpture-installations showing during Basel, at David Castillo Gallery, the Scope Miami satellite fair, and at Ella Cisneros’s CIFO. He realizes that the shameless pursuit of mammon associated with this fair can be criticized, but in his opinion, “the fair has stimulated the art scene for the better. There are a lot of artists who like to complain about Art Basel, but when it doesn’t come back, they will all shit their pants.”
Rodriguez-Casanova was paid a visit by the folks from the Whitney Biennial recently, something that probably never would have happened without the spotlight of Art Basel. (The semiannual show at the Whitney Museum of American Art is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious in the world.) “At the end of our visit,” Rodriguez-Casanova recalls, “one of the curators said that this time around, she was very impressed with the level of work the local artists were making in comparison to prior years.” In fact, three Miamians were chosen for the 74th Whitney Biennial in 2008: Bert Rodriguez, Adler Guerrier, and William Cordova.
Other artists point to the presence of Basel in Miami as a catalyst for their own work. Xavier Cortada will be showing his “Reclamation Project” and South Pole installations during this year’s fair, at the Miami Science Museum and Miami-Dade College’s Center Gallery. His eco-installations include planting thousands of mangrove seedlings around town, and flags he placed in the Antarctic ice last year, which will travel to the North Pole next year. The works are related to his first experience with Basel, when he participated in the locally organized OMNIART exhibition in a downtown Miami warehouse. “Basel created this opportunity to come together,” explains Cortada, “for curators to convene a bunch of artists who then did an intervention on a building, and that allowed me to explore these ideas, giving birth to my future projects.”
But not every salutary development in the local scene should be attributed to Basel, adds the artist. “We were at a juncture in history that was right,” he says, meaning Miami in 2002 was a diverse, cosmopolitan community that was ripe for a creative explosion. Or as he puts it: “This wasn’t Fort Myers, after all.”
What can be directly credited to the Swiss fair’s ripple effect is the rise of Wynwood. From less than a handful of spaces that existed in 2000, there are now more than 70 exhibition spaces in the factory district turned art enclave.
It’s not just the number of galleries, but that so many of them are now showing high-quality work consistently, another change from the recent past. One very young space, named for its very young director, 25-year-old Anthony Spinello, has stood out as an impressive example of what can be achieved locally. Spinello has energy and skill, and represents what the 21st-century Miami art scene has to offer. For this year’s December extravaganza, he and Claire Breukel (of the experimental space Locust Projects) put together a well-received, somewhat tongue-in-cheek show called “Littlest Sister 07.” Advertised as “the smallest fair in town,” the show plays with the Basel fair’s preference for small exhibition booths. (See page 34 for more.)
It will likely be the Wynwood art district, organically grown but clearly boosted by the money and energy of Basel, that will best reflect what happens to us if and when the big fair pulls up stakes. “There will be a bit of a correction” in the number of spaces in Wywnood, says Cortada, “but a little shock is okay. Some things are kept up artificially here, and if they disappear, that’s not a bad thing.”
Rodriguez-Casanova, who is represented locally by the Castillo Gallery, concurs: “The dealers will be affected.... Do you know how much they sell during the fair? The fair leaving will probably separate the men and women from the boys and girls, and will show who really can keep a gallery open down here. The fact of the matter is, Basel brings down a ton of dealers, curators, artists, and collectors. If it goes, I think only a small portion of these people will continue to come back.”
Which brings up another big question about a post-Basel world: The many satellite fairs have become almost as big a draw as Basel, but would any of them return?
On one level it seems unlikely. It’s all about selling, and the galleries will follow the money. If a big chunk of it flies to San Francisco instead of Miami, why set up tent here? On the other hand, the profitable and popular New Art Dealers Alliance Fair (NADA), while organized in New York, is an exclusively Miami event. Maybe NADA and other fairs would be willing to stay put, betting on the fact that Europeans don’t really want to take that extra jaunt across the country, and that South Florida’s weather will continue to make us the preferred choice for a winter art holiday.
Then again, we might not need any of the visiting fairs. We might be able to pull off an art week on our own. “We have changed permanently,” says Venezuelan native and Miami resident Odalis Valdivieso, who has a solo show of her landscape photography at another Wynwood gallery, Signature Art. “[Basel] has given us training, a sense of context, and we’ll be able to reorganize ourselves. Before, we didn’t have the experience, but maybe now we can create new fairs.” (For starters, there’s the somewhat staid Art Miami fair, which has finally joined the Basel party in December, having given up trying to get people down here to buy in the boring month of January. Not that it’s ever electrified the place like Basel.)
Basel leaving town might even constitute a cleansing of sorts. Expressing a not-uncommon sentiment among local artists and galleries, Valdivieso notes, “Despite all the studio visits and money [that come during this crucial week], it hasn’t really been equal ground. Certain groups get most of the exposure while others are mostly ignored and struggle to get seen. It’s not really ‘fair’ competition.”
Artists from the Fredric Snitzer Gallery and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin are often seen as getting that extra attention. So are the youngest artists. “There can be too much emphasis on ‘emerging,’ to the detriment of the growth of the young artist,“ says one collector of contemporary art.
And maybe fewer Euros would be okay as well. “The fairs have brought an overbearing sense of art commerce,” says Rodriguez-Casanova. “I can’t help but feel that this is affecting the work being developed.”
But nobody truly wants to say goodbye. Because of Basel, there is a palpable sense that Miami is a more sophisticated place, and that’s going to be hard to give up. “We won’t fold up and die if Basel leaves,” says Cortada, “but I’d miss that week.”.
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