ART BASEL
At Art Basel Miami Beach, Less Heat
By KATE TAYLOR
MIAMI BEACH – The crowds that used to form more than an hour before the opening of the “First Choice” portion of Art Basel Miami Beach—the four-hour window between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. when only elite collectors can enter and browse the fair—are gone. Gone too are the speculators who before the financial crisis used to race down the aisles as soon as the doors opened in order to snag a work that they thought they could flip at a profit a few months later. Indeed, on Wednesday during “First Choice” things seemed sedate compared to the years before 2008. Some described the giant convention hall as “empty.”
That doesn’t mean that things didn’t sell. The extreme caution and modesty of 2008 and 2009, the hesitation to be seen spending, is gone, too. Pay in the financial world is roaring back to pre-crisis levels, and art is increasingly seen as a safe place to park money, like gold. Read more…
Art Basel Miami, Day 1: The Calm Before the Storm
By KATE TAYLOR
Art Basel Miami is a multiday sprint of buying, looking, socializing, and crucial networking for people not only in the art world but in other industries catering to the very rich, from private banking to private planes. The starting gun goes off at 11 on Wednesday morning, when V.I.P.’s get to enter the fair. But for those who arrived early, Tuesday offered an opportunity for warm-up.
The day started at 10 a.m., with a ceremonial groundbreaking for the Miami Art Museum’s new $200 million building on the bay designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Construction had been held up for several years by financing and other issues, but in May, Miami-Dade County released $100 million in bond proceeds to allow the project to go forward. The museum, which has to raise $100 million itself, has so far raised $45 million in pledges, the museum’s chairman, Aaron Podhurst, told The Miami Herald.
The museum is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
As the day heated up (literally – this being Miami), both local arts patrons and collectors fresh off an 8 a.m. flight from LaGuardia headed south to Coral Gables, where Sotheby’s and the dealer Paul Kasmin hosted a luncheon to celebrate an exhibition of the sculpture of Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne at the Fairchild Botanic Garden. Read more…
An Art Project of the Coolest Kind
By KAREN ROSENBERG
What’s that solar-powered freezer doing outside the Brooklyn Museum? Refrigerating a chunk of Alaskan ice.
It’s not an attempt to cut the air-conditioning bill. The freezer and its contents are a sculpture by the Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan. Titled “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project),” it went on view yesterday at the museum’s south entrance.
Solar power notwithstanding, the project has a large carbon footprint. In 2005 Mr. Strachan, working with a team, extracted the two-and-a-half-ton block of ice from an Alaskan river. The ice was then refrigerated and shipped to Nassau, in the Bahamas (Mr. Strachan’s birthplace), where it was exhibited in a solar-powered glass freezer at the height of summer. Later, it toured to Miami’s Wynwood District during Art Basel Miami Beach. Just last month, it could be seen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at the recently opened secondary space of Mr. Strachan’s dealer Joe Amrhein (a former boiler room, as it happens). Read more…
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario