Dispatches from Art Basel Miami Beach
January 2007
WEIGHTY MEASURES
Taking a page out of the auction houses’ playbooks, this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach catalog was a fitting preamble to some of the weightier works available at the fair, including Richard Serra’s roughly 6-foot-square Corten steel “Corner Diamond” at 1,600 pounds (though given the artist’s propensity for tonnage, this would be Serra-lite), Roni Horn’s clear glass “Opposite of White” (approx 1,750 pounds, according to the wall label) and Aaron Young’s installation in a shipping container at Art Positions involving 40 tons of sand.
BUTTERFLIES AREN'T FREE TO FLY
When Elton John sang “butterflies are free to fly,” in “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” he didn’t anticipate Damien Hirst, he of sliced-animal-sculpture and dot-painting renown, who was represented by a couple of household gloss paint on canvases speckled with dead butterflies. A 6-foot by 9-foot bright pink canvas with 28 iridescent blue butterflies at Gagosian Gallery went for $850,000, while a multicolored triptych of three 7-foot by 7-foot panels with 84 multicolored butterflies (28 bugs per panel) was £1.25 million (nearly $2.5 million). That’s about $30,000 per butterfly.
TRENDS
For all of the recent and heated interest in contemporary Asian art, its absence (or nearly so) at the main fair was startling. By contrast, artists heavily represented included old reliables such as Andy Warhol, Josef Albers, Richard Prince, Tom Wesselman and Alex Katz.
IN ART BASEL'S ORBIT
“I’ve run out of red dots,” cries an exasperated Silvia Lorenz from the Zurich-based Galerie Romerapotheke, which sold its entire inventory of 50 works—plus an additional 24 by e-mail— within two days at their booth at scopeMIAMI, one of the 13 satellite fairs of Art Basel Miami Beach. Watercolor-on-wood paintings by Jana Gunstheimer, priced from $2,000 to $7,000, and miniscule (6 by 9 cm) pencil-on-paper scenes of foliage by Marcel Gahler at $1,800 each, were in greatest demand. Not all the galleries reported similar results, with some dealers blaming an over saturation of fairs. Nevertheless, Andrea Pollan of Curator’s Office along with other dealers said there was “phenomenal traffic” and things were “selling well.”
Down the street at PULSE Miami, Erik Sandberg’s Breugelian-style figurative paintings at Conner Contemporary sold briskly. On day two, a minor frenzy broke out between two collectors vying for the last available work. Down the aisle, Houston’s Finesilver Gallery was also refreshing it’s booth with new works by Johnnie Winnona Ross, Teo Gonzalez and newcomer William Detts, who creates eerie pointillist acrylic on canvas paintings based on surveillance camera images.
At N.A.D.A., Standard (Oslo)’s director Eivind Furnesvik, said says this year’s fair was better than last year's, which he considered “overwhelming.” He reported strong interest from museums, curators and collectors. Not all galleries, however, reported similar results, with some dealers blaming a saturation of fairs. —Nord Wennerstrom
THE NEXT ANTIQUES
21st-century editioned furniture was in high demand at Design Miami. Paris-based Gallerie Kreo sold 12 Marc Newson tables in glass and aluminum at $170,000 each—they were sold in first hour. Donna Karan picked up three mahogany totems by François Stahly at Magen H.
SPEED SHOPPING
At Art Basel Miami Beach, Blum & Poe (Los Angeles) sold out its stand in two hours. New York’s Mary Boone Gallery restocked its stand every day of the fair.
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
A decidedly more international crowd was snapping up more works than in prior years. An Armenian museum snared the monumental Jaume Plensa sculpture “Sitting Tattoo IV,” 2006, polyester resin and lit from within by colors changing from magenta to lime green from New York’s Gray Gallery.
Spotted buying were Brazilians, Russians and Japanese. Mexico City’s kurimanzutto, sharing a space with the Warsaw Foksal Gallery Foundation, sold new paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal priced at $30,000 to $60,000 to Latin American collectors. —Brook S. Mason