CHAMPAGNE ON ICE

A remarkable swell took place after the doors opened, and not just fare-goers making for the various courtesy bars. The powerful and glamorous A-list crowd amassed quickly, imbibed, and prepared to consume art. The mood was generally upbeat and optimistic, if not exactly replicating the feeding frenzy of the “bubble” years.

INEFFABLE OBJECTS OF DISPLACED DESIRE

THE SWEET SMELL OF TRANSGRESSION

Power Londoner Jay Jopling’s White Cube was right at the entrance, with a “real” Damien Hirst skull painting, a wall-scaled Gilbert and George and a seductively ominous work by New Yorker Phillips.

DEEP CONVERSATION

Perhaps they are discussing how you can display a giant yellow swastika and not have that be offensive. McEwen’s solo, “I Am Curious Yellow,” complete with matching carpet, aimed only to please.

SHIVER ME TIMBERS

Paris’s Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin continues to showcase flashy theatrical work from a cutting-edge international stable, very art-fair friendly. New Yorker Coffin’s absurdist hero was one of the few literally over-the-top pieces to be seen this year.

HAVE NUDE, WILL TRAVEL

Veteran master of pop figuration Wesley made a statement with this utilitarian suitcase at the booth of Chelsea gallerists Fredericks Freiser.

GERING IN FLIGHT

57th Street dealer Sandra Gering, now partnered with Madrid’s Javier Lopez, showcases a range of punchy, graphics-oriented work, including this wall-scaled gouache and graphite piece by James.

PYROTECHNICS AND PASSIONS

Nares strong solo at the large, centrally-positioned booth of Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin, featured huge iridescent iconic brushstrokes isolated against dark saturated colored grounds. One of Nares’s movies, with its percussive formal manipulations, was also on hand, adding ambience.

STRIPES AND STRIATIONS

In from St. Louis for a brief 36-hour stay, abstractionist Lundsager was working with Greenberg Van Doren Gallery to plan her solo exhibition, slated for the weekend. A representative work hangs behind her in the storage closet. “I love being here,” she said of New York and its buzzy environs, formerly her home.

A DISCERNING EYE

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR

“They’re acrylic with silver plating,” he explained. “They’re very temporal.” Best of all, “they kind of record you,” he elaborated. This might explain their popularity. Both works were sold—and Kassay is among the fair’s “hot” young artists.

ALL DRESSED UP AND…

It turned out the lattes were free, if you know Armory Fair-founder Paul Morris, or had another “in.” It seemed like more people were “VIP” than not, judging by the shortage of seating. We’ll see how many make it to the MoMA party, still standing.

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A young, buoyant crowd, enlivened by the day’s nonstop art crush, landed on West 53rd Street to let loose at The Armory after-party to benefit The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

A VIEW FROM A BRIDGE

BACKED BY MOMA DONORS

PERFECT CRANIUM

THREE MUSES

MUSTACHIOED CONNECTION

HEARTTHROB TROUBADOUR

THE BEARDS HAVE IT

THAT’S MONEY

KEEPIN’ IT REAL

NECKLINES AND BYLINES

WHIRLING DERVISH

A TENDER GOODNIGHT

TO OBLIVION – AND BEYOND

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“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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The neon sign over the door by Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine suggests a Dante-esque Divine Comedy awaits.

“Part consortium, part collective,” is what Independent art fair called itself, as launched by gallerists Elizabeth Dee (X Initiative, N.Y.) and Darren Flook (Hotel, London). Making use of the former Dia Art Foundation’s handsome West 22nd Street building, the free-of-charge venue offered artist projects, public programs and commercial galleries showing artworks without the defining “walls” of traditional booths.

SMELL A RAT?

Packed in for Thursday’s party-atmosphere opening, viewers were met with a 12-foot-high inflatable rat muttering recorded aphorisms such as: “Only one thing counts in this life/Get them to sign on the line that is dotted.” Responses seemed affable.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Murray Moss with Michal Fronek and Jan Nemecek’s, Illuminated Crucifix, 2010, and Thomas Struth’s, Stanze di Raffaelo II, Rome, 1992, behind.

SoHo design store Moss paired with Westreich-Wagner art advisors, in an attempt to create 12 “dialogues” between disparate objects that were “never intended to be together,” in Murray Moss’s words. The results should be “subjective,” he explained, “like the circumstances of our lives.”

CALLING A GHOST TO THE TABLE

DRESSED FOR SUCCESS

“She knits a sweater about political or current event, then wears it around,” explained Nelson Hallonquist, of the Florida gallery. Overheard viewer comment: “It’s like shopping in a mall with small stores.”

SIMPLY RED

THE NEW PAGANISM

DON’T FENCE ME IN

ART CRITICISM FOR SALE

CALLING DR. STRANGELOVE

Known for her motion pictures, Sussman here presents an exact replica of Russian Yuri Gagarin’s office, the first man in space.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Artists Space promotes its screening of Make It New John, a documentary about carmaker John DeLorean by Glasgow-based filmmaker Duncan Campbell.

AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE

TILT-A-WHIRL

Move over Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor. Danish artist Hein did more with less, as his optical contraption beguiled audiences with its dislocation of gravitational reality.

FLASH OF HISTORY

One couldn’t help but feel the presence of the Dia Art Foundation and its illustrious exhibition history in the building’s earlier incarnation—before there was such a thing as The Chelsea Gallery District, or, for that matter, a contemporary art world driven so ruthlessly by art fair culture.

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September 17 to October 25, 2008
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, between Park and Madison avenues
New York City, 212 517 8677

The New Museum (reopened December 2007) still feels new in its vanguard boxy Bowery reincarnation—the lobby all steel and concrete and plate glass—crowded with industrially-clad  European tourists and waifish art students.  This ground-floor space is employed to intentionally discordant effect to introduce curator Richard Flood’s Mary Heilmann survey, as the first grouping of paintings is hung in the terrarium-like narrow glassed-in enclosure that comprises a small gallery behind the snack bar.

Here, a number of works ranging from 1970 to 1994 share a palette of blue, white and black. All feature loosely-painted geometric motifs, ranging from constructivist-leaning floating rectangles, Blue and White Squares (1997) to straight bands of hard-edged horizontal color,Capistrano (1994). Some are on shaped canvas, Miramar (1994). In the earliest of these works, Malibu (1970), the canvas isn’t even stretched: it hangs freely. All evoke seascape, perhaps in homage to Heilmann’s California past (born in San Francisco, 1940, she studied literature and poetry at UC Santa Barbara before taking an MFA in ceramics and sculpture at UC Berkeley). This biographical thread is also picked up on in a series of recent ceramic sculptural objects juxtaposed, made in collaboration with Steve Keister and Rachel Bleiweiss-Sande, poised around the paintings on floor and wall.

That is all a teaser for the full impact of the show, which comes across visceral and forceful as soon as the elevator doors open to the large, second-floor galleries. Garishly colorful canvases—representing nearly 40 years of free-thinking and playful experimentation—vie for attention in a non-linear hopscotch chronology. Artist-designed rolling “Clubchairs” allow for contemplative viewing—but with an implied restless velocity (think: adult kindergarten).

Early experiments with ad-hoc sculptural materials, Starry Night (Night Sky) (1967) and The Big Dipper (1969), show the young artist already moving toward the painterly, with modeled celestial black and silver clumps played off each other to imagistic effect.

Soon after, by the 1970s, Heilmann is seen grappling with the minimalist ethos of the time, responding to that era’s mostly male color/geometry paradigm of Ellsworth Kelly, David Novros, Blinky Palermo and others. In L.A. Pair (1976), a horizontal diptych employs scraped-off paint to reveal two alternating primary-colored grounds beneath. This strategy—using overpainting to obscure or scraping away paint to reveal—is central to Heilmann’s ongoing practice. It’s a willfully perverse methodology, being assertive by negating the traditional role of the artist and his mark.

The show reaches a sense of triumph in the large nocturnes Neo Noir (1998) and The Third Man (1999), in which retinal chromatic rectangles of atmospheric space float, framed into window-like squares by surrounding strokes of dark sweeping brushwork. Delicate internal illumination is weighed against malevolent obliteration.

Heilmann’s most recent canvases are among her most assured. She often seems be daring herself to do something truly “awful”—only to find beauty in it. In Jack of Hearts (2005), for example, an undulating stain of blood red paint is laid transparent over a simple black-and-white checkerboard. The accumulated brushmarks and open drips make her act of painting transliterate into a kind of crime of passion.

Downtown, under the New Museum’s harsh fluorescent lighting, the paintings have a matte, plastic-like quality, pushing them towards confrontational “ugliness.” Uptown, by contrast, at Zwirner & Wirth’s elegant space, a spare historical hanging has the opposite effect. Here, Heilmann’s works look refined and considered, passing as masterworks of late neoplastic awareness. In this location, there’s no denying it: Mary Heilmann now is “someone.”

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The recently-converted 5thfloor galleries at Gagosian uptown have mostly been given over to sprawling group shows of market-driven talent. The space, a low-ceilinged fluorescent-lit warren of former offices, verily hums with chilly attitude. Curator Tom Duncan, a gallery registrar, now brings art history into the mix with this adventurous photography survey, pairing historical and contemporary examples of sculptural construction and assemblage as subject matter.

The show’s timeline begins with experimental modernist works by two noted sculptors, American David Smith and Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy. Smith’s four exquisite miniature black-and-white gelatin silver prints, Untitled (Tableau) (1931-1933), first appear as Max Ernst-like surrealist painted landscapes, but on prolonged viewing reveal themselves to be arrangements of real organic forms, coral and twigs found on a trip to the Virgin Islands. Moholy-Nagy, in his little-seen early vanguard color work from 1936-1946, exploits his then-new medium’s theatrical qualities, capturing prismatic light as it reflects off plastic armatures hung in black space. Both artists move photography away from its traditional reportorial definition—toward more open formal abstract readings.

Jumping ahead to the 1980s, works by the Swiss collaborative team of Peter Fischli & David Weiss and also by American James Welling seem intentionally “academic” and “arch” by comparison. Fischli & Weiss’s Blossoming Branch (1986), a tabletop arrangement of stacked metal clamps, a plastic bottle, an aluminum cooking pan and a dust broom, has all the “traditional” compositional elements of a Picasso bronze. Welling, in his studio studies of drapery, exploits the chiaroscuro qualities of black-and-white printing to willfully static effect, more like Dutch still-life painting.

Cindy Sherman’s two large works from 1992 are brazen and provocative by comparison.Untitled (1992) is a horrific portrayal of a figure made up of prosthetic limbs and disattached body parts, its face in agony, seemingly in the midst of a sexual assault from an equally distended aggressor. Sherman exploits photography for all its visceral immediacy; she constructs “fictional” self-identities only in order to make them “real” all over again.

Gregory Crewdson follows the radicalism of Sherman’s “set-up” strategy to its logical ends in Untitled (butterflies with braids) (1997). Yet his results are staid by comparison. The medium-scale glossy color print shows human hair blond braids hanging amidst a dark grove of trees, covered with blue taxidermy butterflies in the foreground. The lighting, saturated palette and cinematic “staging” provide for an overall mood of ersatz surrealist horror.

The younger practitioners follow Crewdson’s self-conscious lead, especially Anne Hardy, who makes mock-ups of windowless rooms and loads them with signifying objects: a makeshift lab with beakers, pipettes and notational charts, for example. For her, a lot of effort is exerted creating narrative-looking content that doesn’t lead anywhere.

Roger Ballen, working in black-and-white at a modest scale, also feels quite stilted, with his diorama arrangements of cardboard boxes, animal skulls, a live kitten, child-like scrawled drawings on the walls behind. His work has the psychological flavor of Joel-Peter Witkin’s earlier genre-defining efforts (he’s not in the exhibit), but without the hardcore goods.

In the end, it is Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) who is the star of the show. His works are interspersed among the first three rooms, and they all come across relaxed and intelligent without ever working too hard. At the entrance, Beerenstilleben (2007), a modestly-scaled color print, shows empty plastic food containers sitting on a windowsill bathed in light: it is an absolutely considered and casual moment. Beauty is returned once again to the realm of a photographer’s “eye” as opposed to surrounding conceit. For Tillmans, meaningful abstraction exists all around us in the realm of the everyday. He doesn’t need polemical purpose.

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Even for seasoned navigators, there’s a lot of getting lost to be done in Miami, with everything oriented NE, NW, condo towers being built everywhere blocking one-way streets. Looking for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) near downtown, we first passed a group of boxy nightclub buildings. These are the after-hours places, which pick up the crowds after South Beach closes down at 4 am. Even at 3 in the afternoon, there was still a crowd of glazed ravers lined up, waiting to get in.

Then, like a mirage, emerged CIFO’s glass mosaic façade, a free-standing converted warehouse on North Miami Avenue. Seen from a distance, the pixilated Bisazza tiles make up an image of a bamboo jungle, the conception of architect Rene Gonzalez. (The benefactor, Ella Fontanals Cisneros, is a Venezuelan real-estate developer on a mission to promote Latin American contemporary artists.) The exhibition, “Fortunate Objects: The Appropriated Object,” is first-rate, a succinctly curated affair that juxtaposes works by Ai Weiwei, Amelia Azcarate, Marcea Astorga, and others.

Next, off to Wynwood proper, to see the Rubell Family Collection. Opened in 1996, the 45,000 square foot former DEA confiscated goods warehouse looks unassuming, even drab, from the exterior. That only sets you up for a bigger surprise when you get inside. It’s a huge space, incredibly appointed, filled with first-rate examples of recent art. (For comparison, it’s about on the scale of New York’s Whitney Museum.). I was blown away. This is the last signifying frontier of private wealth in action. There’s a 40,000-volume art library behind glass in a room with no one in it, a New Media room, a Phaidon bookstore with volumes extending dramatically to the ceiling, a Cerealart gift shop and a new sculpture garden with monumental works by Thomas Schutte. Two exhibitions there were especially strong, a survey of Hernan Bas (b. 1978) who studied in Miami and “Euro-Centric, Part 1,” featuring Thomas Zipp, Urs Fisher and others.

Trying for a trifecta, I embarked for the nearby Martin Margolis Collection, hearing that it had installations by Olafur Eliasson and Anthony McCall. I circled the block, but couldn’t find it. Instead, I spotted a handmade sign, made of paper, advertising a temporary show by Mike Cloud. This turned out to a makeshift outpost of New York’s Max Protetch gallery in a rented retail space. Cloud’s assemblage art inside gives new meaning to “slacker”-ism, raising crappy-looking to unimagined heights. The gallery assistant told me that the Margolis warehouse was indeed next door, but closed early at 4 pm. Closed early? On the Saturday of Art Basel Miami Beach? That’s nuts.

I wanted to see the Peter Coffin show at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. The Paris-based operation was one of the more visible presences at the fair (it even publishes its own art magazine, BING, to promote its artists). They have opened a permanent space in Wynwood, impressive in its scale and ambition. Coffin is a New York phenom, whose smart neo-conceptual works were to be seen all over the fair. His show, with the fractured title Model of the Universe (e.g. sweet harmonica solo, e.g. the idea of the sun, e.g. frisbee dog c included one of the weekend’s most impressive pieces, a steel spiral staircase twisted into a continuous circle: Tthink MC Escher’s impossible stairways to infinity meets a DNA double helix meets utilitarian found object.

One thing that’s great about Wynwood is—unlike New York’s West Chelsea or Bowery gallery districts—it’s still genuinely gritty. The cross-cultural juxtaposition with what’s going on in the surrounding neighborhood is so strong that it creates shocking 21st Century frisson. On SE Fifth Avenue, for example, is a colorful strip of ethnic fashion stores, in case the likes of Peter Coffin need to buy a sequined prom tuxedo—or some human hair.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

“The Art Miami fair has redefined itself,” explains Eli Ridgeway, of Paule Anglim, San Francisco, of the original fair that preceded Art Basel and the legion spin off fairs.  “Here galleries are showing new works in a historical context.” This means cutting-edge galleries such as Chinablue, Beijing, can cross-contextualize with established programs of New York galleries.

Chinablue, Beijing, mounted an impressive wall-sized photo mural by Wang Qingsong, showing the interior of a vast warehouse with hand-painted employment posters papered from floor to ceiling. I engaged gallery employee U Han to tell me about her experiences here. At first, she was shy, but once she got talking about how Qingsong makes his elaborate photo set-ups, she wouldn’t stop talking.

Bjorn Wetterling, who has run a leading contemporary gallery in Stockholm for 29 years, devoted his entire booth to a multi-layered photographic mixed media installation by New York twin brothers Doug & Mike Starn. He told of how he decided to participate. “I was not supposed to do the fair,” he told me, “because I was already in the photo fair. But they kept calling me, begging and begging. Finally, I was in Malaysia—and they called me late in the evening. I told them, ‘I have an extraordinary idea.’” And that’s how the Starns show was born.

New York gallerist Alexander Gray is featuring confrontational works by Kathe Burkhart (“Up Your Ass”, from the Liz Taylor series) and Cary Leibowitz (the artist formerly known as “Candyass”). His booth’s exterior has a Karen Finley piece consisting of a blank wall with Sharpie markers for people to write their mother’s maiden names (by the time I saw it, it was already completely covered). I asked Gray if his fares shocked anyone. He told me, “No, it’s not possible to scandalize any more.” Of the Finley, he said, “the public has been incredibly engaged in this monument to matriarchy.” Gray’s painting program is really interesting, as well, as it includes 1970s-era abstract works by Jack Whitten as well as contemporary offerings from Jo Baer and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Meanwhile, young artist Crystal Kanney drove “all through the night” from Savannah, Ga., to attend—and to wear her full-body Elvis suit, a kind of self-promoting art billboard.

Next, I headed back to Miami Beach, as I still hadn’t seen the “containers,” metal shipping units fashioned into galleries for Art Basel Miami’s Art Positions section. (This means, sadly, I had missed Iggy Pop’s performance Wednesday night).

By the time I got there, it was after nightfall. I had yet to see the ocean, so I wandering alone down the vast expanse of empty beach, gazing up at the illuminated million dollar condos and stars above. As you approach Art Positions, it sounds like a party, thanks to WPS1.org’s radio DJ booth and booming sound system.

The containers fair is hilarious. Stoned-looking gallerists slouch in their expensive clothes in inexpensive beach chairs as legions of curious unfatigable visitors troop through, jamming themselves into these brightly-lit air-conditioned shoeboxes.

I could hear the sounds of Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC coming from the central bar area next door. Curious, I wandered over toward the colored lights and fog machines. Under pop graphic signage by Ryan McGinness and a giant video screen featuring assume vivid astro focus’s neo-psychedelia was a plywood skateboard ramp with a demo going on. For myself, having spent this past late August skating at Owl’s Head skateboard park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, preparing for the “Old Man’s Bowl Jam,” I was intensely curious. Turns out, this was Art Radio WPS1.org’s “Concrete Waves: Homage to Skate Culture at Art Positions.”

A strange figure, with flowing dreadlocks and a sweat-drenched plaid shirt, carved elegant kickturns from side to side of the elongated half-pipe. I did a slow burn. It was Tony Alva, legendary 1970s cult hero, Z-Boy of Santa Monica Dogtown renown, the inventor of pool riding and the frontside aerial. For the first time since arriving in Miami, I was genuinely star-struck.

I approached him afterwards, told him how closely I had studied his pictures in Skateboardermagazine in the 1970s (this was before I started reading Art in America). He was gracious, but physically spent (he’s now 50 years old!). He autographed a paper Ryan McGinness skateboard deck for me. Finally, I could go back to New York satisfied.

It was time to hit the party circuit, off to the Belle Island apartment of collectors Alfred Gillio and Paul Berstein for an exclusive soiree for Art Basel Miami’s Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. But that’s another story…

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6

After the glamour, glitz and polish of Art Basel Miami, the Pulse fair seems funky, almost shabby, by comparison. That’s good. It gets you rooting for the underdog.

The Pulse fair, having built its reputation in a tent in years past, has moved to a Deco-era concrete warehouse with adjoining sculpture courtyard. (The outdoor pieces include a working one-man submarine by Duke Riley, the Brooklyn artist who was arrested last summer as a would-be terrorist for impinging on the water-space of the Queen Mary 2, docked off of Red Hook.) Here, hipsters milled about aimlessly, while bigger fish arrived in black limos and yellow pedicabs.

I had talked to Pulse participant Magda Sawon, director of New York’s Postmasters, at the David Yurman/Whitney Museum party the night before. She was super-enthusiastic, saying the fair had great energy and brisk commercial action. Upon arriving, that mood was palpable, as gallerists enjoyed free beer being doled out from a galvanized metal wash tub of ice on a rolling dolly.

Postmasters, true to its politically-conscious program, was showing an outrageous video by Kenneth Tin Kin Hung, “Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People,” which included, among other photo-collaged imagery, a tableau of Condoleezza Rice riding a giant turd above the capitol city.

For people who hadn’t yet realized that buying art is a form of shopping, Jonathan Seliger’s editioned bronze Gucci shopping bag at Jack Shainman, New York, brought the point home with post-Duchampian panache.

An engaging wall of big buttons with slogans at Catharine Clark, San Francisco, [photo 5655] turned out to be by artist Walter Robinson. I queried, did this mean the return of Walter Robinson, now editor of Artnet magazine? (His paintings from the era of his showing at Metro Pictures in the 1980s have since gained a cult following.) No, an exasperated Clark responded, there is anotherWalter Robinson, in California, now making art.

I ran into veteran independent gallerist Paul Morris at the booth of Bischoff/Weiss, London, showing the work of Olivier Millagoul. When he struck up a conversation, the two young partners asked him who he was. He produced a card, and pronounced, “I founded the Armory show.”[photo 5673] For me, having attended the first New York alternative art fair at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I knew his history. But I wondered how amazing it must be for him to think that he, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land and Matthew Marks dreamed up this whole fun art fair movement—the nonstop moveable feast—and look where we are today.

Upstairs from Pulse is a highly appealing mini-fair, GEISAI. It was founded in 2001 by the artist-led enterprise Kaikai Kiki, brainchild of Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami. In it, individual artists are given booths from which to present a one-person show. Most were there, on site, to further engage the public. Some 20 international artists were selected by a jury from a pool of 716 applicants.

I ran into painter Charles Clough, a familiar figure from the New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, who has since moved to Rhode Island. He told me, “I did my last show with Tricia Collins in 1998. When she closed, I went out with the tide.” He has published a compelling book for the event,Pepfog Clufff, which displays methods of rephotographing painting details to develop a new working language (a project he began in 1976). So, how was the fair going? “It’s funny running into a lot of people from the past 35 years I’ve been amongst in the artworld,” he told me. “But,” he continued wistfully, “I’m still waiting for the ‘legendary sales’ to start.”

By contrast, two booths down, Eric Doeringer was having the opposite experience. He makes small knock-offs of well-known works by art stars—and sells them for $250 apiece (usually on the streets of West Chelsea). How were sales for him? “Fantastic,” he gushed, “like nobody’s business.” He told me that he had brought “four gigantic suitcases full of works, a few hundred.” He says his best sellers are Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Rob Pruitt’s panda.

Around the corner was a wall-mounted flat screen TV featuring Walter Robinson talking (he’s one of the GEISAI jurors). But was this the real Walter Robinson?

I left, battling insane traffic, to get to the hotel fairs at South Beach, along Collins Avenue.

There were literally throngs of art soldiers and fabulous trophy specimens to be seen crowding the overflowing hotel lobbies. At the Dorset, hosting the flow fair, an exhibitionistic DJ Hottpants [photo 5687] was spinning CDs (I didn’t know they “spun”) in front of a garish painting. At the bar, a youthful hustler approached two young females. His pick-up line: “I’m surprised to see two cute girls here. I thought it would just be ‘artsy’ types.”

I ventured across Collins Avenue, dodging Lamborghinis and Bentleys, to go to the Red Dot fair at the South Seas hotel. Here, a few quality galleries had decamped in their rooms with surprisingly esoteric works. At Howard Yazerski, Boston, I saw beautiful paintings by Cologne’s Peter Tollens. At Brian Gross, San Francisco, there were exquisite historical works on paper by Richard Pousette-Dart. New York gallery Anita Shapolsky, which specializes in artists who were represented in the 1940s and 1950s by Martha Jackson Gallery and Betty Parsons Gallery, had brought unusual small works by Buffie Johnson, Ernest Briggs and others.

I came away thinking there might be a true heart and soul art community here somewhere—even on Collins Avenue.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6 – BREAKFAST TIME

At the Vicente restaurant this morning, a Spanish joint on Collins Avenue, I ran into Paul Ha, a familiar face from his time running White Columns in New York, who has since decamped to St. Louis to run the Contemporary Art Museum.

Paul had befriended a young artist from Washington, D.C., Adam DeBoer, 23, exhibiting his figurative paintings at the booth of his home city’s Conner Contemporary Art at the Go Go Art Projects section of the Pulse Fair. It’s “like a farm team,” DeBoer explained. He was riding high, as he had sold his largest work the night before. “It’s the first painting I ever sold,” he told me. “It was wild out there. A buying frenzy. Red stickers all over the walls after only four hours.”

This was the youthquake I had been warned of. “Aren’t you worried about pushing out all the mid-career artists?” I asked. “No,” he replied, he was only worried about “burning out at an early age.” I told him, “Move to New York.”

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5

The Art Basel Miami Beach fair at the Convention Center opened at noon sharp, with a literal rush through the gates. (Think Aqueduct Raceway, but with stiletto heels, not horseshoes.)  Inside was a glittering spectacle of art and excess, laid out with impeccable Swiss style.

To the left of the entrance, at the booth of Deitch, N.Y., the first painting that viewers saw was Kurt Kauper’s “Bobby 3,” a full-length realistic portrait of the Boston Bruin hockey great Bobby Orr, nude. The funny thing was, instead of looking like Orr, the figure resembled Kauper’s rival painter John Currin.

Also near the entrance was an impressive installation by Christof Buchel at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. It was culled from the artist’s recent debacle (cancelled show) at Mass MoCA, consisting of metal storage container with a ladder leading to a make-shift roof deck. Mounting this structure, one could see the trashy leavings of a kids’ pizza party—Jello coagulating, half-consumed Kool Aid, etc, with an official US Army 750 lb. “leaflet bomb” hanging above. Looking through the Gauntanamo Bay-style cyclone fencing, viewers could then survey the entire fair.

Two booths chose retail themes: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, fixtured to look like a Prada store, and, at Shanghart, Shanghai, a full-blown convenience store, with external street façade. There, outside, a woman told her friend that she had just sent her boyfriend inside to “buy condoms.”

Among the early VIP attendees, competitive buying was fierce. At Gladstone’s booth, a woman was looking at a Richard Prince painting, “My Life as a Weapon,” 2007, which has a joke text painted in blue and black over a grid of color porn magazine photos. Turning to her husband, she said, “This is your thing. The fact that you don’t own this is terrible.”

I also heard the whispering murmurs among gallery employees, “the Kapoor just sold.”

Mary Boone’s booth was true to her 1980s West Broadway glory days: Barbara Kruger, Ross Bleckner, a large group of new Eric Fischls, “Scenes from Late Paradise” (sold already, together, according to Ron Warren, the longtime public face of the gallery).

Speaking of Mary Boone, I was surprised to see a painting by her wunderkind noir photorealist Damian Loeb at Acquavella’s. The Color of Money (2007) shows a house on a darkened street.

“How much is that painting,” a woman demanded.

“It’s sold,” a gallerist informed her.

“Do you have another?”

“We have another work, but it’s of another subject.”

“How much was this one?”

“$80,000.”

Then, the woman exclaimed, “That’s my house. That’s my house. That’s the house I grew up in.”

Sighted: Author Tom Wolfe, in trademark white suit, greeting well-wishers with his skull-cracked smile… New York art consultant Kim Heirston, elegantly educating her clients (and, no, she was not the tallest woman there—in the context of this XL Germanic crowd she is average height)… Brit scribe Anthony Haden-Guest looking pale-but-determined, notepad in hand… Talent scout Clarissa Dalrymple, puposeful in white cowboy boots… Miami’s own supercollectors Don and Mera Rubell, ever optimistic… 1980s East Village doyenne Gracie Mansion… OmnipresentArtforum publisher Knight Landsman in white suit and yellow tie (no doubt he has packed six such natty outfits)… 1980s art stars Doug Starn and Mike Starn looking smashing in matching frayed denim jeans and hair gone gray… New York painter Melissa Meyer (a friend, at last)…

Overheard: A woman complains to her female companion, “I can’t find anything to buy for $15,000.” Another man scolds a dealer, “Call us when the dollar gets stronger.”

Two observations: When it comes to art fairs, there is no such thing as fatigue. Also, after about four hours, everyone starts to look familiar (you begin to “know” the characters).

Finally, I was actually looking for art, paintings in particular. Some notable examples:

At Paula Cooper’s, Dan Walsh’s Pass (2007) consists of horizontal violet bands stacked upon a white background to buzzy hypnotic effect.

Kai Althoff’s dispersion work of blocky forms on cloth, created a gentle play on the optic relationship between gray and red, at Barbara Gladstone’s booth.

At Hetzler’s of Berlin, Arturo Herrera’s acrylic on felt work looked like a Robert Moskowitz in its silhouetted reduction—and was set up against a recent Bridget Riley.

At Michael Werner, New York, a self-contained Sigmar Polke room was installed with four fantastic ghostlike figure-ground abstractions (all sold as a set, at $5 million, a prospective buyer was informed).

Anselm Reyle, the hottest young abstractionist of the moment, had a sexy/decadent purple mylar-on-violet painted canvas work, encased in lucite box, at L & M, New York (marked sold, with a red dot at $250,000).

A new Baselitz “Remix” cowboy (!) painting (image right-side up) at Ropac, Salzburg, looking fresh and neo-Richard Prince.

Brooklyn’s own Pop Tantric Chris Martin with two forceful works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Lydia Dona, recombinant and delirious, a large diptych with engine parts outlined over shimmering silver, to the electronic soundtrack of the Dino Bruzzone piece next to it, at Karpio, San Jose.

Fabian Maracaccio and Jonathan Lasker, masters of mutant formalism and extruded brushstroke, facing off at Schulte, Berlin.

Kate Shepherd’s Pewter, American, Death, Revere (2007), white interstices of geometric netting undulating against a graphite ground, with elegant contained light, at New York’s Galerie Lelong.

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