Art Basel Miami Beach: Let the bright lights shine

While the UK shivers amidst gales and plummeting temperatures, the art world skips off in search of sunshine and sales to Art Basel Miami Beach. Now in its 12th edition, ABMB is has firmly established itself as America’s leading art fair. With some 258 galleries taking part, it brings a savvy harnessing of Swiss efficiency to South Beach, proving that business and pleasure can indeed combine. Certainly the throng pouring into Miami’s South Beach Convention Center on Wednesday’s opening day didn’t seem to be drawing in their horns, with brisk sales from the word go and the high-rolling visitors striding through the booths ranging from Leonardo di Caprio and P Diddy, to veteran patrons such as Eli Broad and Swiss philanthropist Maja Hoffmann.

This year more than ever the fair reflects Miami’s position at the crossroads of North and Latin America with more than half the participating galleries having spaces in these regions, along with a spate of new arrivals from China, Singapore, South Korea and Africa that further underline the ever-expanding frontiers of the art market.

Then for those on a more modest budget there’s a welcome new Edition section with ABMB newcomers such as London’s Paul Stolper Gallery offering pieces by Jeremy Deller and Gavin Turk as well as a special flatpack cardboard plinth by Manchester design guru Peter Saville upon which you can place your art work du jour.

At the other end of the spectrum there are booths that challenge the fair format. Neugerriemschneider’s stand is part cabinet, part salon, completely created by Cuban-born artist Jorge Pardo. The outside has special niches containing works by gallery artists; the inside is draped with lush fabric and furnished with chic and comfortable Pardo-designed sofas and armchairs to encourage relaxation and contemplation. It even has a discrete tequila bar – so popular you need a special password to get in – but it is also entirely for sale. Ingleby Gallery from Scotland has entirely recreated the wooden hillside hut of reclusive Antiguan artist Frank Walter, complete with his furnishings and paintings. Basel newcomer Tang Contemporary Art recreates a Beijing finance office, with every object – printers, phones, even a pack of cigarettes – fitted with little motors that make them appear to breathe.   

Of course ABMB is no longer the only fair in town and over the last decade it has spawned a throng of satellites which are scattered throughout the various districts of Miami and offer a dizzying amount of alternative options and works in all media.  For the best of 20^th and 21^st century design there is Design Miami, which also has a Basel sister, then for prints and works on paper there’s Ink, housed in the Deco Dorchester Hotel while all the major collectors have been gravitating to NADA, the edgy yet reputable young art fair run by the New Art Dealer’s Alliance which this year scatters more than 70 galleries and artist’s projects from the US and beyond throughout the reception rooms and poolside of the expansive Deauville resort.

A few years ago there was much harrumphing that ABMB had lost its surfside funkiness by no longer housing its young galleries in empty storage containers down on the beach, but now there’s a chance to get surfside again with stylish newcomer Untitled – which is threatening to give NADA a run for its money showing over 100 contemporary art galleries in a chic and capacious tent structure pitched on the beach, just adjacent to the parade of landmark deco buildings on South Beach’s Ocean Drive. Reluctant to be left behind, long-standing satellite Scope has also come down to the sea, pitching another tent structure just a few metres away.

Overall there is no doubt that ABMB has been instrumental in transforming Miami into a high-end cultural hub, and proof positive of the city’s changing status is the opening (or in fact many openings) this week of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, in a spectacular new $131m building designed by Herzog de Meuron and housing new installations by Ai Wei Wei and Hew Locke as well as an impressive permanent collection.

PAMM is the latest and largest of a plethora of quasi-institutional private initiatives by the local collector community that since the inauguration of ABMB have all contributed to the city’s cultural regeneration. These include the De La Cruz Collection, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, The Margulies Collection and most notably the Rubell Family Collection, owned by Don and Mera Rubell and housed in a vast former Drug Enforcement Agency warehouse. (It is the only art gallery to have featured in Miami Vice).

This week the Rubells have opened 28 Chinese, an exhibition devoted to new Chinese art and the result of more than 100 studio visits made by the energetic couple and their son Jason throughout China earlier this year. It’s an impressive show, combining classic pieces by big names like Ai Wei Wei and Zhang Huan with newcomers such as He Xiangyu, who boils down vats of Coca-Cola and displays himself like Chairman Mao as a waxwork in a glass case.

The other main event, which like the exhibitions in the private collections and PAMM will remain open once the fair and its entourage have left town, is the exhibition of Tracey Emin’s neons at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

It’s Emin’s first US museum show and she’s arrived in style with a multicoloured extravaganza of over 67 neon works spanning 20 years which chimes perfectly with the aesthetic of this bright, buzzy intense city. “The thing about Miami is I don’t need to persuade people that neon is worth looking at; neon is part of their psyche,” Emin says. “It’s the same with me growing up in Margate: I understand why neon makes you feel good.” From Margate to Miami, let the bright lights shine.

Art Basel Miami Beach: Let the bright lights shine