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When the world comes crashing down around you,
when you can’t bear the headlines, or your bills, or even your
bff—let art be the anodyne for your soul. And while it might
seem as if the Miami Beach
Convention Center is hardly sanctum sanctorum, to walk
there at the peak of Art Basel Miami Beach is to be completely immersed in a world
existing solely for art. For what is Art Basel Miami Beach if
not a whole world of people declaiming, “Look what I made.
Let’s put on a show.” Who can resist such ingenuous
exuberance? With the fruits of creative labors spreading as far
as the eyes can see, you can’t help but consider all the people
in this world who live to create. So many artists—creating, not
hating. For if you’re creating, you’re not destroying. It’s
enough to make you wish everyone on the planet were in touch
with their inner artist.
Begun in 2002, this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was
the seventh edition, with more than 250 galleries from 33
countries chosen from over 800 applicants. Even in a sour
economy, people were willing to fork over the rather hefty
admission fee. And for what? To experience beauty? To have
their preconceptions challenged—Is this art? My kid has this
on our fridge. Perhaps it was simply to commingle with
40,000 fellow aesthetes, dilettantes, and the curious.
How did this year’s edition reflect the zeitgeist? Well, there
was Chinese artist Zheng Guogu’s installation, “Commemorative
Plaque 2008: Lehman Brothers Gate,” which included painted walls
based on Internet images of Lehman employees vacating their
premises, alongside portraits of Warren Buffet and Henry
Paulson. And there were Barbara Kruger’s pithy and apt text
pieces, this year taken from Goethe who wrote, “We are the
slaves of objects around us,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s quote, “He
entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and
looked at all objects with a wild and distracted stare.”
Clearly, people—we’ve been down this profligate road before; we
seem only to have forgotten.
But rather than dispiriting, the overall tone at Art Basel Miami
Beach was one of relief—that things were not worse than they
are. For to see a smorgasbord of the world’s peoples coming
together under one roof to admire (and critique) art from all
over the world is to be reminded anew of the interconnectedness
of our pursuit of beauty. In the end, it’s possible to come
away from Art Basel Miami Beach and posit the equation
ART = HOPE.
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