Art Basel and Miami Art Week begin with $4 million Banksy sale and banana guy
After a 2020 pandemic hiatus, the Art Basel fair and all its high-gauge hoopla returned to Miami Beach on Tuesday, signaling a jubilant “go” for the first Miami Art Week in two years. And it’s safe to say the usual crush of rich collectors, art aficionados and assorted hangers-on — and the resulting traffic jams — were never more welcome.
The 2021 edition of the main fair, which moved up its VIP preview by a day, made a chill debut Tuesday morning, followed a few hours later by the invitation-only openings for the companion Design Miami fair next to the Beach’s convention center, as well as Art Miami and its companion Context fair in downtown Miami. The myriad satellite fairs, like Untitled Art, which opened Monday evening on the sands of South Beach, are also back in force.
To thin out crowds because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Basel fair restricted entry to timed slots and will hold a second VIP-only viewing on Wednesday.
‘ENERGY HERE IS GREAT’
Collectors and gallerists said they were happy to be meeting in person after two years of mostly virtual communication. And fair organizers and gallery directors said they were pleased and struck by the international character of fair-goers, a result of the Biden administration’s recent lifting of travel restrictions.
They said it’s a good sign for the fairs and gallerists, who weren’t quite sure what to expect after the deep disruptions caused by the pandemic and the specter of the worrisome new omicron variant. Though some artists, gallery managers and staffers from Africa were prevented from coming by new travel restrictions prompted by the variant’s spread in South Africa, work from the continent had been shipped earlier and staffers were in place in Miami before restrictions hit, fair organizers said.
“Many more collectors are attending than I expected,” said Julie Roberts, of Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, at the Basel fair. The gallery represents Betye Saar, whose work is on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the Miami Design District. “The energy here is great.”
STEADY SALES REPORTED
At the massive 190,000square-foot Art Miami tent on the edge of Biscayne Bay, a steady flow of art lovers streamed into the Tuesday evening opening, many in designer sneakers and all of them wearing masks (most stayed on). As the bars did a brisk business, collectors were swiftly pleased with the quality of what they saw.
Ann Nitze of New York and Washington, D.C., found herself negotiating with Acheus/Post-Modern London shortly after her arrival for the painting “Glass Vase, Jug, And Wheat” by the renowned Los Angeles-based British artist David Hockney.
“We’ve all been at home so long,” she said. “We’re really happy to be here.”
Her companion, Suzi Cordish of Baltimore, who owns a home on Fisher Island, says she plans to buy around six pieces, and some will certainly come from Art Miami.
“I think it’s the best ever,” she said of the 2021 show, adding that she has been coming to Art Miami for 15 years. “I spend more time here than at the convention center.”
Less than an hour after opening, galleries at the Basel show were already reporting steady sales.
“Is the Anicka Yi still available?” an associate at the Gladstone both asked a co-worker. “Reserve it for me.”
Though Art Basel staged a fair in its home city of
Basel in September, the response was more muted there, noted Los Angelesbased curator and dealer Jeffrey Deitch.
“Basel was really only Europeans,” he said. “This time there are collectors from South America, Africa, Asia, across the U.S. This is the first time collectors from all over the art world have gathered. People are enthusiastic.”
At Art Miami, a work by British graffiti artist Banksy entitled “Charlie Brown” sold for $4 million at the Maddox Gallery booth.
BANANA GUY IS BACK
Also back at Basel: the banana guy. This time, he has brought a pigeon problem.
Famed conceptual artist and art jokester Maurizio Cattelan, whose $120,000 banana — an actual ripe fruit duct-taped to a gallery wall — caused a worldwide stir at the Miami Beach edition in 2019, is showing new work at Perrotin’s booth. Perched atop the edge of the booth’s walls are 56 pigeons.
If they look uncannily lifelike, it’s because they’re real. Taxidermied and perched in various postures, the pigeons make up two of the most recent version of Cattelan’s long-running “The Ghost Series.” One, consisting of 35 pigeons, is $350,000. The other grouping of 21 goes for $210,000.
In contrast to Cattelan’s art-world flippancy, though, both Basel and Art Miami had plenty of 20th century and contemporary works by big-name artists like Stella, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Alex Katz and their artistic descendants, including Keith Haring and George Condo. At Art Miami, fair director Nick Korniloff said he expects big names to dominate the week’s conversation, from Damien Hirst to Haring and street artist Kaws, whose work is “heavily sought after by collectors.”
Among other standouts, a four-panel piece by Colombian artist Fernando Botero at Art of the World’s booth is “a rare, rare piece any collector of Latin American art would want,” Kroniloff said. It’s expected to go for more than $12 million, gallerist Mauricio Vallejo said.
MORE INCLUSIVE FAIRS
Something new at this year’s fair is a bigger showing of work by artists of color, a consequence of greater concern in the art world over racial equity, Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler said.
“It has made for an interesting and better show,” he said.
As a result, much of the new work shown at the two big fairs, especially that by younger artists of color, engages the topical issues of race, ethnicity, colonialism, gender and other themes of identity, place and politics that rose to the fore during the pandemic and the protests over the killing of George Floyd by police.
One showstopper, at the Moderne booth, is Hashimoto Tomonari’s “Glazed Ceramic Globe,” created just this year. The Japanese artist made a giant ceramic orb to resemble the Earth, gallery owner Robert Aibel said.
One of the most striking and potentially provocative works on display at the Basel fair is a reproduction of the neon sign at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, at Paula Cooper’s booth.
The lettering on the sign spells out a quotation of dialogue by a character in “Beloved,” the classic novel by Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison: “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.” In the novel, the character, on her deathbed, is lamenting the miseries she has lived through.