Inside the “Herculean” Effort of Throwing Miami Art Week
As curator Zoe Lukov looks out at the Atlantic Ocean, her unromantic view is of three fork lifts, two trucks, a palette of bricks, and a black golf cart buzzing by. Presenting art on a beach is very different from in a theater or gallery; the job can be “Herculean,” says the curator of the huge Faena Arts Festival taking place in Miami this week. Some hurdles are expected, of course, when you plan a parade down Collins Avenue. But who knew you had to arrange for the pyrotechnics expert to meet with the fire chief so that artist George Sánchez-Calderón could burn down his sculpture of the American dream home at sunset on the beach?
Right now, there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on in Miami as intricate and insane preparations for Miami Art Week are made. Centering around the blue-chip fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, the bacchanalia of buying, branding and, sometimes, breathtaking art and design, is now in its 17th year and opens December 5 to VIPs, Thursday to the public. The fair and dozens of related and rival events annually boost the 475,000 population of the city of Miami by more than 25 percent in five days and push car traffic on the Miami Beach causeways up almost 80 percent. (Uber says it expects business to be “spectacular.”)
There are bigger glamour scrums, of course—Cannes, Sundance, the Olympics, but probably none as varied. From groupies of great art to heritage wood carvers to caravans of Swiss bankers jetting Chinese art collectors to limited-edition sneaker drops to block-chain proselytizers to handbag fetishists, they all come.
What’s interesting is how strategic it all is, how much work goes into making it look easy. (Those thousands of strings of tasteful fairy lights don’t grow on trees.) Consider Uber. To solve potential problems this week, the private car company hired Peruvian artist Emil Alzamora to install his sculptures as easily noticed meeting points throughout the city and then hired popular cult influencer and model Gregory DelliCarpini to publicize it. (Only in the art world would that string of words make any sense.) Notes DelliCarpini, “Even when you are waiting, you are taking part in the art.’
And food? What Thanksgiving is to turkeys, Art Basel Miami Beach Week is to the unfortunate crustacean. South Beach restaurant Lobster Bar Sea Grille has brought in 700 pounds of lobster tails in preparation. Catering to the week’s influx of high rollers “is like giving birth,” says chef Arturo Paz. “It’s painful at first and you have to push through, but in a blink of an eye it’s gone and you’re left feeling rewarded.” There’s also painting-with-chocolate parties, events promising “unlimited prosecco” and, in what certainly has to be credited as a new wrinkle, Scotch whisky brand Monkey Shoulder is driving around a “Monkey Shaker,” a retrofitted 2,400 cement truck that will dispense cocktails.
Each year is different, a bellwether of its time. This year, there is long-overdue attention to artists of color and issues of immigration, and more charity events than usual. For the first time, the historical African-American neighborhood of Overtown gets a slew of Miami Art Week events tied to the opening of Urban, a new community and arts center. There are gorgeous examples of design to be seen, on view at an inventive Louis Vuitton “Objets Nomade” exhibition, Art Deco stars at the Wolfsonian Museum, and at the Bass Museum of Art, a retrospective of works by the Haas Brothers is generating a lot of buzz. With so many concurrent events competing for attendance and attention, the hype is deafening. (You will never get more invitations to events featuring “world-renowned artists” you’ve never heard of.) But perhaps the biggest marquee event, and the most strategic, is the Red Auction December 5.
Charity art auctions are a dime a dozen, but this one has powerful friends and a gimmick: Done in tandem with powerhouse global art dealer and ABMB participant Larry Gagosian, this sale will offer artworks for which you would typically have to be on a waiting list to get access. “You can’t get a Jenny Seville directly from the studio. You can’t get a Lorna Simpson,” notes Sotheby’s chairman of Europe and sale auctioneer Oliver Barker. Sotheby’s made $68 million from the last two Red Auctions, making them among the more successful charity auctions in the U.S.
So, led by the AIDS charity’s founder Bono, expect an invasion of one-named people to Miami this week, for this and other events. Hello, regulars Paris, A-Rod, Kim, Beyoncé, Leo, Drake, and Questlove—leave a little art, and a few handbags, for the rest of us.
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