21. Art Basel Miami

Last weekend, in an attempt to uncover the mysteries of the contemporary art market, I put on my great uncle’s Lederhosen and posed as an eccentric Austrian collector at Art Basel Miami. The gallerists had largely ignored me the day before. This sartorial jeu d’esprit was an attempt to spark them into action. And it worked. The assistants - meticulously coiffed men and languidly bored girls - appeared to perk up. They showed me around and made introductions. I asked a few questions. They replied guardedly. I got the distinct impression that they were withholding information, or perhaps waiting to see whether I would reveal my hand. And maybe that is what the art world is – a big game in which no one is quite sure of the rules, but no one wants to be the first to admit it.

Let me give a sample conversation:

Austrian ‘collector’ (examining beautiful, painstaking woodcut by Franz Gertsch): This is interesting.

Gallerist: Yes, Gertsch is a very important artist.

Austrian ‘collector’: How long would it take him to produce a print like this?

Gallerist: Gertsch works at his own speed.

Austrian ‘collector’: No doubt. And what speed is that?

Gallerist: Gertsch cannot be rushed.

Austrian ‘collector’: So how long would it take him, if he wasn’t being rushed?

Gallerist: (Reluctantly) I would say, anywhere up to 6 months. Maybe more.

Austrian ‘collector’: (Impressed) Wow, that is a long time. (Examining the tiny pointillist marks) Is he autistic?

Gallerist: (Pokerfaced) Gertsch is a very important artist.


Art Basel Miami Beach has been running since 2002 and is the sister event to the more established Art Basel in Switzerland. The fair runs for the first week of December. The official show takes place in the vast convention center. There are 250 galleries exhibiting contemporary artists; some, like Franz Gertsch, are very important. Miami’s other galleries and exhibition centers take advantage of the event to open their doors to this international assembly of art world movers and shakers. Galleries in parts of town such as Wynwood and the Design District showcase the new crop of artists waiting to be discovered.

I never knew exactly what was going on at the fair. There were a lot of people milling around but how many of them were in a position to pay the huge sums for which most of these works were being offered? Despite the ubiquitous gallerists and their languid/coiffed assistants, I never saw any evidence of business being transacted. And, in that sense, the art fair parallels the city of Miami itself. After New York and Chicago, Miami’s skyline is the third most impressive in America, according to the Almanac of Architecture and Design. And yet many of these huge buildings stand empty. Miami, like the art world, has been hit hard by the recession. Furthermore, and again like the art world, it is hard to know what makes Miami tick. San Francisco prides itself on its technology and bohemianism, New York is driven by finance and Los Angeles by the entertainment industry. And Miami?

The city is one of extraordinary diversity, even by American standards. Over one third of the population of the metropolitan area are Cuban. Large numbers of Haitians, Columbians and Brazilians live in the city itself. They rub shoulders with a generous sprinkling of European emigrés and well-heeled New Yorkers. People watching is a very entertaining local pastime. I enjoyed the sight of a statuesque platinum blond lady strutting down Lincoln Road, dragging two befuddled poodles behind her. She was no stranger to cosmetic surgery – she looked as if she had recently been punched in the mouth and was now caught in a wind tunnel.

What brings the inhabitants of Miami together? In one sense, it is a shared love of pleasure. The sports cars are flash, the yachts are big and the dresses skimpy. There is a flirtatiousness in the air which cannot be explained by the sultry climate alone. However, is there still enough money flying around in a recession to sustain these sybaritic lifestyles? That is also a question which the art world is currently grappling with. Given the cost of shipping artworks around the world – the actual cost as well as the insurance costs – it is baffling how the contemporary art scene functions at all.

Back at the art fair, there were a number of works which I found baffling in another way. I am thinking of the $5000 door mat lying in the middle of the gallery, with a plaster cast of a doorbell on top of it. The poor girl working there told me that she had already had to chase a dozen people off the mat when they accidentally stepped on it. I was so perplexed myself that I forgot to play the game for a moment; I asked her outright what the point of this ‘work’ was. She stammered a little and called her employer who proceeded to crush me beneath the weight of his art world babble.

Austrian ‘collector’: This is interesting.

Gallerist: Yes, Gabrielli is a very important artist. His experiments in form are designed to encapsulate the physical manifestation of a single thought, with all its lyricism and paradox. His pieces represent both interior visions and the very real destruction of the well-defined and corporeal. They stand on the anxious fulcrum of categorization where distinctions between forms and material disappear, or are made to disappear. Gabrielli is a very important artist.



None of this made any sense to me but it was so fluently and so earnestly delivered that any disagreement on my part would have felt like a personal insult.

I left that gallery full of admiration for the owner. Did he believe what he was saying? Was he making it all up? In any case, he had silenced me through his use of language. Like a master spin doctor, he had used language to befuddle rather than to clarify, and he had left me feeling like the idiot. That’s when I realized that language is also a big part of the art world game.

There are times when a dealer or a gallerist will push you for a reaction. At these times, there is one phrase which I find particularly useful. After a considered appraisal, I like to say, ‘Hmmm, yes, it’s very derivative.’ Out of context, this is of course utterly meaningless. Its beauty lies in the fact that it could be an endorsement or a criticism – you never have to show your hand, and you come away sounding like a great expert.

20. Georgian Wedding

I would like to describe the wedding of a dear friend who recently married in Tbilisi, Georgia (the central European country, not the US state). So far in this blog I have tried to refrain from writing about anything to do with my social life (what there is of it). I hope I have managed to restrict myself to events or narratives which may be of interest to people that don’t know me, as well as to those that do. And I have tried to steer clear of anything of a private nature.

However, I found my friend’s wedding a quite extraordinary event. For a start, it gave me my first taste of a remarkable country which I might otherwise never have visited. I was only in Tbilisi for a few days, but many aspects of the city made me think of descriptions of Middle Earth in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. When you look around you see castles, churches and monasteries perched on cliff tops. There are also a number of huge white statues of proud warrior women, their swords uplifted. However, the architecture is much more eastern than I had anticipated: many buildings have the sort of carved wooden first floor galleries that I associate primarily with Nepal. The language and alphabet are also quite unlike anything else I have ever encountered - in fact, the alphabet is unique. On the other hand, the similarities to England are also striking: both countries have almost the same flag, St. George as their patron saint, and a great love of drinking and sport.

Mama Georgia Statue

I also gained an extremely positive impression of the Georgians themselves. For a start, they seem to be extremely laid back. In fact, they take laissez-faire to a whole new level. However, at the same time there is a strong sense of pride, honour and chivalry. This is expressed in their treatment of women who, I was reliably informed, are placed on a pedestal and never permitted to pay for anything. They have also embraced rugby, which is surely quite unusual for a central Asian republic. And they are fearsome wrestlers, which I know firsthand from having been unfortunate enough to spar with the occasional Georgian at my judo club.

My friend’s wedding took place in the Mama Daviti church, on the steep side of Mount Mtatsminda (‘Holy Mountain’). There are no seats in the church; everyone stands. However, it is perfectly acceptable to wander in and out as you wish – again the Georgian laissez-faire. At times this attitude can maybe go too far: I was standing next to a woman whose mobile phone started to ring. She rummaged around in her bag, eventually found it, and then started blithely chattering away. That would not have gone down so well at an English wedding.

Mama Daviti Church in winter

Outside it was a bright and sunny; inside the church was very dark. Three ancient women chanted haunting madrigals and the incense smoke curled thickly around the candles. Bride and groom both wore crowns and the groom – my friend – was addressed with the new Georgian name which had been conferred upon him when he converted to Georgian orthodoxy two weeks beforehand in London’s Seven Sisters. The only incongruous note in this solemn ceremony was that two other couples were being married at the same time – normal procedure, apparently, though for a brief moment it did make me think of Las Vegas.

The following day the wedding guests were driven to a lunch half an hour outside Tbilisi, in the countryside. In dappled sunlight we walked down wooden steps, crossed and recrossed a small river, and walked below platforms and treehouses suspended in the foliage above. The path lead to a walled, shady terrace overlooking a broad river. It reminded me of Rivendell, the home of the elves in Middle Earth. On this terrace we were served a Georgian banquet. Since no one could read a menu, it was hard to pace oneself. Dish after dish arrived, most of them in dumpling form, and most of them very salty. This wasn’t a problem for me since I like salty food. However, in Georgia even the mineral water is salty; I found myself wishing for some normal water with which to dilute it.

Following our return from lunch, I decided to go to the sulphur baths in Tbilisi with a friend and his girlfriend. I was expecting something like a Turkish steam bath. However, the negotiations with the bath house mistress were futile since the communication barrier proved insurmountable. We were lead into our private room; I am not sure whether this was a tourist luxury or the norm. There we were given thin sheet-like towels and directed towards our private sulphur bath – a sort of hot tub full of pungent eggy water. I think we were supposed to get into the tub naked but, although I have overcome my public schoolboy’s embarrassment about male nudity, being with a friend and his girlfriend changes the dynamic. None of us had brought swimwear, having been informed that it would not be necessary (and assuming that men and women would be separated). So, we climbed into the eggy hot tub in our towels.

The water was indeed hot but in no way as satisfactory as a sauna for sweating out the accumulated toxins of the past few nights. After some minutes we heard a knocking on the door of the anteroom. I went to open it and was confronted by the burly figure of our masseur. I let him into the anteroom and he promptly took all his clothes off. I wondered whether there had been some miscommunication. The burly masseur must have seen the consternation in my face since he put his black y-fronts back on again, then he followed me into the room with the eggy hot tub.

There was a large marble slab against the side of this room. The masseur indicated to me to get onto the slab. I sat on it and swung my legs up as lithely as I could, given the restrictive nature of the sodden towel which I still had wrapped around me (and which was by now quite see-through). The burly masseur tore it off in disgust, then he began to pummel my naked form on the hard marble top, in full view of friend and girlfriend (who, I hope, chose to look elsewhere). There were three stages to this punishment and at the end of each stage a new victim was required; this involved copious amounts of soggy towel application, soggy towel removal and a complex trigonometry of gaze aversion. My favourite moment occurred during a respite in the proceedings, when my friend was naked and supine on the slab and the masseur had popped out to look for his instruments. We suddenly heard childish giggling; looking up, I could see the outstretched pointing arms and delighted faces of a number of street urchins who were peering down at us from the windows in the side of the cupola which crowned the small dome directly above our heads.

Though I wouldn’t say that I particularly enjoyed the brutal massage or the eggy water, I do feel that I have shared a bonding experience with my friend and his girlfriend. And we all enjoyed the walk from the baths back to our hotel. It was still early on Sunday evening and the streets were full of people wandering aimlessly around in large family groups. In Western Europe, certainly in Northern Europe, we only go out if we need something, or to shop. This was more similar to the Italian passegiata – couples flirting, children running around, adults stopping to shoot the breeze. There was a very enjoyable sense of unhurried bonhomie – a sort of collective stock taking. We are much the poorer for not having this in the west; I might even trade our fine northern saunas for it.