Someone told me this blog is getting stale, and that someone’s probably the only person who actually reads it. For that, I apologize. I’m new to blogging. Back in early December, a major Manhattan website had an internal crisis and wound up with a bunch of job openings. My agent set me up with an interview, but the guy who was hiring said, “Bro, how can I hire someone for a blogging position who doesn’t even have a blog?” He had a point. A few days later, John Claude Lacroix, Medicine’s founding partner, called me while I was on vacation in Miami. “Dude, write for my site,” Lacroix says. “Dude, send me the info. I’m in,” I say. Now just two and half months later, we’ve already gone sour.
Still, I enjoy the act of writing so much that I’m obviously willing to continue. But from this day on I’ll try extra hard not to bore readers. Rather, today I’ll use Portfolio Magazine as a lead in to a discussion of media, art, and politics. Also included is an unpublished essay written right when John asked me to blog.
In Miami, when John conceived this whole thing, I was attending Basel Miami, North America’s largest contemporary art fair. Yesterday, when my over dinner someone decried Med’s online sourness, I had just attended an opening for a group show of Iraq photographers. Below is one of the images from the show, taken by Stefan Zaklin, of a dead American in Fallujah.
The tie between Miami Basel and the Iraq war can be found in the pages of Conde Naste Portfolio this month. The magazine, now on it’s sixth (?) issue, has hit its stride. Si Newhouse staked $100 million—about the same as Transformers’ budget—to launch Portfolio. Media gossips at the Observer, Gawker, and Fishwbowl covered Portfolio’s every hire and fire, issue by issue. No feature was left untouched. The New Republic dispatched Elizabeth Spiers to write 3000 words on why Portfolio sucks (no longer avail online). Rumors of Michael Lewis getting $12 a word proved unfounded. Tom Wolfe did a cover story. And Portfolio trudged along.
Well, I finally bought my first issue, thanks to a cover story about Iraq by Denis Johnson, former junky and current National Book Award for fiction winner. Johnson stays up in Kurdistan, covering the oil boom. His story is hardly Jon Lee Anderson getting shot at in the opium fields. But Johnson writes a great piece nonetheless. With sentences like this:
This evening, Rambo orders beef Stroganoff, therefore so do I, to my considerable regret, and he sips a German beer I should get the name of, but I’m more interested in clocking his consumption, because I wonder if it’s possible for this specimen to chug down the calories and still look capable of pinning an elephant in four moves at the age of 47.
…it’s hard not to enjoy Johnson’s piece.
Portfolio’s sole problem is it’s limited scope. See it’s a business magazine trying to act like an ASME contender like VF or The Atlantic. My humble advice? Pull back on “business”—such a cruel concept anyway, ripping people off, don’t you think?—and play up the economics. Recent business best-sellers have been in The World is Flat and Freakonomics vein. Political economy—not business. With writers like Johnson, Portfolio should explicitly (like in an editor’s note) expand its breadth beyond “business” and into “political economy.” Using an all encompassing term that covers capitalist democracy and more allows the magazine to go deeper.
For instance, this month Adres Martinez writes a front of the book piece on campaign finance. He compares election spending to what large corporations shell out for marketing. Wendy’s spent $315 million last year, or the same as Kerry in 04. ATT spent $2.2 billion, about twice what this year’s race is to cost. Perfect political economy writing here…
The Portfolio stories that stay too business-y are boring.
Not boring is Jay McInerney’s Art Basel piece. Like Johnson, McInerney is a (former?) druggy novelist. Unlike the universally praised Johnson, McInerney is all too often derided for being a caricature of his younger self. Hey, is it Jay’s fault that he wrote Bright Lights, Big City, the only pure 80s NY cocaine classic?
Since then Jay’s lived it up as a wine columnist, model fucker, Strokes hater, foie gras eater, West Villager, without ever really leaving NYC or the Hamptons. He’s easy to hate on, for sure, but his books are fun and well written. Plus, the guy needs to exist. New York needs an 80s writer holdover who isn’t dead or completely washed up, someone who still lives “the life.”
So read the first paragrph from the Basel story:
Thursday morning, 4:30, I’m walking back to my hotel from Le Baron, the transplanted French nightclub that sets up shop on Collins Avenue for the week of Art Basel Miami Beach, with Paul Sevigny, a D.J., and Patrick McMullan, a photographer. (Who’s buying whom? Read “How Stars Are Born at Art Basel.”) Patrick’s been hard at work shooting the parties that have become such a big part of the festival, and Paul’s come down from New York to spin for one of them—I forget which. Ralph Lauren, Pucci, Swarovski, Audi, and UBS, the banking giant that’s the main sponsor of the event, are among the corporate entities that have hosted events tonight, and those are just the ones I can remember. The festival officially opened 12 hours ago, but the serious collectors and V.I.P.’s swarmed the Miami Beach Convention Center starting at noon, and the serious party people had attended dozens of soirees the night before. Iggy Pop gave a concert on the beach tonight, and not long after that I found myself on the lower floor of the Delano at Lenny Kravitz’s nightclub, the Florida Room, chatting with transvestites and trying unsuccessfully to make conversation with Lance Armstrong. (View other art shows around the world.)
Flashback to December. I’m at Basel, John calls, this blog thing is about to happen. I’m also working on a Miami piece for, um, myself I guess. This was my first lede:
Friday, 3am: Collins Ave, South Beach. Outside Rokbar, Tommy Lee’s club. During Basel, Rokbar’s been taken over by Parisian disco Le Baron. On this night Le Baron was hosting Purple Magazine, a $20 French fashion text that mixes downtown NY low-culture with Parisian high-sleaze. The party’s door sets nightlife records for arrogance.
“This,” cue a nose-y French accent, “is a family affair tonight. No one is getting in,” unless you’re Paris Hilton, who showed up with Brooklyn tattoo artitst Scott “Saved” Campbell, to hear DJ Paul “Chloe’s Brother” Sevigny, owner of NY mini-club Beatice Inn.
All this attitude to get into an ugly room—the walls are lined by faux-amps and televisions playing subversive videos—only to be swarmed by guidos of both the Miami-Armani/Exchange and French-snakeskin boot variety. Down the street was another party, hosted by Eva Mendes for V Magazine. Earlier, Scion (the car) had partnered with Swindle Magazine (founded by graphic designer Shepard Fairly) to host a party showcasing graffiti paintings on hotel rooftop. Vanity Fair and Moma did parties that night too.
Fuck, I guess we all did the same things in Miami.
Anyway, Jay McInerney basically launched Chloe and thus her brother’s career.
Chloe naked in Purple Magazine.
Back in 1994, Jay kept seeing this young lil thang around. He dubbed her the “It Girl” and wrote a profile for the New Yorker. Without Jay’s 7000 word love in, would Chloe be on Big Love today, would the Beatrice Inn exist? While not solely responsible for Sevingys’ dual rise, Jay’s piece in 94 certainly helped…
More on Jay and Chloe, and an unpublished essay on Basel Miami…
Jay Mclnerney, Manhattan Diary, “CHLOE’S SCENE,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1994, p. 182MANHATTAN DIARY about Chloe Sevigny, 19, who is a downtown trendsetter of the moment. She was in a Sonic Youth video, recently in Details, in a series of photographs by Larry Clark, who has just cast her in his new movie “Kids”; at the moment, she is 5′8″, weighs 110, and looks, in her current short coif, quite a bit like a skinny Jean Seberg. Her nose is perhaps a bit blunt, and she points out the crookedness in her posture, which is the result of childhood scoliosis, but this doesn’t prevent downtown style chieftains and scenesters from comparing her to Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn and Edie Sedgwick. Her first break came at 17, when she was picked for a Sassy shoot, and was asked to be a summer intern there. Around that time, she posed for a fashion spread in Paper. A stylist, Gabriel Feliciano, said, “People want to project their desire on one girl. She’s smart enough to hold back, and that allows us all to project whatever we want to. I could go on and on about Chloe, but actually I know very little about her.”
Back to staleness and Iraq and Basel Miami. Below is an essay I wrote from Basel, detailing the contemporary art world’s detached reality and love of partying.
IN THE BUBBLE AT BASEL MIAMI
1.
Friday, 3am: Collins Ave, South Beach–outside Rokbar, Tommy Lee’s club. During Basel, Rokbar’s been taken over by Parisian disco Le Baron. On this night Le Baron was hosting Purple Magazine, a $20 French fashion text that mixes downtown NY low-culture with Parisian high-sleaze. The party’s door sets nightlife records for arrogance.
“This,” cue a nose-y French accent, “is a family affair tonight. No one is getting in,” unless you’re Paris Hilton, who showed up with Brooklyn tattoo artitst Scott “Saved” Campbell, to hear DJ Paul Svenghy, owner of NY miniclub Beatrice Inn.
All this attitude to get into an ugly room—the walls are lined by faux-amps and televisions playing subversive videos—only to be swarmed by guidos of both the Miami-Armani/Exchange and French-snakeskin boot variety. Down the street was another party, hosted by Eva Mendes for V Magazine. Earlier, Scion (the car) had partnered with Swindle Magazine (founded by graphic designer Shepard Fairly) to host a party showcasing graffiti paintings on hotel rooftop. Vanity Fair and Moma did parties that night too.
Miami girls don’t wear pants anymore. Any fabric below the labia is passé. I learned this from two local women over cocktails at a South Beach hotel, while waiting for their drug dealer at 4am. Both wore spandex shorts that covered half their ass cheeks, but one complained, “I should’ve just worn underwear.” As is, she wore white shirt that barely covered her spandex. It’s day three of Art Basel, North America’s largest contemporary art fair. Another girl arrived a black cocktail dress that “barely covers cooch,” she snorted with a giggle. When one more friend showed up wearing jeans, she bitched, “Damn it, why did I wear so much?” The drugs showed up: two eight balls, twenty E pills, a half-ounce of pot, and two vials of Special K–a lot of contraband for less than ten people.
2
Art, sex, money, commercialism, celebrity, media, drugs—Miami during Basel celebrates creativity with excess. It’s easy to have a great time, but easier still to get jaded on the contemporary art juggernaut. But those sickened by vagina-touts, brand synergy, and $75,000 dollar kitschy paintings by 29-year-old Chinese can rejoice: The art bubble is about to burst! By most accounts, 2007 saw Basel at its peak. Over 50,000 artists, gallerists, journalists, publicists, collectors, and party-people invaded Miami for what will likely go down as the Biggest Bestest Basel Ever. This year, Thorstein Veblen’s name came up more the Murakami’s. So is the leisure class about to downsize?
Art Basel Miami is the little sister of Art Basel, the world’s largest contemporary art fair, held every June in Basel, Switzerland. The first spin-off came to Miami in 2002. Since then contemporary art prices have risen 100%. While not solely responsible for the increase, Basel Miami certainly helped make art collecting sexier and more visible in America. But as the sub-prime fallout forces the global economy towards recession, art prices should flatten out. Last month, Sotheby’s missed its auction targets. Reports on sales in Miami were mixed.
The bubble hasn’t popped yet, though. This year, aside from Basel itself, which takes up a hundred-thousand square feet (the size of your average Wal Mart) of the Miami Convention Center, there were twenty other fairs, countless museum exhibitions, scores of gallery shows, and party’s celebrating everything from Lou Reed’s Berlin LP to designer dildos. Basel is designed to wear you out.
Of course with the world’s top galleries present the main fair was wonderful: De Kooning, Picasso, Matisse, Rothko, Judd, Warhol…a highlight reel of the last 150 years. Pop, abstract expressionist, minimalist, and impressionist art was just a sideshow. Basel is all about contemporary work.
Among the best-represented living artists were Richard Prince and Gerhard Richter. At the moment Prince has a retrospective on at the Guggenheim, a “collabo” with Louis Vutton, and a painting on the The New Republic’s cover. A Richter sold for $6 million on the fair’s opening night. Richter’s moody, reflective abstractions are more striking than Prince’s pop-culture appropriation.
Walking the Convention hall I saw Kehinde Wiley canvases at three separate gallery booths. Wiley, a black man in his 30s, takes the hood and mashes it with 19th century masters. Hanging at Wiley’s New York dealer, Deitch Projects, was a four by seven foot painting of a ghetto black guy laid out dead, draped by brown vines. Can’t afford a $60,000 price tag? Try a $50 towel.
Judging from Art Basel, the War on Terror never happened, nor did 9/11. To some, this was welcome. “The last thing the world needs is a post-9/11 art book,” said an editor at an art book house. According to my computer’s dictionary, art is “the creation of beautiful or thought provoking works.” Nonetheless, 98% of Basel artists’ thoughts looked unprovoked by politics. For every Raymond Pettibon and Robert Polidori, there were a fifty pure aesthetes dealing solely in shape, medium, and color. Why is apolitical work so dominant in 2007? Maybe it’s because the collectors—in their pearls and, blue blazers and Tod’s–are Republicans. Or maybe all of us are sick of war.
Not everyone avoided war. At Photo Miami in Wynwood, Miami’s Chelsea, Timothy Greenfield–Sanders showed a series of Iraq-veteran portraits. Epic and haunting, the bold full color prints of eyeless, armless, legless soldiers moved some viewers to tears. Each portrait was accompanied by an interview with the soldier or a family member. Several were injured in Ramadi, the majority in Baghdad. The causes various: car bombs, shaped explosives, grenades, small arms fire, suicide bombs, mortars. In the interviews, the soldiers issued no regret, instead expressing hope and pride. Still, one can’t help but feel responsible for their wounds, as it is our tax money paying for the war. Is this type of work too raw?
Other themes from Photo Miami: Hazy Chinese skyscraper construction in medium Format; Golden African animals in motion; digital mash-up with absract social commentary.
In general, the fairs in Wynwood were riskier. NADA was especially raw, with a DIY feel. Zine culture and experimental sculpture from household items were themes. Upstairs from the Pulse fair was Geisai, an interactive fair that originated in Japan. The brainchild of artists Takashi Murakami, Geisai featured 24 unrepresented artists. The artists sat with their work, greeting viewers and answering questions. I met Blane De St Croix, a Boston-born sculptor in his late 30s. His sculptures were scale models of border zones from around the world: Mexican-US (a desert with a fence), North-South Korea’s DMZ (“The largest wild life sanctuary in the Koreas,” De St Croix said), and Afghanistan-Pakistan. Dressed in jeans and lime green vacation shirt, De St Croix, who received an NEA Fellowship, defied the artist stereotype and loved the Red Sox.
Wynwood’s a new urbanized warehouse neighborhood in downtown Miami, with bums and beat-up cars next to high-end galleries. At 60% Hispanic, Miami is America’s most Latin American city. Borrowing a Central and South American theme, Miami is America’s most unequal city economically and corrupt politically. The poverty rate is 26.9%, twice the national average, according to the Census Bureau. With a median household income of $27,088 (the national average is $48,451), only landlocked Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo are poorer.
Still, Miami’s Fisher Island is the country’s richest zip code. It makes little sense why Miami’s so poor. It has a strong tourism market, and is an international banking and shipping hub. Until one considers how corruptly the government spreads its tax money. If Miami’s exiled Cuban reactionaries—who dominate Miami-Dade politics–adopted some of Fidel’s socialism there’d be fewer poor.
Traveling from South Beach’s translucence to downtown’s despair made it hard to shed a tear for the art bubble’s likely deflation. In fact, it made me think that the bubble has padded artists pockets so much they’ve left reality altogether.Money, art, bubbles, vanity, racial inequality, status seekers, sexy-ness!!! …sounds like a Tom Wolfe novel. Wait, isn’t that a picture online of Wolfe at Basel’s opening party? His next book, set in Miami, is about immigration. (And later sold for $7 million!!!) He told the Wall Street Journal: “I want to create a green zone in Miami. A green zone for artists, where we give them free iPhones and microwaves, and then send them out into the slums to revive the areas — sort of like an artist army.” Great idea.
3.
Everything that’s right/wrong about Basel can be found at the Raleigh Hotel. On Saturday night I sat poolside under dangling poofy lights, encircled by palm trees. Like in some Latin House music video, divas with death stares toasted Ricky Martin-look alikes. Olivier Zahn, Purple’s editor and Karl Lagerfeld’s brosef, wearing a leather jacket and aviators, brushed past architect Greg Lind. Tending bar were two Haitian-Americans. “We have great art and music in Haiti,” one told me. “But no one here cares.”
I overhear a conversation about video art. “It’s a breakout year for the video artists, indeed,” said a bearded fellow in a tan suit. Video art was dominating national headlines too. The CIA, having perfected the art of unlawfully destroying interrogation tapes, some containing torture footage, was dealing with a mounting scandal.
Sure, after days of lunches, fairs, and hustling about, it felt amazing to have my senses tingled by near naked women at one of the most beautiful poolside lounges on earth. Yet enjoying $14 dollar cocktails at 2am usually comes as a reward after a day of hard work. Was Art Basel challenging? Thought provoking? On both counts: not enough—it was an inaccurate reflection of the world. But as a bubble protecting us from 2007, Art Basel was a perfect escape from reality.
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