Midtown Miami Walmart would force art fairs out - Biscayne Corridor

via miamiherald.com

"With plans for a proposed mega Walmart store in Midtown moving forward, reality sets in for many art fair organizers who will have to start looking for new venues once the project breaks ground.

Scope Art Fair, Red Dot, and Art Asia, three Art Basel Miami Beach satellite fairs that last year took place on land where Walmart is planing to build its new store, are confident they’ll be able to set up camp on the lot this year too. After that, they’ll have to start searching for a space somewhere else."

The Biggest Art Basel Miami Beach Yet


Karim Masri, Meir Teper, Tony Shafrazi, and Gianni Nunnari check out Keith Haring’s Untitled (1988) at the VIP Preview at the Miami Beach Convention Center for Art Basel Miami Beach 2011

Just how overheated was the atmosphere at this past December’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach? Start with the record-size crowd of 50,000, including an opening-night vernissage crush that had the Beach’s fire marshal in a panic, hollering, “Nice and easy! Nice and easy!” as he forced hordes of VIPs to march single-file into the Miami Beach Convention Center, like so many kindergartners in high heels. Gaze over the swarm of Hollywood A-listers who winged into town, from Michael Douglas and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones to Sean Penn and Will Smith, turning Basel’s week of velvet-roped parties into a tropical take on the Sundance Film Festival.

Then add the sudden transformation of louche celebs into discerning cultural mavens: If the sight of Sean “Diddy” Combs dropping $70,000 at the fair on one of British neo-feminist Tracey Emin’s sculptures wasn’t jarring enough for you (Emin’s solo exhibition at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art is already scheduled for 2013), there was New York Yankee A-Rod trading in his baseball bat for curatorial duties, having a set of It boy Nate Lowman’s “bullet-hole” paintings installed in his waterfront Miami Beach home (including inside his indoor batting cage, naturally), while a who’s who of visiting Basel-ites ooh-ed and ah-ed over his burgeoning art collection.

Not least, there was a dizzying array of, ahem, art-themed corporate product launches: a pop-up shop hawking a new line of Dior handbags customized by German abstract painter Anselm Reyle? Why not! Perrier copresenting a night with drag queen-cum-videographer Kalup Linzy and post-punkers TV on the Radio? Sure! A poolside fête with alt-rockers Soulwax, courtesy of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Maybach autos, and… the Kingdom of Morocco? “The same publicist who brought us Maybach was working with Morocco,” LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch helpfully explained to The Wall Street Journal. “Everybody wants to connect with contemporary art.” Well, pass the lamb tagine.

Maybe it’s best not to overthink this blurring of art and commerce, as evidenced by the spirit inside the Basel booth of Leipzig, Germany’s Eigen + Art. There, a woman stood transfixed before Neo Rauch’s Die Jägerin, a fiercely imposing, nearly eight-foot-tall, bronze statue of a female falconer readying for battle. “Where will this go?” she asked earnestly. It seemed like a fair question—sporting a fearsome necklace of four disembodied heads, the statue seemed best suited for display inside Qaddafi’s revolutionary palace. “Where will it go?” thundered back gallery head Gerd Harry Lybke. “To whoever gives me $850,000!”

via oceandrive.com

Revelers celebrated the 10th year of Art Basel Miami Beach in two ways: with private dinners or private parties.

Jeffrey Deitch, the hyper-social director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, held both at the Raleigh Hotel. “This is the American equivalent of the Venice Biennale,” said Mr. Deitch, in purple, as he passed Alexandra Richards in the D.J. booth. “Social interaction has always been an important part of the art experience.”

MIami makes it to the new york times again!

But not everyone is happy that the institution, now known as the Miami Art Museum, will be recast as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County to recognize Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift in cash and art.

Four board members have resigned in protest. Several are threatening to rescind their contributions. Protest e-mails to museum officials have complained that an institution being built on public land and largely financed by taxpayers should not be named for an individual, no matter how generous.

“Name a plaza or a wing or the building,” said Rubén A. Rodríguez, one of the trustees who resigned, “but not the institution.”

The naming and renaming of institutions, arenas, even bridges, after people, to raise money or recognize civic contributions, typically engender little fuss. (Think of the Guggenheim or the Getty, not the former Brendan Byrne Arena.) There was hardly a peep when the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008, after Mr. Koch’s pledge of $100 million.

But in an era when the need for cultural largesse by the wealthy is only expanding, there has been an unusual level of opposition here to the idea of renaming a community resource after an individual patron of the arts.

Is it the timing? The size of the gift? Mr. Pérez’s career as a major developer here? Or perhaps jealousy on the part of others whose own major contributions to the arts have never secured such a high-profile designation?

Museum officials say they’ve been surprised by the community reaction to the name change, though they caution against exaggerating the response. The change, after all, they said, was approved last week by a vote of the museum board; of the 35 members present, only 4 voted against, with 1 abstention.

Thomas Collins, the museum’s director, said the institution was fortunate that Mr. Pérez, a trustee, stepped up to take a lead role in its $220 million capital campaign to bolster its endowment and construct the new building, to be completed in 2013. Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift includes a pledge of $20 million, along with $15 million worth of Latin American art, which he collects avidly.

“He has been part of the governance and leadership of the institution,” Mr. Collins said. “He has made a major commitment of fine art to the museum. Institutions have been named for people who’ve done just one of those things.”

Many institutions have taken to naming just about anything — hallways, lobbies, staircases — to raise money. In Miami naming has become something of a rage. In 2008 the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts — named for the cruise line — was renamed for the businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht after her $30 million gift. When the Miami Science Museum opens its new building in 2014, it will be renamed the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. There is also the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and the Frost Museum of Art at Florida International University.

Naming is often a prickly issue for an institution, since it links it to a person in the public’s mind.

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said that institutions have to be careful about whom they agree to be associated with. “I’m not sure anyone would want to have the Bonnie and Clyde Opera Company,” he said.

Sometimes property has to be unnamed. The Vilar Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera House, for example, went back to being just the Grand Tier after its benefactor, Alberto W. Vilar, failed to come through on his financial commitments.

via nytimes.com