During a recent opening at the Carol Jazzar gallery in El Portal, longtime holographer Mark Diamond used the headlights of his 1989 Caprice Classic station wagon to show a newbie artist his latest experiments with 3-D photography.
The artist, Alicia Apfel, is a lawyer by day. But Art Basel Miami Beach, with its yearly injection of art euphoria, has compelled her not only to collect art but also to get her hands dirty making it. A while back, Jazzar let Apfel use her space for an installation: a build-out of a living room with only traces of the person who might have just inhabited it.
“Mark came to see it and we got excited about the possibility of a collaboration,’’ Apfel said. “We think his three-dimensional photography might be able to capture the gist conceptually, and in terms of emotional content, of these rooms I’m interested in building.’’
The 10th edition of Art Basel, with its avalanche of blue chip art and its invasion by the who’s who of international art-world players, opens this week in a Miami that’s nobody’s uncultured cousin anymore.
From thriving art schools to the explosion of galleries and street art in Wynwood, from the expansion of local museums to the impassioned toiling of artists both unknown and on their way to the international stage — Art Basel’s presence over a decade has helped transform a town that was less known for high-minded cultural engagement than for the lowbrow if glam pursuits immortalized in MTV music videos.
“People forget there was a Miami art scene before Art Basel,’’ said Dennis Scholl, vice president of arts programs for the Knight Foundation. “That’s what drew the fair here. But there is no question Art Basel has had a profound influence. A rising tide lifts all boats. I think Art Basel has helped the visual arts, and the arts in general, fuse into the fabric of the community.’’
The fair brings with it enough collateral action to seize the town for a week, clog up traffic around the Beach and Miami’s urban core and make it nearly impossible to score a taxi or a reservation at the top restaurants. Involved in the arty tangle: more than a dozen satellite art fairs that pitch tents and take over hotels and warehouse spaces around the Beach and the mainland; just about all of South Florida’s museums and private collection spaces, which put on special shows; public art pieces and guerrilla art by locals and out-of-towners blanketing the town. It takes a master strategist to attend just a sampling of glam dinners, cocktail parties and after-hours soirees marketing goods that this year include Ferrari, Dom Perignon and headphones by Dr. Dre.
But when Basel first put down stakes here in 2002, there was no Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. No Frank Gehry-designed home for the New World Symphony. No South Dade Performing Arts Center or Aventura Performing Art Center. No De La Cruz Contemporary Art Space. No starchitect-designed parking garages getting ink around the world, such as the Herzog & de Meuron structure on Lincoln Road and the one coming to the Collins Park area by the famed, London-based Zaha Hadid.
“The impact that Art Basel has had in Miami from the international perspective is tremendous,’’ said Juan Ignacio Vidarte, director of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, another town transformed by art and the presence of its Gehry-designed contemporary art museum.
