Art World Undercover #5: Art Basel Miami Beach (Day One), by Adam Lehrer

In his first day in Miami for the art fairs, Adam Lehrer staves off insomniac sleep deprivation and wonders what it all means...

It’s 2 AM on Wednesday, November 30, and I’ve just watched the mid-wit horror film Smile. I’m in a bad mood and ruing the film’s use of excessive jump scares to justify its retarded plot that clearly rips off Ringu and It Follows. I’m lonely. My wife has left for Miami already, and it’s just my dog and I lying in bed. I want to sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about the process of waking up, getting on a flight, and traveling. I’m full of dread. I stay awake. I feel exhausted but my body won’t let go. I say “fuck it” and watch more television. The insomnia manifests as a slight sickly and feverish feeling – like termites bur roughing in my central nervous system.

I don’t feel like an art critic anymore, but that’s what the majority of those who know me still think of me as. It suits me just fine, I suppose. It opens doors and allows me to access the worlds that I hope to destroy. Besides: I am about 10,000 words away from finishing what I believe will be the greatest work of fictional literary art that I will ever write. A trip to Miami for Art Basel and the fairs that coincide with it is a most welcome detour from my more long term works of psychological warfare. I welcome the distraction. At the very worst, I’ll still get a lovely tan.

At 6 AM, I slap my cheeks, get off the couch and take a shower. I’m packed. I leave the dog with a friend of the family. My heartbreak leaving her behind is intensified by my exhaustion, but I feel a simmering excitement as I wait for the Lyft to arrive.

My flight leaves LaGuardia at 8:40 AM. On the plane, I sleep for what seems like an hour before being jolted back into distorted consciousness by the sheer discomfort of the horrendous Spirit Airlines seat. I read some of Wyndham Lewis’ Tarr to exasperate my contempt for the bohemian layabouts that populate the art world. 100 years after Lewis’ observations, artists have only become more repugnant. More desperate. More compelled to adhere to the ideology of the group. I care less about this less than I used to. Writing fiction with fervent intensity over the last three years has mellowed me, and given me an outlet to transcend my disdain. The Counter-Agency of the Avant Garde, however, requires its functionaries to do leg work. So, to Miami I go.

I’m too tired to read fiction, so I put the book back in my backpack and take my iPhone out of my pocket. I open a PDF of Mike Kelley’s essay collection Foul Perfection and am reminded that what was interesting about the art world died when he got fed up and offed himself. In his essay on “Caricature”, Kelley writes that aesthetic reduction can do more than accentuate the emotionality of a subject, as in expressionistic figuration. “If Picasso’s reductions tend to accentuate the tragic and highly emotional nature of a figure,” writes the late artist, Ballard’s reductions are deadening and ultimately apocalyptic.” I can’t help but connect Kelley’s musings on caricature to the caricature of artistic production that the art world has become. Art itself has been reduced to vulgar commodity and the landscape of art is, even if luxurious and seductive, ultimately deadening and apocalyptic, too. And Art Basel Miami Beach is late modernity’s T.S. Eliot-ification of the art world, masked in the veneer of wealth, beauty, and the euphoria of the free-floating exchange of capital. It is the apotheosis of art as the vanguard of the social apocalypse. And I’m looking forward to being a part of it very much, now.

I arrive in Miami just before noon. I take a Lyft to the Gabriel on Ocean Drive between 6th and 7th St. I have a deep love of this city. It makes me horny. There’s an undeniable sexual energy that courses through it. The beautiful humans that run and work out along the water front. The trashy but gorgeous Art Deco design. The extreme tropical beauty that seamlessly blends into its almost surreal urban planning, few cities on Earth make your presence within them more unmistakable than Miami. As the intense  sun soaks my skin, cloaking my sleep deprived body with a renewed vigor, I feel ready to take this mission on.

I enter the Gabriel and walk up to the receptionist desk where apparently a key has been left for me by my wife, who checked in yesterday. I stand there for five minutes while the hotel employees sit there chatting. I’m too tired for rage, so I hold my anger in even as the Eastern European manager discusses Serbia with another worker and the mulatta laughs at the jokes of the gay latino bell boy. Finally, I signal my presence.

“Yes, apparently I have key…”

“Oh yes,” says the mulatta, weirdly knowing exactly what I’m talking about. She gives me my key. I settle into the room and change my clothes into something more appropriate for the warmth: a Spacemen 3 t-shirt, my Army athletic shorts, and my Asics sneakers (after an intense fitness and weight lifting regimen, I’m more concerned with showing off my body than my sartorial style.) I take a Hims for what feels like no reason other than the novelty of disrupting the flow of an art fair bricked the fuck up, cock bulging out of my tiny little shorts.

I leave the hotel and walk a mile south on Washington St. and finally arrive at Art Basel Miami Beach for the final day of its collector previews. I collect my press pass that I secured through writing my regular column for Compact Mag at the west entrance of the Miami Convention Center. One immediate observation: Art Basel Miami Beach is far less concerned with its treatment of press than, say, Frieze, Armory, or other major art fairs. On preview day, I am forced to wait in line like a peasant. I am forced to have my bad sifted through like a peasant. It does not frustrate me. On the contrary, it’s refreshing. Art Basel doesn’t care about the discourse of art. And why would it? Discourse at this juncture only hinders the flow of capital. It attaches a faux intellectual dimension to what is and should be interpreted as a cold hard sales push. They see me as a writer. That is, a nuisance blocking their goal (of making money.) I’m so much worse than that.

Like a moth to the flame, my eye is directed to an absolute monstrosity that is currently being gazed upon by a small crowd of philistines. On display from the Tokyo-based gallery, a sculptural piece by Hajima Sorayama. It is seemingly a female metallic android encased in glass, reminiscent of that gorgeous sequence in Blade Runner 2049 when Ryan Gosling’s robotic protagonist walks through the Wallace Corporation surrounded by retired replicants as if they were pillars. But while those robots were props in service to a work of cinema, this one is being presented as an art object. It is hideous. So…. ugly. But I look at it for a few more minutes. I’m in turmoil about my inability to take a stand against this thing. Further inquiry (on my phone) about the artist reveals the sculpture as an addendum to a series of paintings of androids that are even worse. Well, maybe it’s OK that it’s hideous. It’s getting a reaction. That is all that art is. A reaction and a sale. Did this work sell? Will it? I don’t know.

I notice some paintings by Rebecca Ackroyd. They are all large-scale renderings of crotch shots. This amuses me. But reading the textual materials associated with the paintings says that they are meant to evoke the abolition of gender. “But they are cunts?” I think to myself. Cunts mean women you dumb whore. Across the way is Gaga Gallery, where I run into its director Fernando Mesta. Fernando is a lovely guy who I met last year at New Years 2022 at the apartment of Mathieu Malouf and Heji Shin. I was on an obscene amount of Ketamine and alcohol at that party so I struggle to make conversation in lieu of my sobriety. In any case, I notice a Danny McDonald sculpture that makes use of an assortment of Frankenstein dolls. I adore Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece and appreciate the reference. Fernando takes a photograph of me next to the piece showing off my Frankenstein tattoo. To fit in at Art Basel, one must behave a little cringe, here and there…

I stumble upon what looks like an assortment of project spaces with several younger galleries showing off just one “rising artist” per booth. My body feels OK but my mind is already deadened from the lack of sleep and stimuli overload. I need protein. I buy two empanadas and a cappuccino (delicious) from a cafe positioned in the middle of the space. I suck the cappuccino down like it’s fucking mother’s milk and I’m restored. I notice a gallery from Lagos called Rele. It’s being operated by a pairing of the exact kind of light-skinned black girl and inoffensively and plainly pretty Asian girl that seem to work as middle management in just about half of the art world. An assortment of paintings by an artist named Tonia Nneji is on display and it’s almost offensive just how reverent of both the style and palette of Kerry James Marshall this artist is. If a white artist was to rip off a great this badly there’d be no end to the amount of shit they would get for it. Instead, I have to pretend Tonia is a refreshing and radical thing and I bite my tongue and smile at the gallerists and they ask me if I want to know more information and I say “no thank you I’m just looking today” even though what I’m thinking is “FUCK NO, I already know too much, LIARS LIARS LIARS!,” whatever.

Down a ways, I notice six several beautiful oil-based still-lives that seem to re-imagine the floral image through the glow of a candy flip. Lysergic colors — brights neon pinks and purples  that collide into the forms — against deep black voids, more like the image of a flower that you see behind closed eye-lids on LSD and MDMA than flower that you look at in a shop. I’m somewhat surprised to recognize the name of the artist: Chino Amobi. I know Amobi through his music and have been mostly unaware of his visual work until now. There was a time that I found Amobi’s music rather interesting — particularly his 2017 LP Paradiso — but I seem to have mostly forgotten about it after developing a profound hatred for the kind of radical chic, pseudo-academic, gender-queer and race fixated electronic music scene of artists like Elysia Crampton or Klein or basically anything that the writers of The Wire collectively blow their loads over. In retrospect, this is unfair. Amobi’s work always had something to it. My friend Nina Power once wrote about Paradiso: “[m]odernity is Hell, Paradiso tells us, but the only way to understand this is to embrace it fully, to stare into the void, to get on all the fairground rides, even though you already feel sick and all the colours are wrong.” I find it exhilarating that such a description could be applied here, on the art. There is also a video piece in this booth and I watch some of it and it’s cool. As I leave, the skinny white woman gallerist asks if I watched all of it with a tone of indignant disapproval and this vexes me. No one watches video art at fucking art fairs you fucking hag!

Night Gallery’s massive installation by Samara Golden is also encouraging. Though I abhor the retarded stick figure paintings by Mira Dancy and am left with a feeling of murderous hatred looking at the “haunting” paintings of Americana landscapes by an artist named Todd or something, Golden’s work is over-shadowing everything that surrounds it. Three walls are covered in her “guts paintings” that evoke piles of human gore and innards through the careful application of copious amounts of spray foam. Typically, a piece like this would be used as part of Golden’s massive and hyper-vivid installations of reconstructed scenes of postmodern life to give the overall work a small gesture towards the alien and unknown. But here, the pieces work alone as abstract evocations of our ephemeral mortal bodies. Given how weak I feel, the art leaves me in a state of small anguish. It’s quite beautiful, actually. I see real value in it, and now I need to leave because it’s upsetting me. To everyone else, it’s just a selfie background. All contemporary art is selfie backgrounds. My dick is now fully hard, which makes me chuckle. My shorts could seriously not be smaller. I should be arrested for this, but I’ll just claim that I’m trans if I do. This will see both freed and likely given access to Madonna’s SEX book republication party. Maybe?

The Chapter booth has hideous figurative paintings by Cheyenne Julien as well as some even more opaque than usual paintings by painter and installation artist Adam Gordon, who I like to call “Screamo James Turrell,” and it’s all flat and lifeless. Director Alison Dillulio attempts to sell a Gordon piece to a collector and I so badly want to make a scene but I can’t blow my cover. At the very least, there are two pieces by Milano Chow and I’m very into what she does with these little miniature scenes. You can’t say it’s not unique. I’m chuckling to myself about “Screamo James Turrell”. The Chicago-based gallery Marianne Ibrahim should just call itself “WAKANDA FOREVER” and be fucking done with it. My eyes are drawn to two paintings being shown by Paris-based Balice Hertling. They are by the LA-based Chinese artist Owen Fu. They are weird, distorted figurative paintings and now I’m feeling manipulated by them. It’s too obvious. To Tzvetnik (more on that later). The paintings seem like they might be in a stage of pre-transitional gender confusion. I am, however, drawn to the gallery’s displaying of a Ser Sepas installation. Several crudely rendered paintings of a female-ish form are draped over a wooden rectangular structure, meaning you need to walk around them at 180 degrees to see the entire body. I like how they play with time and architectural space. Ser is already a trans woman and has been so since I photographed her years and years ago, before my recruitment into the Counter-Agency. This leaves me feeling hopeful – maybe we all can continuously become…. Something.

The Bucholz booth is pathetic. Isa Genzken. Wolfgang Tillmans. Same shit as every year and I’m certain that the faggot, Prada creative director and now FORMER menswear innovator Raf Simons will buy all of them. At the Spruth Magers booth, I find myself looking at two very bizarre inkjet acrylic paintings by the semi-canceled Jon Rafman. One seems to be something like a picture of fallen angels chilling around Hong Kong (a Wong Kar Wai reference? I fucking hope not!) and the other looks like old white men with their faces distorted and caricatured as menacing and threatening. I have a weird thought about Rafman’s race politics: “Is he a race traitor?” Weird way to phrase it, I know, but it would make sense in lieu of the ridiculous smear campaign that he suffered for him to save face, and being next to some low-tier Kara Walker paintings and a predictably retarded Barbara Kruger piece that says “Do You Die First?” (I DON’T KNOW LADY DO YOU?) sadly alters the meaning of his otherwise fascinating imagery.

I find myself utterly gripped by and compelled to look at several monochromatic oil paintings. Each of them depict a simple landscape, either a field or clouds or whatever, and are each emblazoned with stark fonts of what appears to be Cyrillic. I realize that I’m drawn to these because they look like Nazi propaganda paintings and I’m shocked that something like this has made it into Art Basel. I then realize why: artist Nikita Kadan is from Ukraine. I can’t say for sure if Kadan is associated with Azov or any of the other far right Ukrainian forces, but he has fought in the war against Russia. I commend his bravery and whatever, but I despise the text he uses to advertise his work. He accuses Putin of racism, of treating Ukrainians as “the same but different.” Dude, this war has nothing to do with race. You’re the same race! It’s cowardly, at least on the level of the work. This is a clear example of the fine arts being used as Western media brainwashing. All right wing art has been abolished from the art world UNLESS that art is being made by Ukrainians. Because those far right forces are currently useful to the Western liberal order. So, is this guy a fascist? I don’t know. But if so, it would be the second time in weeks that a major libtard arts institution platformed Ukrainian nationalists following the debuting of a film made by Azov militia member Dmytro Kozatsky at the New York Documentary Film Festival.

Magenta Plains has an undeniably excellent booth. Showing large-scale prints of recently deceased artist Barbara Ess’s should-be iconic pinhole photographs, they manage to evoke a singular mood that stands out against the visual glut of this gigantic labyrinthic clusterfuck of an art fair. I managed to interview Barbara a few years prior to her passing and was charmed by her. Beyond the deep artistic influence I derived from looking at her work over the years, I was stunned how much she kept up with not just art, but also music (she wanted to to a noise festival with me,) books, and even politics – she was more level-headed about Trump than just about any liberal artist of her age that I’d ever met. The photos being shown by Magenta Plains are oldies but goodies. I am in love with the one that seems to show human forms in blur, like one of Francis Bacon’s paintings of wrestlers. The gallery’s director Olivia Smith, however, explains that the figures seen are Barbie dolls. This means that Barbara created the illusion of movement in the image. Animating the inanimate. Giving life to the lifeless. The Freudian uncanny. Beautiful. I’m moved.

I’m unsure about what my purpose is here. What exactly am I disrupting? Am I merely a party crasher? I don’t know. Finally, I join my wife. She’s working in the collector’s lounge in her capacity as a publicist, and our reunion brings me peace. We embrace surrounded by the vulgar greed of the VIPs as they sip cocktails and champagne, laughing and laughing and chatting and laughing. The nihilism of the scene is restorative. Exhausted and depleted of sleep and protein, I belly laugh. My wife asks me what’s wrong. I can’t stop laughing. All these rich libtards. Buying shitty art by middle class black people and trannies and laundering their guilt through direct cash transactions. “This is it,” I’m thinking. This is America. This is the West. It’s glorious.

I have an invitation to the dealer’s party. I don’t know. My wife and I walk on Ocean Dr. back to the hotel. This is where I proposed to her, on the beach, three and a half years ago. I see the CVS at 728 Ocean Drive which was once occupied by the building where Tony Mantegna was forced to watch as his friend Angel Fernandez had his fucking head sawed off by Columbians before shooting that Columbian several times outside in broad daylight while watched by several witnesses and miraculously did not get arrested. I feel the presence of Cunnanan and Versace. Miami is haunted by the ghosts of crime and high level trafficking, and its darkness only accentuates its beauty. Miami holds a special place for us, and it’s a place that reminds me to preserve my private self. My real self. The part of me that isn’t “the artist” or the “Counter-Agent” but the man who loves and who values the simplistic joys of living. It’s only 6 PM, and I’m lying on bed with her. The party isn’t for five hours. Maybe if I can just get a nap in, I can make it out and continue my work. No. I’m in the blackness now.

This is the first part of a three-part series. Part two will be out tomorrow, Dec 7, and part three will be out Thursday, Dec 8.

IMAGES:
1. Counter-Agent
2. Art by Hajima Sorayama
3. Art by Danny McDonald
4. Art by Chino Amobi
5. Art by Milano Chow
6. Art by Jon Rafman
7. Art by Nikita Kadan
8. Art by Barbara Ess