ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH NOTEBOOK

A PARTY FOR THE ARTY | December 18th 2007

Art Basel's winter festival in Miami attracts the world's leading asymmetrical haircuts, and some art dealers too. Jessica Gallucci throws darts, buys stamps, and explores the Afghan border in miniature ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

"WOULD you like to throw darts at Sue?"

The woman addressing me is Susan Lee-Chun, clad in spiky black heels, a blue plaid jumper and a skullcap topped with a short felt spire. She looks like a warrior from the future, dressed in couture. "Sue" is a photograph of an attractive Asian woman in a blonde wig, a target superimposed over her face. It is already riddled with holes.

"What did Sue do to you?" I ask. "She assimilated", says the performance artist, proffering a fistful of darts.

Ms Lee-Chun's show is Spinello Gallery's contribution to PULSE Miami Contemporary Art Fair, one of the many satellite fairs that take place this week alongside Art Basel Miami Beach, a monster exhibition that draws galleries from all over the world to network, mingle with the jet-set, and, vitally, to sell art.

Though PULSE is a smallish fair for lesser-known exhibitors, its opening party is a true microcosm of the art world: the art-lovers are easily identifiable by their enthusiasm and sometimes by their haircuts, which, depending on the degree of asymmetry, advertise that the individual operates in a realm where flourishes of this sort are not just acceptable but hallmarks of authenticity. Serious buyers cluster hungrily around the gallery directors, eager to nab their favourite pieces (the more experienced of them employ strategic body-blocking techniques: they hold plastic champagne glasses aloft and to one side, taking up more space and threatening to spill upon their competition).

And after the first hour of the opening, the partiers are absent; after all, the DJs (billed as "Japanese Twin Techno Duo Ryukyudisko") started at seven, and both the music and the food are outside. Eventually the majority of attendees move out of the exhibition hall and into the cool night. Some of them have appropriated Jürgen Mayer H.'s grand, undulating "Beat Wave" sculpture as a bench; others hover, napkinettes in hand, near a white-coated butcher operating a prosciutto slicer.

In an elevated wing overlooking the DJ booth, PULSE hosts GEISAI, a shoebox of a show put on by the artists' collective Kaikai Kiki, which is led by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. The exhibitors are 20 artists chosen from a pool of over 700 applicants from 53 countries. All the artists are independent, meaning they man their own booths, and there's not a red-dot-wielding gallery director in sight.

Eric Doeringer's display catches my eye first, perhaps because it is decorated with garlands of multicoloured triangular flags and hand-written posters touting bargain prices-or perhaps because I instantly recognise the work on the walls: there are Hirst's dead butterflies, Yoshitomo Nara's creepy little girls, assume vivid astro focus's psychedelic pastiche, Marilyn Minter's filthy left foot.

Mr Doeringer says that his knockoff versions of famous works are part of a series titled "bootleg", and business has been brisk. He is also offering, for $1 each, custom-designed, 41-cent United States postage stamps featuring the faces of the art world's elite: Samuel Keller, Jeffrey Deitch, Francois Pinault, Don and Mera Rubell, Charles Saatchi, Barbara Gladstone and Larry Gagosian, each emblazoned with "GREETINGS FROM MIAMI". I buy one of each (and two of Deitch, because he looks so merry in his photo).

In the next booth over, I linger for a while over Blane de St. Croix's objectively uninteresting dioramas of dirt and moss. The artist is standing nearby, and I sense that I shouldn't hurry off without seeming to give his work some brief consideration, so I scan the miniature terrains and wonder how these pieces managed to get selected for exhibition. I'm about to slink away when Mr St. Croix appears over my shoulder and murmurs, "Bin Laden was hiding somewhere in there."

He explains that this particular piece is an obsessively faithful scale model of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And over here-he leads me to another landscape--is the border between North and South Korea, which has been untraversed by humans for so long that wildlife has flourished. And another is the border between Mexico and the United States, complete with the proposed chain-link fence and its controversial two-foot overhang into Mexico. Fascinating stuff, after all.

I wander through the other booths (admiring Masamitsu Katsu's stereo system in graphite and Maria Adelaida Lopez's model houses in vacuum dust) and back into the courtyard, where the Twin Techno Duo has turned up the volume. I join a crowd near a massive wheel of parmigiano reggiano, where I meet Brian Doyle, a video artist whose eerie documentary on Celebration, the Disney-run town, is part of a continuous reel featured in PULSE.

Back inside PULSE, Winkleman Gallery's booth displays a large plexiglas box atop a podium. A diagonal partition splits the box into two compartments. One compartment holds black bracelets with the slogan I'd rather be hot than rich; the other side has white bracelets that say I'd rather be rich than hot. There is a sign that reads "Please take one".

At the beginning of the evening both compartments were full. I've checked back to see which version was more popular, but the numbers are dwindling equally-as far as I can tell-on each side. Edward Winkleman, the gallery's owner and director, explains that most people grab one of each.

(*This is the first installment of Jessica Gallucci's week-long diary from Art Basel Miami Beach, now appearing on Economist.com.)