Art Basel Miami Beach

Alexander Peers writes a good wrap up on Art Basel Miami Beach.  According to her review the atmosphere was a bit more subdued due to hurricane Sandy, and sales seemed decent but not exceptional.  She reports there was a lot of digital and video art this year.

Peers reports

The Art and the Sales

There was very little heroic art at ABMB 2012, few roaring works with big ideas. Instead, there was a small-scale delicacy to what ringed the fairs: artworks of glass, text, feathers, or made of thin, delicate wire; art about balance or construction. Lots of art with water images; lots of digital and video art.

Sales-wise, “[Work going for] under $200,000 was fine, but there was difficulty for dealers over,” said gallerist Lucy Mitchell-Innes, who did well with a booth of works by mostly younger female artists, including Catherine Opie’s photographs of Liz Taylor’s closet. Among the fastest sales were in Pace’s booth, where crowds encircled a Michal Rovner work that looked like a painting but is a video, a fact discovered as tiny characters inside walk across the “canvas.” (The $150,000 edition sold out.) Sean Kelly “sold every Terence Koh we brought,” and was so busy by week’s end he was selling works by showing buyers images of his New York inventory on iPads, he said. Eli Broad’s purchase of a circa-$5-million Jeff Koons at Gagosian was one of the top buys but rumors that Koons is defecting to David Zwirner, at least for one exhibition next year, got more attention.

There were also sales of works by Albert Oehlen, Barbara Kruger, Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Calder, Los Carpinteros, and Richard Prince — who introduced his own soft drink in collaboration with Arizona.

Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard, CEO of the cigar-maker Davidoff, was in town to announce an artist’s residency program that will bring Dominican Republic artists to Williamsburg’s ICSP, among other spots. He ended up buying “Spacebubble” by Katja Loher from New York gallery Scaramouche at the Pulse Art Fair. “It’s a complete departure from our normal art-buying” of paintings, he said, but he and his wife liked “the dialogue between themes of nature and technology.”

Source: Vulture.com