The report on Art Basel Miami is the crowds have been strong, but buying has been select and included a fair amount of negotiation to close the sale. As is the usual case in the current market, some dealers do very well and brought the correct inventory and in vogue artists, while others can suffer with fewer sales. In general the mood has been positive and the fair has been considered by many a success.
Peers reports
To read the complete NY Observer article, click HERE.Celebrities, mostly window-shopping, included George Hamilton, Calvin Klein, Jay-Z, Ben Stiller, Danny Glover, Serena Williams and Steve Martin, who was plugging his book. Buyers negotiated aggressively, stayed largely below the million-dollar level and took considerable courting, dealers said. And some of the sales reported as "done" we suspect are still up in the air.
But the mood was good. Art collector Stephen Garmon, who said he was the designer of the brightly painted exterior of the Google corporate plane, bubbled outside the Sagamore Hotel that a $17,000 piece of his had sold at the Red Dot Art Fair. "And I talked Lamborghini into lending me a car" for the week, he added.
Not everyone was happy. Major Upper East Side collectors Howard Farber, whose collection of Cuban art is 1,000 works strong, and his son-in-law, Larry Warsh, who is probably the nation's largest collector of Chinese contemporary art, found the wares European and parochial. "It doesn't speak to what's really going on in the art world globally," said Mr. Warsh. Mr. Farber noted that the Cuban art that was at the fair did well-a Wilfredo Lam that sold for $3 million at the Cernuda Arte booth broke a record for the artist-but there wasn't much of it on view. Political art, sexual art, any art that pushed the envelope-well, this wasn't the year for it.
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