What I Learned at Art Basel Miami Beach

The RLA, our new friends the PDBs* and I went to Art Basel this weekend. There I learned a couple of things I didn't know about Art. That's art with a capital a, proles. Art that costs more per square foot than I make in a week. This is Important, Gallery Art, and not for folks like me. The dealers were Very Happy to make that clear to me.
Here's what I learned, in a nutshell.

1. The only art worth looking at in this vast space was art created eighty to twenty years ago. Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse... like that.

2. There are only two acceptable positions when drawing/painting/sculpting a nude. These are, in the case of a female, lying on her back with a point of view directly up the ole cooch, foreshortening the head to irrelevance, or, in either gender, bent over and fingering one's own arsehole.

3. The dealers are self-absorbed, arrogant assholes who have a blatant disdain for artists or their audiences. Consider this interaction.

RLA, picking up a postcard advertising a "commissioned portrait show": Commissioned portraits? By whom?
Dealer: Artist X. If you want to commission a portrait of yourself. That's what this show is about.
RLA: Really? I'm a portrait artist myself. (He reaches into his jacket for a postcard.)
Dealer: NONONONONONO. I don't want to see that.
Me: Really? Not even to be polite? You won't just look at it?
Dealer: NONONONONO. We're really just focused on what we are doing here.
Me, looking around and seeing nobody in this booth except myself, the RLA, the little beige dealer** and his assistant: "And a roaring fucking business that would be."

RLA and I stomp out.

4. Big-headed Japanese anime-style cartoon children or Sailor Moon-dressed pubescent girls are hott.

5. Magnetic tape, when stretched across a frame into a 5-foot square, is worth $70,000 dollars, and there is at least one idiot willing to pay that much for it, because the piece was already sold. Or at least that's what the abusive bitch who yelled at me for several minutes for looking at said piece too closely and (GASP!) BREATHING ON IT!!! told me. To add injury to insult, she didn't even move her cell-phone away from her ear as she was loudly berating me.

6. Glitter is hott. So are rhinestones and shiny plastic "gems".

7. Impasto is back with a vengance. The thicker the build up the better. It is important to use silicon caulking as a base for your paintings.

8. Figural art (if it isn't big-headed anime or self-fingering nudes) is totally not hott. In fact, if you are a figural artist, you need to be an "outsider" artist and do big-headed, big-eyed Keane sort of little girls in densely inexplicable situations that are vaguely distubing. Extra points are awarded for including dead animals in the composition.

9. Sculpture is good if it: sits on the floor, is constructed of iron or steel or blackened metal, represents random body parts unrelated to each other or anything else in the installation, is kinetic. In fact, one of the nicest pieces I saw consisted of two old-fashioned floor fans, painted shiny black, facing each other. In between was a piece of magnetic tape (AHA! a trend?) spliced into a circle, held aloft and shimmering by the wind generated by the two fans.***

10. There seems to be a factory somewhere in Miami that produces women of a certain age with identical nose jobs, inflated lips, too-tight cheek bones, highlighted blonde hair and plastic grapefruit inserted under their skin on the fronts of their chests. They travel in packs, too. They are not shy about opining about the Art they are looking at, either. Their bust size is higher than their IQs. This is a quote from one of them: Look. This is all symbolic. This symbolizes a bridge.

The "this" in question was a photograph, one of a dozen or so in an installation, that depicted some sort of dining table detritus stacked up to look like, well, in her defense, a bridge. Or a dock.The rest of the photos were of what the dining table would look like if you let a pack of ten year olds play with their food for a couple of hours. Sugar cubes arranged in circles. Crumbs piled up into tiny pyramids. Like that. I refrained from asking her what she thought the bridge was symbolic of. I didn't want to get yelled at again.

On a related note, the RLA and I watched "Art School Confidential" a couple of weeks ago. Rent it. If you ever went to art school, film school or knew anyone who did, you will laugh yourself sick. If you didn't? This movie is a documentary, really.

* Persons Dressed in Black

**The dealer was monochromatic. He was sort of tanned, his hair was sort of brownish, he was dressed in a tan/beige suit with matching shirt and tie, and he was wearing perfectly circular, thick-framed, light tortoiseshell glasses.

*** No. Really. That was one of the best pieces, except, you know, for the old masters like Stella or Warhol.