Sorry to have only stumbled upon this just before Christmas. But Glenn O’Brien’s slide show on GQ.com of his trip to ABMB is not to be missed. We could have chosen any one of the 25 slides to show you how perceptive, charming and hilarious the whole slideshow is but we ended up with this one toward the end. O’Brien forgot to charge his digital camera. So he grabbed a notebook to make some sketches instead. Here’s a sample:

Gagosian had really good Picassos and Princes and Basquiats. Too bad Picasso didn’t take drugs or play golf, maybe I would have had one. Gagosian was really crowded. I’ve never seen Larry in his own booth. I wonder if he sits in the storeroom holding court, or maybe is video-surveilling from an undisclosed location. Anyway, it was like a little museum but more crowded.

I ran into Sante D’Orazio and his party crew again at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, talking to gallery director Maxime Falkenstein, the suave gentleman who commutes between New York and the new gallery in Brussels. [Read more...]

Sarah Douglas sums up ABMB with her top ten list. Click through to read them all but here are three we found most interesting:

• Dana Schutz

Remember how when Dana Schutz’s name came up during the recession, it was invariably in the context of how she was one of those young artists whose prices got pushed up, up, up in the searing heat of the boom and would no longer be sustainable in a fallow period? Well, what the art world seemed to forget was how good a painter she is, how she continues to push her work into ever more challenging territory. As though to reset the discourse, her dealer, Zach Feuer, brought a handful of stunning, brand new Schutzes to his booth in the Nova section of Art Basel. With their weird, contorted, psychologically charged figures, their acrid mannerist palette, and Schutz’s enviably prodigious range of art historical references — one minute she seems to be riffing on Robert Delaunay, the next channeling Balthus — the canvases wowed everyone, and were snapped up in the fair’s first few hours.

• Pieter Schoolwerth [Read more...]

Sales Up From Last Year at Art Basel Miami

Jason Edward Kaufman talks to PBS’s Newshour about ArtBasel Miami Beach

Plum TV, the luxury vacation area cable network, put together an impressive package of videos covering ArtBasel Miami Beach. In this nearly hour-long documentary, they get into great detail on the event (there are six parts to the embedded video, so be sure to click through to see all of them):

[Read more...]

The local Miami gallery community has a gripe with ArtBasel over who gets in to the art fair and why. The Palm Beach Post‘s Lydia Martin explores the point:

“The argument is that our galleries are just not mature enough yet,’ said Miami artist Carlos Betancourt, who hosted a small party in the slick, four-story condo he rented so out-of-town friends didn’t have to pay for a hotel.

Betancourt, who talked art with a crew of other artists (some at the party deemed the many artworks hanging in the rented condo “really bad,’ so most pieces were turned around so you only saw backs of canvasses), celebrates Basel’s presence, but: “Every year, you can go in the convention center and see some really good galleries. And some really bad galleries. They get in year after year, and some Miami galleries that have some really amazing artists get left out,’ Betancourt says.

Basel 09 Less Bling, More Ka-Ching (Palm Beach Post)