The Art World’s Most Fucked-Up, Fantastic Party

Above left: a ferocious twirling metal sculpture by Alice Aycock (b. 1946) in the Meridians section of Art Basel Miami Beach, held annually at the Miami Beach Convention Center (above right), sets the scene for an energetic maelstrom of art spectating and buying.

It’s an enormous honor to be here in Miami.  I haven’t been here for a few years, but I watch you constantly.

I hate you for living in a beautiful, shitty city.

It’s unbelievable how fucked-up-fantastic this city is, and I love that about you.

—Jerry Saltz, Chief Art Critic, New York Magazine, Scholl Lecture series at the Perez Art Museum Miami, Dec. 2, 2024

INDEED — and especially in late 2024 as the world continues to evolve in unpredictable ways — like nowhere else in time or space could one imagine a more “fucked-up fantastic” congress of creativity and pretense than the bacchanalia of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Whether a bucket-list item for aspirational travelers or a feast for the eyes for elite connoisseurs, Miami Art Week, held in early December under the pink pastel hues of South Florida’s wintry sunsets, is truly an unparalleled experience.

Art is on view (and for sale, of course) all about town, with gaggles of gawkers and poseurs mingling among everyone else on the art world’s spectrum, from the casually curious to the top dealers, curators, and collectors.

That being said, the whole affair can strike the unprepared as a complete mess: overwhelming, overpriced, and overstimulating. 

Traffic is a nightmare. After all, Miami is a 21st century city rooted in some of the lousiest civic planning of the 20th century, with empty, unsightly, and trash-covered lots strewn about gleaming new shops and skyscrapers of trendy neighborhoods like Edgewater and the Design District.

Meanwhile, a host of VIP receptions and events beckon both the cognoscenti and the yet-to-be initiated into a beguiling, moveable feast of cocktails and canapes.

Above left: Entrance to the venue of Untitled Art Fair, held directly on South Beach; right: a major project that will transform a jumble of freeways and concrete into a new gateway for the city, Miami’s new Signature Bridge under construction just north of downtown.

Most people will never even begin to comprehend the contrasts and contradictions of the Western Hemisphere’s most decadent, seductive, and comprehensive display of art, a scene that continues to evolve and attract new vitality and visitors every year.

Yet for those of you curious about what it means to navigate this mysterious world while remaining connected to your truest self, I am proud to be your humble guide and advisor.

That’s why Charting Transcendence makes its home base in Miami — because it’s fucked up fantastic.

The Unenviable Nature of Being an Art Advisor

Golden hour on the terrace of the VIP lounge of Untitled Art Fair, which recently announced a new edition to be held in Houston in September 18-21, 2024, maintains a sleek allure even as this photograph does not reveal the extent to which the spectacle of Miami Art Week is both exhilarating and exhausting.

Last week at Art Basel, a New York gallery director I know remarked to me that she most certainly wouldn’t want to be in my shoes, professionally speaking.

“How interesting!” I replied.

Personally, I’ve never worked in an art gallery (nor have I event wanted to), for it always seemed too limiting, given my tendency to be curious, wander and explore. “How come?”

“Your job is really hard, Matthew! You have to work with clients who have no clue what they want! My gallery job is much easier. Either we have the art they are looking for — or we don’t.”

And the gallery director certainly has a point. Trying to match a client with compelling art is a process of mapping the landscape of their psyche while maneuvering through a distended marketplace awash in bling and hype (especially in Miami, where pretense and superficiality are the norm.)

That being said, as lovely and brilliant as my gallery colleagues are, I’d definitely rather have my job than theirs, for I appreciate my freedom to explore — even as it stretches the limits of my attention span and stamina.

Being an art advisor is hard but very gratifying work. Unlike some in the field, I don’t do it for fame or glamour.

(Photo credit: satisfied CT group tour participant.)

Charting Transcendence led tour groups, clients, and artists through a labyrinth of over 280 booths at Art Basel this month.

I must have worn out a dozen pairs of shoes this year simply hoofing between hundreds of museums and galleries, across dozens of art fairs, large and small, from New York, to Mexico City, to Los Angeles, before arriving home in Miami for Art Week, a phenomenon that amounts to the Super Bowl of my profession.

All the while, I’ve let myself bask in the affect and information conveyed by thousands of artworks, sorting through them in my head and forming meaningful connections with them in my heart.

This is what makes art advisory difficult, especially in the constructed, moneyed, and quasi-paradise of Miami, where appearances are everything, substance and meaning lacking behind every glitzy facade.

Fortunately, I’ve had enough experience in my life to know the difference between what matters and what doesn’t. 

And I love my job, free of the overhead and constraints of a gallery or institution, for I shape my own reality and intellect with every art encounter.

That’s how I decided to make the most of my profession’s most intense week of the year.  I love my work and I’m proud to share my gifts with the world.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.  That’s why I created Charting Transcendence.

The Main Course: Highlights from Art Basel and Miami Art Week

WARNING: Too copious to adequately summarize and impossible to fully grasp in any physical or intellectual container, the most delectable morsels of a Miami Art Week experience are subject to the preference, taste and life experience of the viewer. 

One of my most emotional moments at Art Basel came upon first entering the fair and seeing this painting, Lotus Pond (2018), by Matthew Wong (1984-2019) at the booth of Karma Gallery. With nearly all the visual and thematic hallmarks of Wong’s deeply psychological landscapes, this work was highlighted for all of Charting Transcendence’s Art Basel tour participants due to the inspiration Wong’s work lent to the company’s establishment.

Los Angeles-based Cheryl Pope (b. 1980), represented by Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery, showed two of her large, intricately constructed needle-punched wool on cashmere canvases, a unique fiber-based practice that substitutes for painting.

A simple yet beautiful observational photograph of Miami by Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984), who regularly shows at Art Basel with Berlin’s Wentrup Gallery. Ana is a friend who recently reached the stratosphere of her career with a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery showed a wide variety of Bay Area artists, including this painting by Chelsea Ryoko Wong (b. 1986). Its playful figures and flat landscape demonstrate the artist’s skill in blending contemporary Western figuration with Asian influences.

After all, through engagement with the art advisory process, each of us may choose to create our own reality every step of the way.

Yet for planeloads of visitors, that generally means going to parties — after all, Art Basel is Miami’s equivalent of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or Austin’s SxSW (South by Southwest) festival, replete with buzzy hospitality and spectacle.

Artwork at Art Basel Miami Beach is wildly diverse in both style, medium, and influences. Colleagues of mine laud new director Bridget Finn’s vision and accomplishment in delicately curating a balance of incredibly disparate and compelling galleries.

Just one of the things that fascinated me was the growth in high-quality fiber, thread-based and other multimedia artworks, diverging from an average fair’s usual range of paintings and sculptures.

The director of Tehran’s Dastan Gallery illuminates L.A.-based artist Roksana Pirouzmand’s (b. 1990) The Past Seeps Through the Present (2024), a sculpture that slowly drips water through a fired cast of her grandmother’s body onto an unfired clay cast of her mother’s body: splotching dabs of intergenerational trauma onto a sofa.

A superstar of the German Duesseldorf school of photography, Thomas Struth showed this beguiling photograph of a somnolent tiger, highlighting the enchanting formal qualities of the pattern on his soft coat of fur, with Marian Goodman Gallery at Art Basel.

Eric Firestone Gallery, with outposts in the Hamptons and Lower Manhattan, deals in a cohesive mix of figurative and abstract work that spans both the modern and contemporary eras. It presented a compelling range of work at this December’s Art Basel, including this lovely canvas by Hue Thi Hoffmaster.

El Espacio 23 is the private museum collection of Miami’s most prominent collector, Jorge M. Perez. Every year it puts on a treasure-trove exhibition of works from its collection, which this year includes this untitled oil on mother of pearl painting by Mexican artist Julio Galán (1958-2006).

Other fairs I attended included the formidable Untitled Art Fair, housed in a custom-built tent on the beach; the New Art Dealer’s Alliance fair (a.k.a. NADA), the more commercial yet satisfying CONTEXT Art Miami, and the scrappy Satellite Art Show.

All along I reveled in the discovery of great art while reconnecting and rekindling community around art with colleagues and friends.

Fortunately, for those who missed the tours, more are in store for clients and individuals in Florida, New York, California, Texas and Chicago in early 2025 — dates to be confirmed in the next Charting Transcendence newsletter.

One of my favorite Miami galleries, Emerson Dorsch, showed this new painting by Elisabeth Condon (b. 1958), whose work I have recently presented to several clients.

Noel W Anderson (b. 1981), previously mentioned in this newsletter, wields the power of the thread like no other artist of his generation in this work from his basketball series with Luxembourg’s Zidoun-Bossuyt gallery. Noel also shows with New York’s Harper’s Gallery.

An intricate, fascinating painting from the 1990s by a little known outsider artist, Joel Palacio Llorente, shown last week at a pop-up exhibition in an disused gym in Miami’s Little River neighborhood.

Spinello Projects, a prestigious Miami gallery revered by progressive institutions and collectors in Florida, opened a gallery show of classically-inspired paintings by Cuban artist Marlon Portales (b. 1991).

Owner Anthony Spinello has a knack for placing his artists’ works in prominent public and private collections.

Perhaps the most fascinating piece of ancient art on display at in Miami landed at the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection in Miami’s Design District: a 1500-year-old Nazca wari sash from Peru, whose wearer’s identity remains a mystery.

Note the highly abstract yet irregular weaving technique that suggests the artist’s engagement with an altered state of consciousness.