A thoughtless appraisal of Art Basel

I went to Art Basel. I approached the largest art fair in the United States and its offshoots the same way I approached Israel, which I recently visited for the first time: I did not know what I'd see or what I wanted to see, but I was pretty sure that whatever it was, I'd like it. That was true.

The fair is huge. Here are a few impressions from a person whose knowledge of art comes from going to galleries every now and then. I only wrote down the names of a few artists I liked, and this isn't the least bit journalistic. It just reflects my tastes- I like to draw and take photographs, so I notice that. I also like a lot of painting from between, um, 1910 and 1950, to use some really arbitrary numbers, so I guess I notice that too.

Drawing is big, as it has been for some time. I realized that drawing was big when I found myself unable to avoid attending life drawing classes (it was hard since I was living in London). To some extent it is a collector's issue- the galleries are showing a lot of interesting pen and ink work from the 50's and 60's. Now, the trend is to pull a lot of drawings out of a sketchbook and display them in mass, spirals showing, held together by one or two more serious drawings or paintings which relate thematically to the simple scrawls. I saw this in several galleries.

There was also a lot of work equivalent to found footage- I don't know what to call in this context a bunch of old postcards framed and grouped around a painted poster of a tango, or the sorts of 30's and 40's Hollywood studio photos often found in Fairfax flea markets framed and displayed with little blotches and scratches next to
an enormous digital print of a studio glamour shot of a male actor who I can't identify. Maybe it's a restaged photo, maybe it isn't. It seems to be something beyond appropriation.

Then there is all that text stuff... a lot of it badly done and boring, in my opinion, and sometimes really beautiful and transcendent, like the drawings of trees made of tiny pencilled letters. One New York gallery displays corny old jokes (a Jewish man is hit by a car. The paramedic asks, Are you comfortable? The man says, I make a good living) isolated in plastic tableaux. Hmm.

And then the installations, from the ridiculous to the sublime and mostly passable, as in passing without a look. I really liked a few, like the pirate mannequins with peg legs lying in a row. But some of them were just too silly: from a gallery in Mexico City (no, I did not take very good notes), shelves built into a wall and meant to evoke a hotel bathroom, if the rows of stolen hotel shampoos were evidence.

Or this:


What is it? An ironic comment about the way destroyed buildings end up commodified? They don't. A way of drawing attention to the problem of Palestinian autonomy? Maybe I should have checked the tag. I don't understand how this would wind up with a private collector.

I enjoyed some of the work from L.A. Here is a frame from a video installation by artist Brian Bress, shot in high-definition video and featuring an array of extremely weird puppet people, an actress channeling the part of an artist and a hand-built Jeep driving without moving through an eerie sci-fi desert landscape:



I wrote a few other names: Antonin Horak, James Brooks, Leon Ferrari, Eduardo Stupia. They are not current artists and probably dead. I also wrote down the name Mike Kelley, whose name is either very common or found in two separate photo exhibits in different galleries, one of which I liked (attempt to develop an auteur theory of naming) and whose intention is evident, and the other a series of black and white photographs which were rather poorly exposed and muddy and which frustrated me because with all the very deliberate intentions of most of what I saw at the show I could only conclude that the muddiness was on purpose, and I just didn't understand why.

Here is one final painting:



It's by Lyonel Feininger. Would be nice to have that on my wall.