Fair Play: Prologue, Head to Toe

The posts so far:

Peekin' In

Covering the fair from head to toe

 The wall of wigs is by Nina Beier at Standard Gallery, Oslo. The viewer passed by at just the right moment. I stalked the leopard do, below. As for the toe coverage, it's after the text

MIAMI-- After some 45 hours of fairgoing it's all over but the writing. I visited seven fairs--Aqua Art, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Miami, Ink, Pulse, Seven and Nada--plus the Rubell Family Collection, the opening of the Erwin Wurm exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art, a show called Materialism in the Design District, and a large two-wall installation of foot-square artwork in the Wynwood Lofts building, a satellite space of the Philadelphia-based Projects Gallery. I also offered a Bloggers' Tour of Art Miami, sponsored by the venue, with my friend and fellow art blogger, Franklin Einspruch, and had work of my own on exhibition at the Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, at Aqua Art. I will show you some of everything over the next several weeks as I post pretty much daily.

There were some recurring themes throughout the fairs: spider webs--indeed, webs, laces and strings of all kinds; big black paintings and objects; and leaning as a mode of installation. Materiality was very much in evidence, including ever more work in cloth and an unusual number of ceramic sculptures and vessels. And, of course, there were a sufficient number of works to allow me to ask the question again this year, "Art or Not Art?"

There was even a painting of St. Sebastian by Titian. Yes, that Titian.

. . . That's my left foot, photographed in the mirror so that you can take in the full glory of the top-and-bottom donuts cossetting my metatarsals. What you can't see is a bandaid around the little toe. It was all a successful prophylactic strike against the dreaded blister