1/17/2024 0 Comments Beach scenery paintings![]() “If they’re doing their job well, they’re demanding,” Elizabeth said. ![]() More help paying to produce expensive pieces. Elizabeth and Rob hoped spending money would ensure that the gallery would grow in lockstep with their artists, who were “emerging” now, but asking for more as their careers swelled. Really, we needed to sell a lot more, both to avoid Elizabeth going into cardiac arrest and to afford their ambitious expansion plans. Like a coach rallying players for a big game, Elizabeth gathered us shortly before leaving for Miami to announce that the gallery needed to sell about $70,000 worth of art, or 13 or so photographs, to break even. Oh, and Elizabeth and Rob had the harebrained idea of bringing me along to help them pull it off. They were betting $39,000, cobbled together on credit cards, that they could fly to a different state, hang 21 pieces of colorful paper in a glorified elementary-school science-fair booth, and, over the course of five days, persuade strangers to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for said paper. In the weeks leading up to Miami, thick plumes of anxiety poured out of the Denny Dimin office each day-it didn’t help that the gallery’s recent show in New York had sold barely to not at all-and Elizabeth, keeper of bills and invoices, finally pulled up a spreadsheet to show me her budget. “If you have two bad fairs in a row, people can’t dig themselves out from them.” ![]() But also, fairs “ do destroy galleries,” Rob told me. They offer exposure: 40,000 people, including museum curators and big-time collectors, had visited Untitled the year before I went. (The NADA-New Art Dealers Alliance-fair was the other.)Īrt fairs are, I kept hearing, either a necessary evil or just evil. Instead, they would be bringing abstract photographs by Erin O’Keefe to a fair called Untitled, which was considered one of only two acceptable alternatives to Art Basel Miami. “In Miami, you’ll see,” Rob said, breathy with excitement, “it’s all about the fucking deals.”Įlizabeth and Rob had decided against applying for a spot at Art Basel Miami Beach. Just as I was running out of ideas for how to get myself behind-the-scenes access to the fairs, the opportunity came: Elizabeth Denny and Rob Dimin, then the co-owners of the Denny Dimin Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, invited me to come on board as their assistant-with the expectation that I’d get in there and sell. Read: The week Miami becomes the center of the art world But this late in the game, I couldn’t nail down a hotel room, let alone an invitation to tag along with someone who was going. I was curious to study buyers in action in the hopes that seeing what compelled them to pay huge sums of money for an artwork would reveal more about art’s place in our lives. Lots of art galleries try to hold money at arm’s length-pieces aren’t sold but placed, one dealer had coached me to say-but Miami, with its unapologetic buy buy buy mentality, sounded like a rare moment when the art world let it all hang out. Is there any other gathering where people spend so much money in so little time? Only defense expos come to mind. It was “the bourgeois indulgence that comes before a Communist revolution.” I read that the year before, the galleries participating in Art Basel Miami Beach had brought $3.5 billion worth of art to sell, and that was just one fair out of dozens. “If I had to choose between going to Art Basel Miami and dying in a plane crash, I’d pick going down in flames,” one erstwhile attendee said. Then, as December neared, I started to hear more about Miami.ĭepending on whom I asked, Miami was either an unmissable art pilgrimage or as tasteless as a Señor Frog’s wet-T-shirt contest. So a few years ago, I spent months working in galleries and artists’ studios, spackling walls, stretching canvases, writing press releases. I wanted to understand art-why it matters, how to engage with it, why both artists and scientists insist it’s fundamental to our humanity. But as I hit my mid-30s, I started to worry that I was missing out on something important. I’d spent much of my adult life convinced that art wasn’t for me. I wasn’t in the know, or at least I hadn’t been until recently. The first week of December marks the kickoff to Miami, which features two or maybe three dozen different art fairs, the most prestigious of them being Art Basel Miami Beach, an import from Switzerland that, if you’re in the know, is simply called “the main fair.” “M iami,” in the art world, is short for Miami Art Week, which is short for a weeklong bacchanal of eye candy, nose candy, parties, and pills held in the name of shopping for art. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.
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