2021’s Art Basel Miami Beach Encapsulates the Indefinability of Art and Evocative Conversation in Subsequence

2021’s Art Basel Miami Beach Encapsulates the Indefinability of Art, Provoking Necessary Conversations

Evan Dale + Mitch Dumler // Dec 8, 2021

The scale of Art Basel’s main gallery floor is best witnessed from its North Entrance – its grandiose main entrance where a concept BMW ordains one side and a large room cut out for conversations with creatives frames the other – where also, a short escalator ride down leaves it the one elevated opportunity from which to measure the festival’s interior reach. Obviously, a monumental structure to witness from the outside, the Miami Beach Convention Center where the world’s most notorious and celebrated global art festival grew roots for its secondary annual iteration – joining Basel’s original Summer locale in Switzerland and eventually a 2018 and onward mark on the map for springtime in Hong Kong to craft a network of ever-expanding global galleria – the gallery space, once inside, still feels impossibly far-reaching. It is, even for seasoned attendees who have made their pilgrimages to the annual or even tri-annual mecca of visual art, a daunting task to see – yet alone to really see – each piece over the course of a single weekend. And yet, something within such a grand setting’s impossible task at hand proves to be worthy insight into why it’s so grand at all. Subjectivity, after all, is, as it always has been and will be, the most dominant force that draws akin Art Basel. Even more powerful than the bottomless pit of funds orbiting the art buying world, are the opinions and tastes that allow the festival to transcend any kind of class narrative.

No one viewer can claim that they see – that is to say that they aesthetically appreciate or even understand – everything on display. Instead, Art Basel’s immense expanse at its Miami Beach edition alone grants any and all attendees the opportunity to immerse themselves in art and whittle down their specific yet undeniably always evolving taste for aesthetics, experience, and their intertwined paths that bring about inspiration and awe. From the first timers hoping to get a glimpse into an experience that draws more than 60,000 onlookers in just a three day run, to the hype-beasts searching for an audience for their own wardrobes and polaroid-candid mannerisms as they interact with a new school of streetwear and hip-hop culture oriented neo-creatives; from the old birds on a Sunday stroll through what they probably see as just another art gallery in South Florida to the Art Basel veterans looking to trade-up their own multi-million dollar collections; from the Spring Breakers looking for an excuse to flock to South Beach in the off-season to the culturally never-quenched simply hoping to quietly immerse themselves in it all, Art Basel is able to draw together what is perhaps the most wide-ranging mosaic of peoples and cultures in the modern world. Art transcends like that.

And even more so, Art Basel itself is only a sliver of what it largely inspires and evokes throughout the rest of Miami at the onset of December every year. Myriad happenings beyond the festival and in Miami’s expansive peripheral dot the calendar. Pop-up shops and brick-and-mortar exhibitions; special hours for local galleries, restaurants, bars, and storefronts; celebrations of street art in Wynwood, of fine concept on the stretch of beach behind the Faena Hotel; and even several entirely separate yet also massive art festivals in their own right, inspired and spinning violently outward from the eye of the Storm that is the Miami Beach Convention Center.

And once inside that storm, riding down the escalator of the North entrance, with eyes scanning side to side across the massive stretch of gallery that feels daunting and impossible at first glance, one immediately finds themselves at ground level immersed in a kind of quiet and peace that lends itself to the simple and organic measures of walking and talking and taking in art. A deeply immersing, at times dizzying maze, the gallery halls and twists and turns lend themselves, too, to the very motorly simple so that the mindfully complex can abound. Getting lost is clearly built into the design of the gallery walls. While getting lost, becoming very found, or something in between is up to the particular attendee and their relationship with a particular work. Here, Art Basel becomes more difficult to delineate, because here, beginning at the foot of the North entrance escalator, everyone is simply a pair of eyes, a mind full of racing opinions, and the occasional grip around a flute of champagne, hoping to appreciate what the world’s most widely-reaching collection of curators could muster.

And that collection – or rather that macrocosmic galaxy of smaller installations – is something truly, remarkably impressive. Broken up to the tune of house-curated collections that tie akin a given theme as would the Art Basel team see fit: like that of Meridians where massive, interactive, and immersive works welcome an attendee to that magnificence of experience at a scale blown-up. Here, at one end of the near-open floorplan, porcelain axes are suspended by Nicholas Galanin for The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls. At another end, Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings orchestrates a conversation in the juxtaposition of colonialism and beachy motifs through the work of large-format collage. To one side of Meridians, Hank Willis Thomas sews together segments of American flags with cuttings from the garb worn by incarcerated inmates for an unavoidably provocative maze of red and white. And to the other, a decadently Easter-esque color palette explores a softer side of graffiti through Kenny Scharf’s Untitled. In the middle of it all, perhaps on the more universally intriguing installations from all of Art Basel, sits Moving Up from Yinka Shonibare. Here, figures adorned with African dress, over encumbered with luggage, and sporting globes in place of their heads, race up a staircase to nowhere, summoning dialogue on immigration, class, and upward mobility. More figures from the same Shonibare collection are found scattered further around the halls of Art Basel.

And scattered, too, are endless collisions and interactions with more and more and, quite frankly, more art. A central hanging of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe iterations leads an attendee to interactions with works from artists they’ve probably never heard of, but can find something to admire about their work, and what its positioning says both about it and Andy Warhol. A darkly decorated room invites listeners from the blinding white of the larger galleries on exhibition, where inside, sketches and sculpture from Jean-Michel Basquiat share space with work from less globally renowned, but equally provocative creatives. And the dialogue that is inspired by one, and then applied to the next, regardless of order or status within the art world, is the exact simplicity that Art Basel at large attempts to achieve. At Miami Beach in 2021, it was achieved brilliantly.

At other moments still, Daniel Arsham wheels a stone and crystallized Porsche 911 Turbo into a hallway, Takashi Murokami instills the capabilities of vibrant color into viewer’s childlike sensitivities, Kaws stand tall, inquisitive and omnipotent, and Hajime Sorayama begs questions on sex and technology with polished steel sculptures of hyper-feminine robotics. There is, that is to say, no limit, no boundary, and right or wrong. There is, simply art, and the fact that Art Basel is able to curate such a comprehensive, indefinable example of what exactly that may mean, is what makes it such an important cultural cornerstone at its most simple, outwardly expanding identity.