Odds and Ends: A Few Last Photos from ABMB Week

    Even stuck in traffic for hours at a time, there was no shortage of things to look at during Art Basel week in Miami. Public sculpture, music, and murals took the art to the streets as well as in the booths. Some themes throughout the week included the continued fascination with books as endangered objects and the need to incorporate them in art whether carved out or used as sculpting material, all the while making sure the viewer knows the source material.Japanese anime and weird hybridizations of humanoid animal creatures were also prevalent in the younger fairs.

    Curators, academics, and the more serious artists seemed rather leery of the whole business with Klaus Biesenbach of the Museum of Modern Art's P.S. 1 stating that art fairs gave him a headache and that they were one of the worst places to see art and others treating it as a necessary evil. It was not clear if Josh Baer was kidding when he said in a Salon discussion with Joseph Kosuth that the artist had stipulated to Art Basel that he would only go to Miami Beach if given a private plane. Mr. Kosuth, who also teaches art,  did say that he was not particularly engaged by the fair as a model for viewing art.