TACKY DELIGHTS: REVISITING ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH
On the familiar comforts of Miami Art Week 2025
THE SNARLING DOG astride the handily engorged cock by Jimmy De Sana; the puckered chapeau of Ryan Wilde; and the sign by Lizzi Bougatsos advertising “For Sale—My Pussy” all felt like a tasteful beginning to another Miami Art Week. Lugging a cotton candy pink backpack, I went straight from the airport to the Tuesday night opening of “Hard Art: Unruly Work from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection” at the Snøhetta-designed Museum of Sex downtown. After the show, I perused the other exhibitions, walking past the gloryhole bathroom jerk-off whack-a-mole and under the radioactive green slit of the short-skirted fifty-foot woman in the erotic carnival, as well as the RuPaul Speaks fortune-teller, which I sadly failed to consult. This trip would be the twentieth anniversary of my first Art Basel Miami Beach—a sporadic tradition of mine that started when I worked as a booth bitch for a magazine all those years ago. Nothing and everything has changed, though I could always use some fortune.
Given that I’m pretty sure the Florida state motto is the same as the Hooters slogan (“Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined”), the week was even classier than I expected. But I also didn’t forget that somewhere in Miami, Jared Kushner was browbeating the Ukrainian delegation into some forced peace deal. Or that at that perpetually going-out-of-business bikini shop on Lincoln Road, they sold “Make Your Breath Great Again—Sugar-Free Peppermints $3.99—3 for $10.99” next to the “Gulf of America” playing cards. Or that I really didn’t see as many friends cross the border to visit these shores as I’d hoped.
At the door to the ICA Miami opening later that night, when discussing that my fair pass gave us the lowest level of exclusivity, the artist I was with called us “V.I.Pleebs,” and so we were. Outside, the crowd drank and shimmied to house and reggaeton music beside a giant screensaver that I guessed was probably a Refik Anadol. [It was.] I ducked out to the blessedly spacious courtyard at Lagniappe with Alex Ross of Los Angeles gallery Cheremoya. Asking for a weather report, Ross relayed he’d sold swiftly earlier that day at the VIP opening for the NADA fair (the oldest of the Miami satellites), with works by Ursula Bradley, Madeleine Ray Hines, and Kento Saisho; over vegetable platters, he updated me on the gallery’s coming relocation/relaunch in Santa Fe. I next hoofed it over to the Moore for PR firm Cultural Counsel’s ten-year anniversary party, which was really and actually very good. Stowing my luggage under a grand piano, I slipped into the crowd at the newly remodeled property, which felt haunted by the ghosts of other Miami Art Weeks: The party was the kind where you felt a little hotter just being there.
The following morning I felt decidedly less hot while being turned away at the door at Casa Tua for the Serpentine Breakfast (the only solid fuck-off I got from a white girl with an iPad all week), but was still cute enough for the VIP Breakfast at Art Basel. Tasteful canapés were followed by speeches from the Mayor of Miami Beach and Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, who provided useful expository information: 283 galleries; 43 countries and territories; and 49 new galleries. After the speeches and then being hustled by a financier-turned-painter, the collectors’ chatter was that there were over twenty other art fairs this year, collectively showing 1200+ galleries.
As the 11 a.m. opening of the fair clicked closer, the crowd of VIPs shuffled out of the collectors’ lounge and over to the entrance—one of the rare times in this world where the rich are treated like steerage. The escalator broke as I stepped off it, likely from the freight of the crowd’s collective wealth and/or self-importance. Stepping into the fair is the same surreal thing as always; twenty years later, the carefully gridded labyrinth appears unchanged. The main booths—the blue-chip galleries and their adjacent aspirants—generally just looked like “stuff” to me (granted, often really, really good stuff), a trunk show with a flavor for every taste. But the solo and solo-ish presentations in Nova and Positions are always the most educational for a penniless writer. In Nova, dealer Rebecca Camacho (making her ABMB debut) stood amongst the tender copper-colored crocheted portals of ektor garcia and the bright soft-chroma constructions on paper by Karen Barbour. Taking a moment in the thrum of the preview, she confessed, “I realized that I was only three blocks from the Cheesecake Factory, so at the end of the day, I was going to either have a conciliatory or a celebratory slice of cheesecake.”
Though I probably make only a tenth of a cent every time a Picasso is sold, I wandered with a sense of economic concern for the assembled galleries and the many artists who depend on them. Both there and as the days wore on (art dealers being, as ever, their unpredictable selves), there was a consensus of an uptick. The art advisor Dane Jensen, whom I sat next to in the lounge, reported that over the summer you could hear crickets, but things were moving again.
Stopping by the metaphysical found abstractions by Altoon Sultan at Chris Sharp, I apologized for leaning in close to admire the brushwork on these tight windows onto agricultural machinery. “As long as you don’t lick it,” said Sharp. And if I buy it? “You can lick it all you want.” At Galerie Alberta Pane, I lingered over the split and arced scaffold-piping by Argentine artist Luciana Lamothe. Nearby a woman remarked “I need a big ol’ Bore-jois, you know?” Given Hauser & Wirth sold two works by Louise Bourgeois—one for $2.5 million and one for $3.2—I really hope her needs were properly met. Then I spotted the sinister chrome cube riddled with holes at Victoria Miro. Still a little hungover from the Museum of Sex, the dark, round apertures read (at a glance) like gloryholes, but turned out to be exterior light channels for an infinity room by Yayoi Kusama (in case you didn’t get enough infinity in the two rooms on view now at the Rubell Museum).
All this and more before moseying into Art Basel’s newest section, Zero 10. Having been to Burning Man, many things appeared familiar, but it was really hard to peer past the work of Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple). Every fair needs something ridiculous that the mainstream can sensationally half-mock (Maurizio Cattelan’s banana in 2019, for example), and Beeple’s work is custom-coded for the purpose: Creepily realistic heads of stupidly famous artists and billionaires had been plopped onto robotic sheep that shit out certificates of authenticity. The less said about these, the better, but these expensive, “cutting-edge” toys ultimately imply that all art is just an obvious joke; the hollow critique of our tech overlords and their favorite collectible artists is just another con, but one designed to end up on the evening news and—probably more importantly—TikTok. The work has a cynicism that makes me hopeless, when art can maybe do something else. Grossed out, I left.
I ambled out of the convention center for a preview of the shows at the Bass Museum. Jack Pierson’s early work had all the rough-hewn humor of the broke-ass artist he once was on these Miami streets. “As beautiful and romantic as it was—people’s lives were ruined here,” read a handwritten Pierson poem put up as a decal on the wall.
Late to the all-female Japanese wrestling event presented by Sukeban—also naturally somehow a part of the Miami art experience—I jogged to catch the bus up Collins Avenue. One of the many wonderfully unglamorous moments of the week was my catwalking in my art-fair best on the city’s public transit, which to my blushing surprise earned me a few compliments from the locals. Getting off at the Miami Bandshell, I joined the crowd circling the ring, waiting for our wrestlers, who really didn’t disappoint; what they lacked in pantomime they made up for in style. After watching the Queen of Hearts and Commander Nagasaki pummel the masked Supersonic, I hopped another bus back into the thick of it for a party thrown by Miami’s own Nina Johnson Gallery celebrating the Jarrett Earnest–curated “Acid Bath House” and the launch of the newest Whitney Review of New Writing.
Before I even reached the bar, I kept thinking about a line from the press release for the exhibition, in which Earnest wrote: “In my experience, in places where queer people come together—a sex club, dance floor, an art gallery, a camp-out—and in the things queer people make with and for each other, there is a specific energy that everyone needs if we are to survive on this planet together. The possibility of queer life is psychedelic erotica.” Walking into Brothers’ Keeper Bar, I spied Earnest and “Acid Bath House” artist Savannah Knoop slowly, methodically go-go dancing on the bar under purple light, the faces and energies of the crowd embodying this spirit. It was truly the place I felt most at home all week. As Candystore took the stage and belted out (while decked in belted leather lingerie), “Why does the sun go on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? ’Cause you don’t love me any more…,” the older man sitting next to me turned my way and announced with a grin, “That’s my son!” When I joyfully remarked that he must be very proud, he smiled and nodded before turning back to his glorious progeny.
On the other side of me, the artist Che Lovelace (showing at the fair with Nicola Vassell) announced, “This is a good party. Trashy like good, not trashy like bad.” With the right artists, Miami really is the right kind of trashy. As the night ended, I was bedazzled by a pair of gold boots streetwalking past, and my friend reminded me that at any art fair, when you start staring in bedazzlement at shiny things… it’s time to go home.
