Maria Bell and Glenn O'Brien; Alex and Ada Katz

Ada gave him a tolerant look and smiled with the fabulous dignity of the ultimate good sport. I knew that they had probably been dining with a comparably fabulous crowd and Alex didn't want to admit it. I later heard him say that he had been offered a ride to Miami by NetJets and he thought it was a sports franchise.

Anyway, the mood was picking up at the convention center and I realized that disaster was not imminent.  It was actually crowded by early afternoon. I made the rounds, handing out the redesigned Art in America and the Interview art issue and checking out the wares. What did I learn? It's interesting how one year you'll see tons of a certain artist and the next year very little. Last year there was a plethora of Warhol and Basquiat, this year very little but the quality was very high. There was a fantastic Basquiat self-portrait on hinged wood with Hispanic bottle caps nailed to it at Krugier hanging around a lot of other blue chips and I snuck up behind a young dealer who was explaining it to a couple of affluent-looking older ladies with expensive purses. They asked about some crossed-out writing, what it said, and the young man started in on a very earnest explanation of Basquiat's writing and cross outs. After a while I leaned in and said "Can I give you a hint? It said "Nothing to be gained here." The young dealer lit up. "Oh, from the Handbook for Hobos?" He responded. Smart boy. Basquiat copped the phrase from the cryptographic code of depression-era hobos. A cross signified "religious talk will get you a free meal"; a bird signified "free telephone"; a cat signified "kind old lady lives here"; a top hat signified "a gentleman lives here"; a circle with an x inside signified "a good place for a handout," while a plain circle signified "Nothing to be gained here."

Station curators Shamim Momin and Nate Lowman; Naomi Campbell and Vladislav Doronin

I don't know if the ladies gained anything from this exchange but I was charmed to hear an astute and curious young art lover discuss this wonderful painting and think about Basquiat at work.  I was reminded of the time when my wife and I came across a docent at the Brooklyn Museum Basquiat show holding forth on the hinges on his painting.  There was some cockamamie theory about what they signified and it was quite amusing when my friend Steven Torton (who was Basquiat's painting assistant and actually made the stretcher in question) went up to the docent and explained that the paintings were hinged because Basquiat's studio on Crosby Street had a small elevator.

What did I see more of? Conceptual art. Work by Lawrence Weiner could be found at ten or so booths and Kosuths in almost as many. There were lots of Germans on display. Albert Oehlen (wish I could afford one), Kippenberger, Baselitz, Herold ... and I don't know if it was my imagination but there seemed to be more work from the masters of the fifties-quite a few de Koonings, lots of Calder and Chamberlain, Judd, Rothko, David Smith, Frank Stella. Oddly I think the painting that caught my eye the most was a big exuberant Alfred Leslie. Funny, but the painting I fell in love with the year before was also a big Leslie (with Joan Mitchell running a close second). I don't know what it is but I just love his abstract work. In the sixties he went figurative, and while there are fine moments in that work, the abstract paintings circa '59-'60 knock me out. He is a funny character. He made the seminal Beat film Pull My Daisy with Robert Frank. It was written by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Corso, Larry Rivers, Delphine Seyrig and other oddities. It was funny to be knocked out by one of his paintings again this year in Miami, because back at the hotel (the Raleigh) I had just been reading the collected criticism of Fairfield Porter and he admired Leslie's painting, but even more his work as a graphic designer. Leslie is intriguing. Maybe he should have stuck with abstraction but hindsight is 20/20 as Howard Cosell said. Many of his painting have terrific titles. In 1960 he did a painting called "Nix on Nixon," and the one I was loving in Miami this year is titled "Cough Control." He lives in New York. I wonder if he'd like to have lunch.

Glenn O'Brien, Clarissa Dalrymple, Mary Boone

What else did I learn at the big fair? (I'll deal with the smaller ones in the next installment.)  It's funny but I noticed that a lot of the art looked less like art than it used to, even last year. I think that this was a direct effect of the recession. Artisticness is receding from a lot of art and I can't help but think of this as a good thing. In fact, especially at some of the other fairs, like Scope, I saw aisle upon aisle of what now appears to be not just bad art but simulated art. I started asking myself new questions, or questions I hadn't asked in a long time. Like: what is this thing? What does it think it means? Who is it trying to fool?  Is it fooling itself?

Suddenly you could see the invisible wires holding it up. Suddenly even big art works by famous artists seemed to have a faint veneer of nervous perspiration. Some work looked suddenly smug. Much work looked suddenly not enough. On the other hand some artists looked better than ever. It surprised me to see how much more I suddenly liked Matt Mullican, Jenny Holzer, Bill Jensen, Walton Ford, Adam Fuss, Gilbert & George. But that was matched by a sudden suspicion of others I won't mention just now. I think it's a good idea to finish grad school and then go work for someone above suspicion as an apprentice.

Rauschenberg looked radiant. The Calders were whispering. The characters in the Alex Katz painting seemed to move when you looked away. Chamberlain's work looked quintessential. The big Christopher Wool painting at Luhring Augustine's booth made Esperanto jealous. I could envision Rembrandt  buying one of the amazing new Cindy Shermans. Yes, art was still working, but as money evaporated like water in a forgotten pan, the men were distancing themselves from the boys and the ladies were leaving the gals far behind. At Robert Miller's booth I found myself grooving on Lee Krasner, while around the corner Eggleston was transcending space and time.

And as the smaller contingent of buyers filed out of the fair, transaction complete, and the kibitzing McMansion golfers and the champagne drinking cougars began to cluster comparing face lifts, I pulled out my Uniball and wrote in my Moleskine reporter's notebook:

If you can't get fucked at an art fair....
Installations covered in sweat ... cheap juxtaposition isn't enough anymore to wow the rubes.
She wasn't good enough to be a photographer so she became an artist...
Can you imagine somebody paying the storage on this in twenty years?
Art makes them horny...
Easy doesn't do it.
Labor intensity and craft are back big time.
In a market like this an art critic could almost make a living.

Next:  A cool show at the Rubell and what I learned at NADA. (And it wasn't nada.)

All photos by Todd Eberle. Click here for his complete Miami Beach photo diary. 

Read Linda Yablonsky's Art Basel Miami Beach Diary here.