Linda Yablonsky goes to all the ABMB parties for The Moment:
The Rubells usually show recent acquisitions at the start of each new ABMB, introducing new artists or new ideas about art that often have an influence on the market. This time out, they remapped their vast holdings to focus on 260 works by 74 artists who appropriate images not just from other artists but also from — you guessed it — popular media. Only this show made a lot more sense and it was both intriguing and fun.
Take the grid of doughnuts nailed to the backyard wall, a nod to minimalism by the food artist Jennifer Rubell. Or the ton of crushed tea leaves by Ai Wei Wei, made to resemble a Tony Smith cube. Or Keith Haring’s 1981 version of Warhol’s Marilyn and Elvis paintings. Or Nate Lowman’s posters of violent figures heroicized in the tabloids, his earliest (and still his best) art. Or Thomas Houseago’s 13-foot-tall bronze of a primitive idol, which had arrived the day before.
Or the Rubell’s new Cindy Sherman, the photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska. (Plenty of pictures by the original were on the walls, too.) “This is a real walking tour of our whole life as a collecting family,” said Mera Rubell, dressed for the occasion in a black fright wig. “You gotta keep ‘em guessing.”
An entirely different art world was just then sitting down to an eight-course meal on the windy terrace of a new and nearly unoccupied 60-story condo, where the collector Ella Cisneros greeted the Miami Art Museum trustee Solita Mishaam, the architect Manolo Mestre, the curator Manuel Gonzales and a hundred other guests from Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and New York, a far country here. The Miami fair is probably the best opportunity for many visitors to educate themselves in Latin American art, which for some reason seems more foreign, or at least less known, than art from anywhere else.
ABMB: The Pre-Game Show (The Moment/New York Times)
