Adam Lindemann has more to say in the Observer but this should be enough to get you going:
By ballooning in size, Art Basel decided to ignore the direction of the market. The auction houses have intelligently trimmed their catalogs and edited their sales. With low estimates and no more than one example of any artist at a time, sales at auction have been good. At the fair, it’s exactly the opposite. What Art Basel needed to do was edit, and then edit again; we don’t need to see a zillion galleries showing the same artists every year.
The art-fair circuit has become a grind. There’s Art Basel in Switzerland in June, then Frieze in London in October, Abu Dhabi in November and Miami in December. By the time the private planes start to land in Florida, it’s the end of a grueling marathon where dealers are burnt out and inventory is mostly stale.
Did I see anything great? I can’t entirely remember, but I don’t think so. The visual chaos of thousands of un-curated and random works left me so visually bloated that I’d have a hard time distinguishing between a smallish Richard Prince De Kooning painting at Gagosian and a “hard to get” Dana Schutz painting that now is readily available from Zach Feuer, so why bother?
Parties raged on, with the opening of the W hotel a central event; many of the usual celebs and hangers-on were there once again. But if you exclude the art tourists, real collectors were again the minority. The majority of these gawkers/scene stalkers wouldn’t know Damien Hirst from Arman; what are they doing here? I haven’t a clue. They walk around looking at things, understanding nothing and asking for prices, only to remark, “Can you believe it’s 20K?”
Artless in Miami (NY Observer)
