A rainbow forms over preparations for an event at Miami Beach.
Somewhere around 41st and Collins, your Uber app would make an offer available to set sail on an Uber Boat across the bay. You and five of your friends, cocaine cowboys style.
Meanwhile around 18th and Ocean, you practically needed an Uber Boat to cross the road. Heavy downpours on Thursday night and during the day Saturday made jumping from beachside to Aqua not only treacherous but potentially ruinous to a pair of espadrilles.
The Soak
Espadrilles weren’t even safe inside the fairs. In at least one of the gargantuan fair tents, water was coming up from the beach sand around the edges and up through the seams of the plywood floors. Water ran aggressively down the inner walls.
At one booth from a Mexico City gallery, I watched large puddles of water creep from the edges – just underneath three framed underwater photographs. Had the artist thought of this playful addition, the triptych would really have been something.
Localized flooding at one fair during Art Basel Miami week 2015.
One half of the gallery assistants didn’t see the humor right away. The other did. She laughed heartily without an effort toward addressing the influx of rainwater.
Amid the sound of wet vacs elsewhere in the fair, it was difficult to tell when the rain finally stopped. Artists, collectors, and gallerists all got soaked.
Making It Rain at NADA
NADA moved to the freshly facelifted Fountainbleau with a strong and noticeably more upscale presence. If the rainy weather outside wasn’t enough – and budget permitted – fair goers and participants could make it rain until the morning hours at LIV.
Meanwhile, Miami Project and Art on Paper moved to the aging Deauville.
All offer 18% gratuity included for your convenience.
A Cutting Edge Week for Art Basel Miami
On Friday night, the Art Basel Miami fair partially became a crime scene – or rather, an official one. An X-Acto blade is great for precision cutting and slicing, while only passable for stabbing. Anyway that’s exactly what a fair attendee used one for. There was a great deal of blood – so much so that the act was mistaken for a performance piece by those nearby.
Stabbing at Art Basel Miami 2015. Photo from Miami Herald.
Then there were cops, an arrest, social media posts, caution tape, the works. There was also a very thoughtfully worded statement, sensitive to the fact that travelers from around the world are now on perpetually heightened terror alert. The “isolated incident” was “immediately secured.”
In the end, it wasn’t terror or even a hate crime according to police. The alleged assailant was simply charged with attempted murder.
Interestingly, one article noted that the alleged assailant was “starting to think about applying to graduate school.” At the time of writing, there is no news regarding the victim’s thoughts on getting an MFA.
And More Senseless Blade Violence
Blade violence wasn’t limited to the fairs during Art Basel Miami Beach weekend. The next morning on Alton Road, blocks away from the convention center and south of the gorgeous 1111 Lincoln Road parking deck, an attempted bank robbery led to police permanently “neutralizing” a man. He was armed with a barber’s straight razor.
The Surge
As a result, a portion of Alton Road was closed, further complicating a traffic situation already yielding Uber surge rates – 4.6 on one occasion in fact.
And forget that Uber Boat. If you tried to book it, the prompt always said that “all ships have set sail.”