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The wife and I took a journey south on Saturday to catch an afternoon’s worth of Art Basel Miami Beach, the four-day international art extravaganza that commandeers large chunks of Miami Beach real estate every December. The city’s convention center was the epicenter, with hundreds of galleries from around the world displaying work by thousands of visual artists. The focus is supposedly contemporary, but famous names from decades gone by kept cropping up (Basquiat, Warhol, Rauschenberg), the pieces crammed into tight, cluttered booths. The huge numbers this festival does ensured that walking and viewing room was tough to come by, which made it awfully difficult to have any kind of meaningful experience with individual pieces. The effect was like trying to sift through a giant pile of art, with no ability to be drawn in by anything but the most immediately eye-catching.

More manageable, perhaps, were the numerous side shows that popped up in the neighborhood around the convention center, such as SCOPE Miami and Bridge Art Fair. (The latter of which hosted a booth featuring pieces from Sarasota’s own Greene Contemporary.) These events were set up in some of the city’s gorgeous Art Deco hotels, in lobbies, courtyards and even individual rooms removed of their furniture. The small spaces made for more intimate viewings, but the steady stream of people was still, at times, exasperating: crying kids, cell phones, the works.

Maybe the source of my problem is that Art Basel seems aimed more at industry insiders (artists, gallery owners, collectors) than at the casual observer. I’m not the type to expect art to be presented in an orderly, white-walled, dead-silent space, but the floor of the convention center didn’t seem energetic, just cacophanous. And granted, I needed more than an afternoon to take it in. If I do go again some year, I won’t half-ass it. This thing requires at least a night’s stay.

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