<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"MIAMI BEACH \u2014 As most people are&amp;nbsp;now aware, the \u201Cevent-driven\u201D art economy represents the art market running to stand still. At big fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach, tremendous amounts of money and resources are spent to pique the interests of wealthy collectors and their multitudinous hangers-on, sometimes with spectacular success. However, since the experience costs a lot to participate in, and is displacing sales through storefronts \u2014 which now seem&amp;nbsp;so&amp;nbsp;20th century as a locus for art commerce \u2014&amp;nbsp;its merits are debatable. Artistically, it doesn\u2019t add up to much; I dread art fairs like I dread going to the dentist, with the same sad knowledge that it is a necessary duty. How much, exactly, do you remember year to year from your frenzied passage through these things? Unless you sold millions of dollars of art or got laid, not much at all. Which means, in my case, definitely not much at all.At the same time, the only thing that bores me more than art fairs is my own art fair ennui. If you wanted to accentuate the positive, you could say that the good side of Art Basel Miami Beach is that it functions as a kind of ad hoc annual global survey, with a quantity of art equal to or greater than the average biennial (someone once said that fairs were an example of \u201Claissez-faire curating;\u201D in fact, the \u201CLaissez Fair\u201D would be a dynamite name for a Miami Beach satellite!). The organizers do make an effort to bring in newer galleries, and at the Convention Center a visitor is able to get a snapshot of international art trends that you couldn\u2019t easily find anywhere else \u2014 even if a certain pre-packaged sameness seems to dominate and the format itself tends to make everything blend together into a kind of \u201Ccontemporary art gray,\u201D reading as an endlessly scrolling blog of bits and pieces of this and that.I\u2019ve always felt that art fairs repel critical thought, but this year I realized that one way to think about your role covering the big fair is that you are on a&amp;nbsp;rescue mission. Here the window opens to the public, briefly, on the back rooms of the commercial gallery world; all the best art comes out in the open \u2014 but only for a moment. Soon it will be whisked away, vanishing into some golden penthouse or cold corporate lobby, where the average person will never get to see it (unless it flips back into the auction market in a few years\u2019 time). So, I\u2019ve gone ahead and picked out 15 artworks I found this year at Art Basel Miami Beach that are worth remembering, from across the entire historical arc of the work on view at the fair. Perhaps, someday, this will help some art historian piece together where they ended up.To see 15 works of art worth remembering from Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, click on the&amp;nbsp;slideshow.To see all ARTINFO\u2019s Miami 2012 coverage,&amp;nbsp;click here.[content:shareblock]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/845950/save-this-art-15-works-worth-remembering-from-art-basel-miami?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+artinfo-all+%28All+Content+%7C+ARTINFO%29>