ABOUT LAST WEEK: Art Basel Miami Beach

THURSDAY (December 3)
Another day, another VIP preview, this time for Pulse—which is always, like, the alternative guy and gal’s fave alternative fair (overheard during the preview: “I’m blogging about this for the Huffington Post. Ha!). It certainly attracted the cool kids: I chatted with the guys behind the Friends With You juggernaut, still smiling after attracting about 1000 people to their store opening in the Design District a couple nights earlier. I then saw the guys behind the excellent Twitter-aggregating website Artlog, seated in a booth bedecked in wallpaper by the graphic design artists Dan Funderburgh, an old associate of mine. Unfortunately, Dan had just left, and the Artlog guys had their heads stuck in their laptop screens, so I decamped to say hi to nearby Anthony Spinello, who was using his Spinello Gallery booth for a solo showing of new photos by Lee Materazzi. We were interrupted by a couple of women who brought me out of my convivial haze and into the economic reality of this year’s Basel. They were attempting to haggle with Spinello over one work, offering half of what he named as the price. This ain’t an auction, ladies.
I had a mind to negotiate with the attractive woman at the Espacio Liquido booth, once I could grab her attention as a fairgoer flirted shamelessly with her. I wasn’t as interested in her, however, as with the insanely detailed and cleverly presented drawings by young Swiss artist Ingo Giezendanner. Alas, their prices were beyond my reach.

In the evening, I stopped in at Luminaire, Miami’s always excellent design showroom, then at Tomas Maier’s high-flying boutique before dining with friends at Michelle Bernstein’s much-improved Sra Martinez, which now does tapas as well as anywhere outside Spain as far as I’m concerned (and I was a skeptic when it opened last year).

Opting to stay on the non-beach side of Biscayne Bay, I eschewed the star-studded Aby Rosen dinner at the W South Beach (in retrospect, what was I thinking?!) to stop in at the opening party for Nike and Lance Armstrong’s Stages show, in an unfinished lobby of one of Miami’s ubiquitous semi-built skyscrapers. Good times, great art by a who’s who of the street-art world including Fairey, KAWS, Barry McGee and José Parlá, and, of course, yellow Livestrong bracelets. From there, it was on to check out the new nightclub Bardot, where George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic was making a special unannounced appearance. The opening band chased me and my crew from the building, however, and we headed back Downtown for the end of a raucous party for Tequila Casa Dragones, aboard what was bizarrely described as “The only Turkish gullet on the Eastern Seaboard.” I don’t know what a tequila boart party has to do with art.