http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/arts/design/art-basel-miami-beachs-unfulfilled-promise.html 2014-11-29 06:24:40 Art Basel Miami Beach’s Unfulfilled Promise Art Basel Miami Beach was supposed to make South Florida an art mecca. So what happened? === MIAMI BEACH — “It was a really devastating message,” the Miami art dealer Fredric Snitzer said, recalling the personal impact when The opening of the Perrotin gallery on the eve of the “This is Paris in the ’20s and that guy down the block is Picasso,” Mr. Snitzer said at the time. Yet by 2009, Perrotin had ceased regular exhibitions in Miami, turning off the lights completely the following year. Several other leading galleries that opened in the wake of Art Basel’s 2002 arrival have also shut down, while many of the city’s most promising younger artists have decamped to New York and Los Angeles in search of greener career pastures. More than a decade after Art Basel’s debut, the city’s cultural milieu has been undeniably transformed. But beyond the splashy galas surrounding the fair’s kickoff on Wednesday, and the expensive new centers for art like the waterfront Some blame rising rents that have scattered a once-cohesive art community, while others point to a dearth of local collectors and visiting Basel-ites interested in owning their work. Without that bigger pool of buyers, they say, there’s no way to sustain artists amid the continued expansion of the art scene. “I couldn’t support myself,” said Bert Rodriguez, a conceptual artist, in a phone call from his new home in Los Angeles. After Yet despite awards and commissions, he felt stuck. “All the collectors there who were going to support me had already bought my work,” said Mr. Rodriguez, known for prankish projects that include burying himself up to his neck on a museum’s front lawn. “I had tapped into every well I could, and it just wasn’t enough.” But now that he’s in Los Angeles, he said, advertising agencies and Silicon Valley clients who once ignored him are lining up. This winter, he will get $50,000 from a company behind a new travel app to drive cross-country and “virtually” write his name across America. “I’ve made more money in the last three years in Los Angeles than in the previous 10 in Miami,” he said. Mr. Snitzer pointed to his own ledger: only 30 percent of his sales are to Miamians. That number dips to 15 percent for more expensive pieces, in the mid five figures. “If Art Basel had to depend on local sales,” he said, “they never would have stayed.” The buying power represented by Yet only a small percentage of out-of-town visitors will venture out to explore Miami’s homegrown art scene. Once a prime attraction for Basel-ites, the local terrain increasingly seems to them to be merely a traffic-clogged backdrop. The New York collector “Then there are some people who come just for the parties,” she added with a laugh, “and the hell with the art.” With all this background noise, the only sure way for local artists to reach serious collectors would seem to be at the main fair, inside Miami Beach’s convention center. But of the 267 vetted galleries there this year, only two are from Miami, the same number as in 2013, and down from the peak of five in 2004. Mr. Snitzer has borne the brunt of local criticism over this situation: He is the sole Florida member of the fair’s selection committee (a shifting body of 10 to 12 gallerists from New York to Berlin), and the only Miami gallerist to have exhibited in the fair since its inception; some rival dealers have accused him of boxing them out. He bristled at the accusation, insisting it was simply a matter of maintaining an international level of quality and competition. He added wryly that for all his supposed influence, his own gallery still hasn’t passed muster with the selection committee of Art Basel’s flagship fair held every June in Switzerland. Mr. Snitzer’s advice to rejected Miami galleries? Apply to one of the many satellite fairs in Miami. “They all make money,” he said. “It’s like saying the only place I can go to college is Harvard.” But the financial results of the satellite fairs aren’t always rosy. Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, a partner in Miami’s well-regarded Emerson Dorsch is bypassing the fairs altogether this year, concentrating on a sprawling installation back at its gallery in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, featuring the local artists Hugo Montoya and Brandon Opalka. “We’re trying to do something different than cramming our ideas into a 10-by-20-foot booth,” Ms. Emerson-Dorsch said. “The best investment you can make as a gallery is in your real estate.” This isn’t just a question of aesthetics. The same art-powered gentrification at play from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to the Mission District in San Francisco has hit Wynwood with a vengeance. In an all-too-familiar exodus, many of the galleries and artist studios that once defined Wynwood as Miami’s art neighborhood have moved out, unable to afford the soaring rents. Unlike Emerson Dorsch, a pioneer in the area, few had bought their buildings. Yet real estate needn’t be the bane of artists’ lives. The But Mrs. Schneiderman wanted a deed, certain that sweetheart leases wouldn’t last. Last month, capitalizing on Lincoln Road’s overhaul into a premiere retail destination, the ArtCenter sold its first building for $88 million. Even after spending part of the profit on a new studio complex in a much cheaper neighborhood, the ArtCenter will still have an endowment larger than any other museum or visual arts group in Miami, providing an enviable long-term measure of security. The rest of Miami’s art scene has hardly been shy in telling the ArtCenter’s board members exactly how — and in what new neighborhood — they should be spending their windfall. These behind-closed-doors conversations have been tense, with some suggesting ArtCenter jettison its artist-driven, studio-focused mission in favor of a much grander vision. “Too many people are obsessed with chasing the next hippest, newest thing,” said Kristen Thiele, an ArtCenter board member as well as a former resident artist there. Ms. Thiele cited the core ideas first laid out by Mrs. Schneiderman: Artists need cheap studio space, the ability to sell their work — out of those same studios, if necessary — and, not least, “the genuine sense of community that comes from being surrounded by your fellow artists with trained eyes.” There’s nothing especially revolutionary about Mrs. Schneiderman’s thinking. Still, for the Miami painter John Sanchez, it’s been more than he could have ever hoped for. Originally represented by Emerson Dorsch, he felt his rain-slicked urban landscapes were falling out of step with that gallery’s turn toward an art-theory laden program. “I’m a realist painter,” he said. “I’m trying to paint everyday moments as beautifully as I can. It’s not rocket science.” By contrast, at the ArtCenter, just by dint of being on a heavily trafficked street, he said, “I got a vast amount of exposure to people from everywhere, not just those in the know.” He’s since picked up both sales and fresh brushwork techniques. Having found a formula for survival as an artist, he’s hoping to move into the ArtCenter’s remaining Lincoln Road building. “I want to be like mold,” he said, laughing. “I want to stay.”