Miami starts with parties and champagne and ends with blood and rain. As the deluge descended and the drains spewed, we huddled around an ATM with a homeless guy, or maybe he was a performance artist or kooky billionaire—no, he wasn’t. We were all far from home, and wondering whether we could con some smugglers to get us to the Perez Museum, just so we could be somewhere dry with free-flow milk and honey (or Blood Orange). And then we saw the bodies of collectors floating down the streets and knew it was hopeless. Or that the beachwear shop had been flooded. We were being punished.

“You don’t like it, do you Rocco, the storm? Show it your gun, why don’t you? If it doesn’t stop, shoot it.”

So says Humphrey Bogart’s Frank McCloud to gangster Rocco in John Huston’s 1948 Florida film noir “Key Largo”. It’s in black and white.

So it goes on Miami’s South Beach too—a storm of parties to end the binge of another art year, somehow financial infarct avoided (just, by a whisker, in the duopoly Sid and Nancy auction world which has been mainlining guarantees like purest smack), and divorce delayed again. In an attic somewhere the portrait must be getting gross. It was the week before COP21 and nothing stirred on Miami Beach except tractors pointlessly grading the sand and a few desultory swimmers who were pretending, like, art wasn’t happening. The tents of subsidiary fairs sat on the sand like camps awaiting refugees. [Scroll down to read more]

A Chinese visitor to Art Basel Miami Beach was stabbed by another Chinese visitor, an architecture graduate living on New York’s swanky upper east side. It was reported everywhere. We mention it in case you missed it. Somewhere else on the beach someone was murdered or harassed or something and apparently it happened during Art Basel too.

Let us not get too cynical though. Art Basel Miami Beach looked great. It was full of amazing art. And a lot of it was sold. Don’t just take our word for it. Kenny Schachter, private art dealer and flaneur, wrote something similar for artnet, an art sales and gossip platform. Why bother complaining about the superciliousness of an art fair? As Kenny said, there was plenty art to fall in love with and plenty of collectors to screw or be screwed by, willingly or otherwise. That’s not the point. Words are easy. The fact remains that in its 14th year, the elegant conjuring trick that is Art Basel in Miami, was a huge success. As expected. Large numbers of artists and galleries will be in the black for year’s end because of this wonderfully absurd carnival. Sure there is a lot of cookie-cutter art there too, and not least from very famous artists. But no-one is forced to visit an art fair. You do not need to read this article. And the A-List celebs padding about with their ego and oils are just so much blarp for the glossies.

“Beuys would be delighted that everyone has finally become an artist and Rauschenberg’s gap between art and life has all but disappeared.“—Kenny

No, the problems of the art world are more conceptually profound, and ever more concentrated. The inevitable weirdness of an art fair, particularly at the pinnacle, which is exclusively occupied by Art Basel and maybe TEFAF, is but a symptom of a wider malaise. The real issue is not what is contemporary art, but what is it for? Has it become irrelevant? The world is burning and millions of refugees are risking everything for a chance in a leaky boat to an increasingly bankrupt West, figuratively and literally. It seems we have finally succumbed to Benjamin’s prognostications regarding art in the age of mechanical reproduction—everything can be copied, and therefore will be. This is the fat arsed portrait in the attic. There is nothing new and nothing will be “new” ever again. We are hooked on cash but buying nostalgia.

Give it up, Frank Ocean—

Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce
Too many bowls of that green, no Lucky Charms
The maids come around too much
Parents ain’t around enough
Too many joy rides in daddy’s Jaguar
Too many white lies and white lines
Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends
Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends