Shavin: At Art Basel festival, the water's fine

Earlier this month, the 17th annual Art Basel art festival came to Miami Beach, Florida. This is the nation's largest contemporary art fair. Held in the 500,000-square-foot Miami Beach Convention Center, it showcases over 250 galleries from 35 countries and the work of over 4,000 artists. Some of those artists are famous but dead (Picasso, Basquiat, Rauschenberg, Motherwell); some are famous and alive (Anselm Kiefer, Gilbert and George, Cecily Brown); and some are mainly infamous (here's looking at you, duct-taped banana-to-a-wall Maurizio Cattelan). The rest of the artists are in various stages of their careers, hoping to slide into the famous category. Everything costs many thousands of dollars. The event draws wealthy art dealers and collectors, as well as artists and art lovers from around the world. Over 80,000 people attended this year. My husband, my friend Cindy, and I were three of them.

We hatched the plan to attend Art Basel at the end of last month. In addition to gorging ourselves on art, we would also revisit the Wynwood Walls district, a gritty area of Miami known for its graffiti-covered walls and famous Shepard Fairey restaurant (Fairey is perhaps best known for designing the graphically stunning 2008 Obama campaign poster). We would also eat good food and lots of it, and do our part to boost the wine industry.

I've been to a lot of art festivals in my life. Most of them, while structured around art and artists, also have other draws, such as food vendors and music stages. In general this is fine - let's face it, shopping works up an appetite - but there's a saying among art festival artists that if a show has food in its name (the Bluffton Seafood and Arts Festival, for example, or the National Shrimp Festival), then your art is probably going to play second fiddle to the vittles.

In the Art Basel convention center, there were no baskets of fried shrimp. There were no elephant ears or corn on the cob on sticks or giant turkey legs, though after walking for four hours, I may have actually cried out for one of these. This show is more akin to a giant museum tour than a festival, and the second day in, I looked around at the other 79,997 people marching purposefully through the rows and rows and rows of art, eating and drinking nothing, and I felt a fluttering of my heart. It struck me that in a world that feels increasingly contentious, where we divide over the meaning of truth, here we were, thousands of us, united in appreciation of art.

My husband, Cindy and I didn't love everything we saw. We had varying opinions about what made the pieces we liked "work" and varying opinions about what made the pieces we didn't like "not work." We moved quickly past some galleries, lingered in others. I fell so deeply in love with one painting I told the artist I was moving in with him and his wife so I could look at it for the rest of my life.

"I imagine that would become boring for you," he said.

"Imagine how boring it would be for you," I said. He did not laugh.

Before we left Miami, we walked a bit of the beach. It was early morning, warm but not hot. Gulls circled overhead, and on the horizon, I could make out the ghostly form of an ocean liner. My grandparents lived in Miami, and when I was a child, my brother, sister, parents and I drove from Atlanta to visit them once a year. We played miniature golf, shopped for souvenirs, tumbled around in the sea and ate so many oranges our bodies sloshed.

Every day was a mix of all of these things for an entire blissful week, but what I'd remember best when I got home was the ocean: how big it was, how exciting, how overwhelming, how full of mystery.

So it is will be with Art Basel, I suspect: an ocean of art eclipsing all else, until next time, when we will do it again.

Dana Shavin

Email Dana at dana@danashavin.com and follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes.