Art Basel Miami - What's happening at the Convention Center

It is Thursday December 4 and I am at the Miami Convention Center attending one of the great events of the year - Art Basel Miami. There are over 220 exhibitors and it is a wonderful opportunity to discover galleries that produce beautiful catalogues and sometimes even hardcover monographs for their clients. This is a group that is used to spending some money, so printing in Italy with Mondadori is not necessarily such a stretch. It is also just a great scene, and I've been looking forward to this for weeks.

Only I have a rotten cold.  The truth is I feel so cruddy I almost couldn't drag myself down to the Convention Center today.  Even the sight of so many swanky art lovers conferring over cocktails didn't lift my spirits.

And then, I bump into my old friend - and competitor - George Dick from Louisville, Kentucky. Suddenly the chances of this turning into a really fun afternoon have just increased by 100 percent. George owns Four Colour Print Group and is funny, irreverent, really annoying at times, and a one-man party. We make inappropriate remarks about some of the more unusual pieces of art (Yoko Ono's "Touch Me" boxed body parts is pretty up there in my opinion). And we talk to various gallery owners, promoting ourselves and each other.  This tag-team strategy by two competitors seems to be so baffling to the potential leads we speak to that, in their confusion, they are much more forthcoming with names, phone numbers, email addresses. Who would have thought?

And we just have some fun. Though cameras are strictly forbidden inside the Convention Center (but open drinks are allowed around all this art? Explain that) I snap off shots of a few of our favorites.

George is considering this one as a mascot for his printing company. (That is, assuming he wants to lose all his business, possibly to me.) Actually, I am considering this one as a mascot for George's company

And this huge sculpture was just so weird and amazing, that it was constantly surrounded with a crowd of observers. From one view, the figure is nearly flat, while from another it is fully formed. And it had the effect of appearing almost like a hologram, even though it was completely solid.