About Place

""MIAMI'S A SUNNY PLACE for shady people!" observed Iggy Pop in a 2008 interview with CNN, just a few years after Art Basel landed on the sandbar that is South Beach and forever altered the landscape of both Miami and contemporary art. "I'm practical, where this place is moody [. . .] and I'm materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual-there's a quicksilver quality about this place.""

"While poring over them from various spots around town during last month's Miami Art Week (including the restaurant at the Rubell Museum, the patio at the Untitled Art fair, and the sidewalk outside the Bakehouse Art Complex), I kept thinking about their resonance with the questions that being back home in Miami pushed to the top of my mind. Most urgently, Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann's feature essay on the exhibition "Construction, Occupation" at UCLA's Fowler Museum compares the housing crises and architectural legacies of São Paulo and Los Angeles, raising the topic of how artists in cities everywhere are responding to the all-too-familiar cycle of urban flight, gentrification, and displacement."

"The importance of place as both context and inspiration for artists also appears in our Focus review of the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. biennial, in which Artforum's West Coast editor Bryan Barcena notes how it eschewed "what so often seeps into LA art from the city's streets: exuberance, noise, mess, dirt, chaos, the defiance of categorization." (The same has been said of Miami's fairs and their relation to the local Afro-Caribbean scene.)"

Miami presents a juxtaposition of sunny surfaces and shady, moody, simultaneously materialistic and spiritual qualities. The arrival of Art Basel on South Beach transformed Miami and the broader contemporary-art landscape. Multiple contributions emphasize the particularities of place, reflecting attention to both global and local art practices. A comparative examination of São Paulo and Los Angeles connects housing crises and architectural legacies to artists' responses to urban flight, gentrification, and displacement. The Made in L.A. biennial notably avoided street-derived exuberance, noise, mess, dirt, and chaos, a contrast also observed in Miami's fairs and their relation to the Afro-Caribbean scene.

Read at Artforum