Art Basel Miami, Or, Is Florida in the South?

Art Basel Miami Beach, an American version of the Swiss art festival Art Basel, brings people from all over the world to Miami Beach to see and be seen, and to party, and perhaps, occasionally, to look at and even buy the art.The New York Times calls it "that bacchanal disguised as the Western Hemisphere’s most prestigious art fair."

Its now in full swing in Miami Beach, running this year from December 2-5, 2010, in museums, galleries, warehouses, and everywhere else one can display art. The full Program is here.

There is lots of photography on display, including a show entitled Inside Out, Photography After Form: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, on view at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, 1018 North Miami Avenue, in Miami.

This show includes the image, above, by Los Angeles-based photographer Uta Barth, entitled Sundial, and we are told that this image and the others in the show explore "the creative relationship between the camera lens and the construction, production and deconstruction of form; tracing the many and various ways in which form can and has been both produced and undone through the agency of the camera lens."

There is also lots of photography on offer from the 300 or so galleries who have moved their wares to Miami Beach for this event. Some real Southern photographers are among them, including Sally Mann, whose piece, Jessie  #6, above, is for sale at the booth of New York's Edwynn Houk Gallery.

But is this an event in Southern culture? How would we know if it were? Much of coastal Florida certainly has lots in common with the rest of Southern coastal culture, but the last time I was in Miami, I saw a forest of empty condominium towers.

Not sure about any of this. Perhaps I should look at more of Uta Barth's photography, which I'm told is about just these kinds of questions, about "a consciousness of the processes of perception and the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing."