On the occasion of 2014's Art Basel in Miami Beach, three Miami locals—a gallerist, a collector, and an artist—talk about the importance of the annual fair.
Snitzer, Mora, and Singh, at the Mandarin Oriental, see ABMB as a vital meeting point for collectors, artists, and gallerists around the globe.
Over 70,000 expected visitors will experience more than 250 of the world’s most prestigious galleries during the annual Art Basel in Miami Beach. As the city readies itself for another banner year at the festival, three in-the-know aficionados talk about the ABMB experience from three different angles: Fred Snitzer is a Miami-based gallerist who has been on the selection committee since the fair’s inception. Javier Mora is a respected collector and has opened his home many times for the Basel VIP collector tour. The Argentine painter Diego Singh has shown in museums and galleries around the world, including Fredric Snitzer and Tomio Koyama in Tokyo. During a relaxed afternoon at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Brickell Key, they spoke about what ABMB means to them.
Fred, you have been on the selection committee since the beginning. In your eyes, how has Art Basel in Miami Beach changed over the last 13 years?
Fred Snitzer: It could have grown much more quickly and it could be 10 times the size that it is, but they’ve chosen over the years not to do any of that. There are probably 20 more dealers than there were in the beginning. I think there are 700 or 800 applicants for those spaces, so the demand has gone up every year. The quality has also improved.
Longtime Miami gallerist Fred Snitzer has been on ABMB’s selection committee from the beginning.
Javier, tell us about your history with the Miami fair.
Javier Mora: We were fortunate enough to be invited by the Art Basel organizers to open up our house to the Basel VIP program from the beginning. We catered it, serving Venezuelan food and typical Cuban food—the Europeans especially loved that. They would have a lot of art conversations and then they would just lounge in the yard. Usually you’re supposed to go for an allotted time—like half an hour or so—but they would stay for three or four hours, just lounging. That was a fun way to meet collectors, trustees, curators—people from all over the world.
It seems like everybody uses Basel not just to buy and sell art but to meet others who are equally passionate about contemporary art.
FS: Absolutely. In a funny way it’s a trade show. It’s a natural meeting place.
JM: And the exchange is real. When we travel to London or Paris, we contact collectors that we’ve met and we visit their houses, just like they come to my house here.
Diego, you show with two galleries that are in Art Basel. How have you as an artist navigated the shift from the brick-and-mortar gallery to the international fair network?
Diego Singh: To me it’s part of the discourse. The fairs come with the territory for everybody, but that’s not the center of my practice. But I’m not an artist who has been commissioned to do a fair project; there are people who do that.
Snitzer and Singh at La Mar.
How do you think ABMB differs from all of the other fairs across the world?
JM: It is unique because of the selection committee’s due diligence in finding quality galleries. Each one of the galleries has looked for serious and interesting artists. With Basel, in one week we are able to have the exposure that would take a year to get to.
Fred, you’ve worked as a gallerist in Miami for decades. How has the fair changed the city?
FS: Profoundly—no one that I had been in business with for the 25 years before Art Basel had any kind of aspiration or fantasy about a fair like Basel coming to Miami. The impact has been across the board. It’s been cultural, it’s been economic, it’s impacted real estate, it’s impacted museums. The whole community has benefited from it.
How did the fair predict or contribute to the growth of the art market?
FS: Like any smart business people, the Art Basel management saw it coming. They could see it in the market. We had had a big crash of the art market in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and it was time for another tier, another evolution of that market. So they anticipated, and luckily that anticipation was realized with the fair. Their timing was amazing.
JM: Just to talk about numbers, the other day I read that the number of worldwide art collectors is supposedly 600,000 and the number of worldwide millionaires, 32 million. You can see that it just keeps on growing exponentially.
FS: It’s still one half of one percent of the world, or less, who looks, cares, is interested in, collects, does anything with contemporary art. It’s a huge opportunity. It’s just a problem in that it’s difficult to educate the public. How many millionaires—how many people in Miami with huge houses—spend fortunes in real estate, spend anything on art? None, almost none, even now. So there is a dilemma within the art world, but that’s another story.
The Helly Nahmad Gallery booth at 2013’s ABMB showed works by Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger, as well as this Alexander Calder sculpture, Brontosaurus.
How do you buy art in the fair?
JM: You always have to have good, comfortable walking shoes to move around quickly.
Have you seen people running?
JM: The first few years, yes; now, lately, I think that it’s more of a walk. You have a list of galleries that are visiting that represent the artists you initially focused on. Once you move away from that, you are going to discover somebody new.
Fred, when Javier walks in, you’ll already have been there. How do booths get set up?
FS: The fair opens on Wednesday. The soonest a dealer can get in is on Monday morning, so all the trucks and all the containers are there Monday morning. Over the years, the organizers have been so incredibly Swiss about solving any issue immediately. It runs like a clock. [But] Basel has had some funny incidents where a major international collector will have gotten a badge that says installer.
DS: What’s the selection committee like?
FS: Those committee members know every dealer and every artist. The directors travel the world. If some little gallery in Bora Bora has a show of a young artist, and if the artist is any good, they know about it.
Of all the places in the world, why first expand to Miami?
DS: The weather! [Laughs]
JM: It’s the center of the world. It’s Miami.
FS: They were looking for a counterpoint. They were looking for a winter fair, and you want to do a winter fair somewhere where it’s warm. Also, starting in the ’80s, there was this revelation that there was Latin American art, and of course Miami is the gateway to Latin America, without a doubt. It also had a collector base. Miami has the Bramans and Marty Margulies, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, the Rubells. The city has all those people here—that critical mass of international collecting.
The Forgotten (2013), by Enrique Martinez Celaya, was exhibited at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery booth at last year’s Art Basel.
Let’s talk survival tips.
DS: Drink soup, eat well, hydrate, don’t party too much, don’t get drunk, watch what you say.
FS: There are about 18 fairs during the time of Art Basel, and none of them would be there if there was no Art Basel. A lot of people think, It’s too expensive; it’s not for me; I need to go to the fair that’s in the closet under the bridge because that’s really what I can afford. That’s a huge mistake. There’s a price range that goes from very affordable to extraordinarily expensive in Basel. You must go to Basel; it’s like not visiting the Museum of Modern Art when you’re in New York.
JM: You have to dedicate a major part of your time to Basel. Maybe you go to one of these other fairs and you find a few galleries, but when you go to Basel, you find so many galleries that you may not have enough time to spend. I like some of the other fairs, don’t get me wrong, but we found over the years that spending 80 percent of our time in Basel and maybe 20 in other fairs has worked out well. Also, the Basel app will help you organize yourself.
DS: A good tip for artists is that at the end of the fair, you can go up to booths and ask for catalogs. Instead of buying a catalog that is $50, go there and they will give it to you because they don’t want to ship it back to Germany.
Is there any anxiety about people starting to buy more work online, or do you think the fair model is here to stay?
FS: There is absolutely nothing that can replace the experience of standing in front of a work; there’s no competition.
JM: I’ll have the work that I’m thinking of buying as my screensaver on my iPhone, so I’m seeing it every day. But I will not buy it until I see it in person. Once you get there, you see it—it’s a done deal.
Art Basel in Miami Beach takes place December 4-7.