For me, Peak Basel came sometime around midnight Saturday, when a young man toting a volume of F. Scott Fitzgerald strolled into Nobu flanked by a pair of semi-naked women with disco-ball pasties and lampshades for heads; the dining room burst into adoring applause as the trio briefly presented itself to a corner booth occupied by Miley Cyrus and Patrick Schwarzenegger.
I’d show you photos, but I was forced to delete them all before security politely walked me out of the dining room and pointed me toward Ghostly International’s poolside after-party for the Pulse Art Fair, where I belonged. Whatever: I snapped this photo as Miley emerged from the dining room in her patented marijuana-leaf shirt.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been shooed away from the Princess of Twerk that week, as I’d failed to get on the list to see her play Beatles songs with the Flaming Lips. But let’s face it, even with Wayne Coyne involved, seeing Miley in disco nips couldn’t have been as great as watching TV on the Radio blaze through an equally stripped-down set at the Deauville, outside of the LES-happy NADA fair on Saturday.
There, Kyp Malone told the loungers at Surf Lodge’s poolside pop-up how beautiful they all were – “but, fucking Ferguson,” he reminded them.
During my four days at Art Week Miami I didn’t see any of the protests that attempted to “shut down” the annual orgy of excess (it’s possible Jerry Saltz’s Twitter feed was more disruptive). But the streets of Wynwood did get taken over by roving hoards looking to take selfies with the new murals.
And the folks clamoring to get into James Murphy and Soul Clap at Ian Schrager’s luxe new Edition hotel/condo certainly resembled a mob on the verge of rioting. (I never even made it to the doorperson, though I did drink from a gilded pineapple tiki mug in the penthouse, so I won’t complain.) And the amount of weed blazing at the Basel House tent definitely qualified as civil disobedience. As did this Warhol-esque silkscreen by Knowledge Bennett.
Which reminds us: we were at Art Week for art. (Anyone there to party got completely trolled by Vice’s 20th anniversary show, back home.) We took some photos so you could see what the Lower East Side and Brooklyn galleries were up to without any of the humiliation of trying to get the doorman’s attention at Le Baron (“Julio! Steve! Come on, guys, I’m friends with Andre…”)