Hiroshi Senju Dubai or Not to Buy Back East

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As the week proceeds, there's an increasing sense that nowadays the strongest artistic—rather than commercial—justification for mega-fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach is the fact that they spawn so many more interesting fairs around them.

The Bridge fair (right next door to Flow at the Catalina Hotel on Collins Ave.) is a really fantastic experience, for example. There are almost 70 galleries peddling their wares here, and the overall standard of work—and the commitment with which it is presented—is really uplifting.

The whole thing starts in the lobby, where gallery owner Sundaram Tagore and his gallant team are doing business about 6 feet away from the hotel bar. They have some gorgeous works from Hiroshi Senju and a beautiful, huge Judith Murray that, they told me, had to be completely re-stretched because of the Miami humidity. And business for the gallery has been good this week. “We’re getting fantastic spill-over from ABMB," Tagore said.

Mount the stairs, and you'll find galleries from across the country and beyond (the enterprising young men of Vane from my hometown in the U.K. are here) all crowded into the hotel bedrooms.

LiveBox (Chicago) has a great selection of video art, including gallery director Catherine Forster’s own Golden Oldies presented as a lovely little installation on three iPods at $2,700 each (or $1,800 if you supply your own iPod).

Nearby, Wayne Coe's splendid mock-ups of model kit boxes—depicting a Guantanamo Guard Dog, a Human Pyramid and the US Occupation—are on sale at Bert Green Fine Art (Los Angeles) for $3,000 for a set of five, or $800 if you only want the US Occupation.

Publishing outfit One Eye Pug is offering monotypes by Tom McGrath and Suzanne McLelland, whose pieces are $3,000 or $5,500 for a diptych.

And Adam Baumgold (New York) has a typically eccentric assortment of artists who occupy the fertile territory somewhere between fine art and graphics. Baumgold told me he was thrilled with the fair so far, adding that artist Marc Bell, in particular, whose prices range from $1,000 to $5,000, has “done really well.” They’re a bargain, if you ask me.

Elsewhere in the Catalina, the ladies at Dillon Gallery (New York) were positively euphoric with the response they’ve had to their Atlanta-based debutant Cedric Smith, whose simple but haunting photographs-within-photographs are going fast at $1,500 each (and are also exciting interest from museums and other dealers).

Rice/Polak from Provincetown, Mass. has also had luck with a delightfully quirky group of artists, including Edward del Rosario, whose beautifully detailed and polished figure paintings are going for $2,800 (for Offspring Series: Woman); and Steven Skollar, whose delicious little framed paintings were priced at $2,600.

Vanessa Suchar, the Galeriste sans galerie, was exhibiting from London, showing Tom Hecht’s beguiling C-print Finis Terrae in an edition of 10 (of which 6 have already gone) at the current price of $12,500. She told me that euro to dollar, U.S. buyers are getting a great deal at the fair because European dealers have had to reduce rates. “The dollar is so weak that my prices in this country are crazy,” she explained.

Other galleries I came across at Bridge: New York impresario Jonathan LeVine, the always-stimulating Trillium Press, and Quebec’s Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, with Luc Courchesne’s rotating photographs for $1,100.

And then there's the indefatigable Nancy Hoffman, who has Katerina Lanfranco’s paper cutouts ($850), Jesse Small’s wonderful little ceramic sculptures of ghosts and speech bubbles ($1,500-$3,000), and Timothy Cummings’ unsettling figure paintings ($3,500-$6,500).

“Business has been very lively,” she told me. But after all the interesting work I’ve seen at the Bridge Fair, I'm really not at all surprised.