Art Basel Shopping Spree: If I Had $10,000

MIAMI—ARTINFO wanted to know what it was like to be a rich collector, and what it was like to be a very rich collector. So we asked two writers to go on virtual shopping sprees at Art Basel. We gave Judd Tully a considerable amount ($10,000,000) and Robert Ayers a much more modest sum ($10,000), and asked them each to come home with no more than six works. Here’s what Robert bought. For Judd’s picks, click here.

In most circumstances, it would be a lot of fun to have $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket. It’s a fair amount of money, after all. But come to Art Basel Miami Beach and you’ll find that all you can get for that amount at most booths is a wry smile from the dealer. Frankly, it’s a pretty depressing experience.

“Try and get five or six pieces,” I’d been assigned. Sorry, it can’t be done, not without resorting to mass-produced souvenirs like “fuck art fairs” T-shirts that our friends at Frieze were selling, or Paul McCarthy’s chocolate-Santa butt plugs. That wasn’t what I was after. Nor was I interested in enormous-edition prints like the ones that Joni Moisant Weyl specializes in (and actually, even there my money wouldn’t have gone very far). I wanted unique pieces that I actually liked. Don’t get me wrong: There’s plenty of stuff here that I would love to own, but it’s way out of my price range. And there’s plenty of stuff that looks so slight that it ought to be less than $10,000, but those things were generally more than I could “afford” as well.

Things started out pretty well. I’d been tipped off to try the Art Nova booths, where apparently I’d find “pieces fresh from studios 'round the globe.” With what turned out to be beginner’s luck, I found Andisheh Avini’s Untitled XXXVI (2006) for $2,500 at I-20. Avini is an Iranian-American artist whose subject matter, unsurprisingly, stems from the conflicts he feels between his cultural background and his day-to-day life in the U.S. This little piece features an inkjet print of a Persian miniature, the main figure of which has been painted out with gold. It’s a beautiful object and poignantly eloquent at the same time.

After that, things became much more difficult. It seems that Art Nova dealers, Art Supernova dealers, and even the folks over in those Art Positions containers on the beach reckon it’s not worth their whiles to bring stuff priced under $10,000 to ABMB—and a lot of what I found in the price range didn’t do much for me. After an increasingly breathless crisscrossing of the convention center—I was beginning to fear I would fail to spend my "money"—I came across a wonderful little piece at Knoedler. James Castle’s Untitled (undated), at $7,000, is a tiny little blue-on-blue thing by a self-taught outsider artist (born deaf and mute in rural Idaho in 1899) whose work I’ve seen at Knoedler before and coveted. Castle’s a bit of a mystery, as are his materials. Nobody knows what the blue pigmentation here actually is. And nobody knows whether the work’s meant to be a landscape. Nevertheless, it’s an exquisite thing, and it will hang very nicely alongside my Avini.

And I have $500 left. What am I going to do with that? Well, as one dealer suggested, “You can probably just about get dinner over at the Setai on Collins Avenue for that.”