MIAMI—To get at the real insider experience of being at Art Basel Miami Beach, ARTINFO asked several art world figures—a museum director, a dealer, a consultant, an artist (actually two), a PR representative, and, in this case, a collector—to tell us about the wheeling, dealing, wining, dining, schmoozing, courting, negotiation, resting, and—oh yeah—looking at art that they do in a day at the fair.

Art fairs present special challenges for discerning collectors like Mickey Cartin, who has his own private exhibition space in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Three years ago, Cartin gave 125 photographs from his sizable collection to Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; selections from that group, including works by Lucinda Devlin and Spencer Finch, are on view at the Wadsworth until December 30 in the exhibition "Again: Serial Practices in Contemporary Art."

Since he is, after all, a collector, and therefore the fair's bread and butter, we allowed Cartin to flout the usual format and submit a sort of open letter to art fairs. Here are his thoughts on his whirlwind few days, as well as a few recommendations:

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This will not appear to be a journal as there is no way I can organize my thoughts and observations into any kind of chronology. There are simply too many things to see, too many unaddressed and ultimately unanswered questions, too many people to bypass, and too many visual images to hold on to. I do not recall the order in which these things happened. I can barely remember what day it is, and I have given up. 

I have been going to art fairs for over 20 years, and while my cynicism has grown over the last few years, I came here with the same sense of anticipation that I have brought to every one of them. I came here hoping to find exciting objects, and in fact I saw many. I do not want to know what dealers are offering in advance of the fairs, I don’t need to be the first one in when the gates open, and I rarely feel any kind of pressure to own the things that I find. I have made a collection of several thousand things by searching patiently on my own for things that matter to me, and I continue to resist with great determination the urgent call to action that sellers of goods at fairs want me to heed.

So this is how things have gone in general: I got here Wednesday and went to Art Basel Miami Beach. I saw many interesting things. I then ran to another art fair, and then to another. Then I went to a very nice dinner held by a gracious art dealer. I got kind of drunk, went to sleep, and when I woke up on Thursday I slapped myself in the face a couple of times, took a shower and a few over-the-counter painkillers, and then went to another art fair. After that art fair I went to another one and then to another. Then I drank some more wine and fell asleep and today I went to the Design Fair and a couple of other art fairs. The sum of all of this is that in three days I have seen more stuff here in Miami than the total amount of artistic output worldwide in the entire decades of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and perhaps even the 90s too. It has never been more obvious to me that there are far too many artists, far too much stuff being made, way too many art dealers, and far too little editing and discrimination. In short, there is way too much junk being passed off as something else, and in art fairs that is called art. 

On a more hopeful note, and as I sift through all the stuff I have seen and try to recall the things that mattered to me, I can tell you this: if the consumer/collector has the patience and self-confidence to go off on their own, and to stop listening to everybody else and just go looking, there are many interesting things to see. How many insignificant, late, poorly screened Warhols do we have to look at, or how many eye-catching Anish Kapoor gizmos do we need to play tricks on us, before we realize that there are compelling works of art to see as well? In no particular order, this is what hit me:

Thierry de Cordier at Marian Goodman. This is an artist who has avoided all trends. He is a poet, a painter, and a storyteller interchangeably. His work is hard to find, and often even more difficult to grasp, but it's worth the trouble. He's hardly a flavor of the month: If art fairs are still around in 2017, and a dealer has something of his to offer, it will still matter then. I spent over an hour looking at his work.

Laura Lancaster at Workplace Gallery (Nada). This is an interesting painter whose great promise can be seen in the one out of five paintings here that really works. But unlike most other 28-year-old artists selling work in galleries for $20,000 and $30,000 and up, it really looks like Laura Lancaster is on to something. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who will probably become dentists or take up something other than art-making, this young artist’s promise is exciting.