1. New Floor Plan

Hurtling out of the fog of memory comes a poignant recollection of Art Basel Miami Beach 2008: No sooner had my plane landed at Miami International than I ran into a group of art world folks wearing looks of consternation. Had I read the New York Times that day? It was official: We were in a — pregnant pause — recession.

I had read the Times, and while doing so had felt a stab of sympathy for recently appointed Art Basel co-director Marc Spiegler, thinking that if I were him I’d be shaking my fists skyward, wailing — volubly, plaintively, well-nigh brokenly — asking how the world could so completely let me down on the occasion of my first Miami fair.

But last year’s event, as it turned out, wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. People sold stuff, it was just a little “eh.” And Spiegler and Co., having sailed through '08 with relative aplomb, were back this year in top form — despite some pre-fair quibbling in certain periodicals about just how many dealers had dropped out, or exactly how much turnover there was, or whatever — and with the temerity, or the admirable gall, to change the fair’s floorplan entirely.

This bold move provoked much grumbling and some disconcerting sights like — and this comes to me secondhand, but still — that of art adviser X and his charge, megacollecting hedge fund honcho Y, tentatively attempting to navigate the fair’s wide aisles, both of them looking a little lost; Dante and Virgil in a darkening wood, gone way, way off course. As it always goes with things of this nature — that is to say, big changes made to a much-loved formula — many of the haters were grappling with acute nostalgia, having previously charted their fair experience around where certain prominent dealers’ booths were located. The gripes of some — looking for James Cohans booth, I found his name had somehow been omitted from the list of dealers on a kiosk in the center of the hall, oops!, and it occurred to me he’d be right to be a little miffed — were more justified than those of others.

On the whole, though, you had to hand it to Art Basel. It took guts to make this monumental a tweak, and relocating the youngster dealers in the Art Positions section from those claustrophobic shipping containers on the beach into the convention center injected a dose of edgy newness into the whole works. There was a bit of a to-do on the fair’s first day when Sylvester Stallone showed up to swan about in front of his paintings at Galerie Gmurzynska; one got the feeling it would have been even more of a to do if more people had been able to easily find Gmurzynska’s booth. Finally, besides, people, as any self-help guru will tell you, it’s about the journey, not the destination. So, every time someone called you on your cell phone and said, “Meet me at booth H21,” or B7, or J9, or what have you, you had to gulp down your fear, unfold your map and commence your quest, and when you finally, finally arrived, a little harried, a little bleary-eyed, at H21, or B7, or J9, you were triumphant! Ulysses on Ithaca! Ready to battle the suitors! Or, in any event, to buy some art.

2. Dana Schutz at Art Basel

Remember how when Dana Schutz’s name came up during the recession, it was invariably in the context of how she was one of those young artists whose prices got pushed up, up, up in the searing heat of the boom and would no longer be sustainable in a fallow period? Well, what the art world seemed to forget was how good a painter she is, how she continues to push her work into ever more challenging territory. As though to reset the discourse, her dealer, Zach Feuer, brought a handful of stunning, brand new Schutzes to his booth in the Nova section of Art Basel. With their weird, contorted, psychologically charged figures, their acrid mannerist palette, and Schutz’s enviably prodigious range of art historical references — one minute she seems to be riffing on Robert Delaunay, the next channeling Balthus — the canvases wowed everyone, and were snapped up in the fair’s first few hours.

3. Pieter Schoolwerth at Art Basel

That said, Schutz better look out. A few booths down, in the Art Positions section, another New York dealer, Miguel Abreu, was displaying a suite of recent paintings by Pieter Schoolwerth, complex compositions that also seemed to revel in oblique art historical quotations, and that effected a delicate balancing act between abstraction and figuration. Ten years ago, Schoolwerth — who is not quite as young as Schutz, but still young! — was making large, hyperactive figurative paintings that looked like George Tooker met George Bellows under a fish-eye lens. Now something different, something more cerebral and sophisticated, is going on in his work. Unlike much art fair art, which by necessity falls under the rubric of eye-catching bling, these Schoolwerths rewarded extended looking.

4. Christian Hayes empty booth

It’s still not entirely clear what happened. The powers that be at Art Basel say Christian Haye’s booth was empty because the New York dealer had a shipping snafu; Artnet, meanwhile, speculated that Haye is mired in debt. Whatever else can be said about this mysterious situation — and more surely will be said about it before long — it must be pointed out that it made for a refreshing break from the usual art fair fare. The adjacent gallery, which happened to be Dusseldorf’s Sies + Hoke, took an attitude somewhere between neighborly and opportunistic, displaying an artwork consisting of a number of metal chess pieces on the floor of the empty Haye stand. That piece, consequently, had the best placement in the entire fair, the catbird seat. Of course, one ended up wishing the whole Haye thing had been intentional, a conceptual prank along the lines of Gavin Browns gambit at ABMB in 2007, when the New York dealer’s booth was occupied by nothing except Urs Fischers cigarette pack dangling from a length of fishing line. How one wanted the Christian Haye empty booth thing to be a kind of statement, whether along sober Beuysian political lines — the vapidity of the art market! — or in the puckish vein of Yves Klein — Le Vide, je te présente fairgoers. Fairgoers, Le Vide. Enchantée!

5. Gabriel Orozco at the Jumex Collection at Bass Museum of Art

Look how much fun these people are having playing with Gabriel Orozco’s doctored pool table at the Bass Museum. You know the piece. It’s from the 1990s. The table is in the shape of an ellipse, and the cue ball hangs down from the ceiling on a piece of string, such that when you hit it, in an attempt to get at the other balls, it swings all around, nearly beaning people in the head. (Well, one player did sort of almost get beaned that night...) The point is, do we get to do this at Orozco’s MoMA retrospective? I’m not sure, but probably not. Again, look how fun and dangerous the whole thing is. What two adjectives suit art better, really?

6. Michael Smith as “Baby Ikki”

The only person arguably having more fun than those folks shooting billiards over at the Bass was the artist Michael Smith, who, at a morning press event for the nonprofit West of Rome, run by Italian dealer Emi Fontana, went into his whole 30-year-old Baby Ikki routine, complete with bonnet, diaper, and pacifier. My companion at this event was a little annoyed by the whole Ikki act, whereas I thought it was pretty much a tour de force. How often is it that a grown man can, in so eerily accurate a manner, imitate the jerky motions and bumbling gait of a toddler? A colleague of mine, who is a mother, once told me the so-called terrible twos could be described in the phrase “I want it; I don’t want it.” In this respect so many men resemble toddlers that one has to applaud Smith for going the full distance in his efforts at verisimilitude. Fontana showed an excerpt from a video that Smith and Mike Kelley collaborated on for the SculptureCenter last fall, in which Baby Ikki toddles innocently through the raucous, debauched scene at Burning Man. It made me want to see Ikki toddling through the aisles of Art Basel Miami Beach, flapping his arms, slurping on his pacifier, looking as lost as all the rest of us. But, you know, kind of appropriately so. Because he’s a baby.

7. Everything at Rosa de la Cruzs new museum, but especially Jonathan Meese

There should be a new test for art spaces: the Meese test. In the wrong space, Jonathan Meese’s sprawling installations and scary, imposing sculptures can look a little scattershot. In the right space, you get a sense for the weight behind the project. Such was the case at Rosa de la Cruz’s new museum, which does justice to so many other artists as well, like Jim Hodges and the late Ana Mendieta. Such was the gravity, the serenity, and the beauty of the de la Cruz building, such was the aesthetic coherence of the collection, that frankly it was difficult to look at anything else for the rest of the day.

8. Yayoi Kusama

The only thing that might have stood up against the de la Cruz was the show of Yayoi Kusama sculptures out at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Fairchild is a botanical garden, the largest in the world, actually, and it’s been doing annual art installations to coincide with ABMB. And the Kusamas may be the best yet. Set among the garden’s lily pads and banyan trees, Kusama’s sculptures — especially the sprightly “Flowers that Bloom at Midnight” she spent the past several months working on specifically for this installation — took on whole new resonances. The large orange-and-black pumpkin sculptures looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland, but best were the red-and-white polka-dotted blob-like pieces that floated in a pond. It was as though a spacecraft packed with extra-terrestrials high on psychedelics had crash-landed somewhere nearby, leaving in its wake a trail of party-colored ectoplasmic goo.

9. Santigold at the Deitch party

If you happen to be one of those extra terrestrials: spoiler alert. As most of us know by now, Art Basel Miami Beach and its attendant fairs are mostly about art, but also kind of about parties. It always seems sort of like Art Basel would prefer one discusses this sotto voce, as though it detracts from the seriousness of the whole thing. But there, I said it. I’m not sure what you did, but here, for the sake of I’m not quite sure what, are some of the things I did: I dined on the terrace at the Standard Hotel, courtesy of New York dealer Paul Kasmin, who put on a lovely little party for designer Mattia Bonetti. There I listened to Miami collector and Wolfsonian museum honcho Mickey Wolfson opine that the news of coming rain was nothing more than “propaganda from the West Coast.” (I’m not sure quite what he meant by that, but in fact it didn’t rain on most of the days it was supposed to, so maybe Wolfson’s on to something.) I saw the art world’s great and good, and not so great and not so good, come out in full force, and full plumage, at Aby Rosen, Alberto Mugrabi and Peter Brants little 72-table shindig at Solea, at the new W Hotel. (In one of the week’s weirder turns of events, a slightly washed-out and puffy-looking Val Kilmer was present, in a powwow with Tony Shafrazi and Peter Brant. Which raised the rather important question: When a famous actor is on hand, why is he almost invariably hobnobbing with Tony Shafrazi? [See under: Owen Wilson]) But the best thing I did, party-wise — sorry, everything else! — was go to Jeffrey Deitchs annual musical event at the Raleigh, which this year presented the redoubtable singer Santigold. I’m convinced at this point that Deitch, an impresario in all things, has some sort of sixth sense for knowing precisely which act to put on in any given year — 2006 somehow seemed very Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, in so many ways, if you’ll recall — and Santigold was suitably spirited. People generally don’t like to do what they’re told, but I’m here to tell you that when Santigold orders “you people need to have a dance party, right here!” there is immediate compliance. It was splendid.

10. But I’m on the Guest List! by Elmgreen and Dragset

If you couldn’t get into Santigold, well, sad for you. And you might have been reminded of that fact by an artwork in the Jumex Collection show at the Bass Museum. It was by the super-clever duo Elmgreen and Dragset, and it consisted simply of a door emblazoned with the acronym “VIP.” Could there be a more emblematic artwork for the whole Miami experience? From the highly coveted VIP cards Art Basel doles out to the fancier folks — only some of them will get you a personal car and driver — to the parties you will never ever get into and don’t you even think it, the whole Miami thing is really based on who you aren’t, and what A-list doo-dahs you consequently can’t gain access to. Which brings me to my last night on the beach. There was a group of us, and we made an attempt to go to ex-Whitney curator Shamim Momins much-hyped party for her new project Land at the NADA fair, at the Deauville resort, and we were swiftly rebuffed by a scrawny dude clutching a clipboard and guarding the door to the ballroom in which the party was being held. Waving at the crowd that had gathered, he pleaded, “We’re at capacity! I don’t want my fair shut down!” Indeed, the City of Miami had been on the scene, talking potential violations on the order of there’s just too many people here, moving one disappointed partygoer to sigh consolingly to his friends, “Hey, this isn’t a hierarchy thing, it’s a fire code thing.” And so a bunch of us, led by artist Rashid Johnson and dealer Joel Mesler, headed across the street to the Sandbar Lounge, a — how to put it? — very local kind of place. Let’s just say it’s a place characterized by two-for-one shots, flat-screen TVs with sports on them, bathrooms indicated by neon signs reading, respectively, “chicks” and “dicks.” Soon there was a lively spillover crowd from the Deauville — artists like Mamie Tinkler and Dennis Hollingsworth and Ry Rocklen were there; collectors like Tim Nye were there; dealers like Jessie Washburne-Harris and Michael Lieberman were there. Sylvester Stallone and Val Kilmer were, mercifully, not there. People talked about their triumphs, and their letdowns, and the general weirdness of art fairs. It was all very relaxed and low-key and casual...until suddenly it was, improbably, happening, and someone shouted, “Hey, we should get someone to work the door! Set up a velvet rope!” Alas, it seems eventually everything in Miami goes the wicked way of exclusivity. That said, next year, Art Basel should ditch the glossy Mondrian and have its Welcome Party at the Sandbar — two-for-one shots! — if NADA doesn’t beat them to the punch.