by The AFC Staff on December 10, 2012
Like most art fairs, Art Basel Miami Beach is conspicuously unaware of its past. The fair closed yesterday, and already its website header has begun hyping Miami Beach 2013. As an art fair, with its accompanying talks, lounges, and VIP access, it’s something between a market and a luxury brand, and neither markets nor luxury brands have much use for memory. In the business of selling “the very best,” you shouldn’t say whether it’s more or less “best” than last year; this is most true of “the very best price.”
So if you missed it, you missed it, and good luck piecing it back together. Thankfully, AFC is here to help, chiseling snide remarks into the bedrock of history. We went to the fairs and then wrote about what we saw at the fairs, which means this: If you say you saw the things we wrote about, some people will believe that you went to the fairs, yourself. Try it out; it’s fun. When art fairs give you false forgetting, give them false memories right back.
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by Corinna Kirsch and Whitney Kimball on April 27, 2012
It’s art fair season. Again. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
This non-stop barrage of art fairs and satellite fairs and online fairs and innovative, alternative fairs has been fun and all, but let's face it: we don’t enjoy spending four months out of the year writing these previews, and we suspect that galleries don’t enjoy schlepping their shit back and forth around the globe month after month. It's only a matter of time before a few winners are announced, and we can give our art-legs a break; so we've decided to help settle this thing. Time for the art fair royal rumble. This May, which fair will unleash the most ravaging can of whoop-ass ever seen?
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