Bruce LaBruce: Miami's Vice

Miami's Vice

Just got back from a weekend in Miami Beach, and believe me, forty-eight hours is enough. That is to say, Miami is not my favourite city in the world, but as my comrade Slava Mogutin and his publisher Powerhouse Books had invited me down all expenses paid to co-host a party for the launch of his new coffee table book Lost Boys, I could hardly say no, even though I'd be getting hitched four days after my return. (Powerhouse will also be publishing my book "Bruceploitation!" late next year.)

If you want to know why the entire world loathes America so much, go to Miami Beach. Sure, it's a kind of paradise, with temperate weather, gorgeous beaches, and beautiful-on-the-outsided people, but it's also vulgar, meretricious, self-absorbed, materialistic, amoral, apolitical, and lousy with ugly-on-the-insided people. Perhaps I shouldn't say apolitical per se. In fact, their idea of being political is precisely flaunting as much wealth as possible, shopping for the most expensive designer labels, driving around in grotesque stretch Hummers, and displaying as much of their expensively engineered plastic bodies as the decency codes permit. (It's the same political consciousness that motivated Bush to encourage people to go shopping after 9/11.) Conspicuous consumption is their religious credo, and material success is their only measure of a man. Sorry to get all Gandhi on your ass, but in a world with so much starvation, suffering, and deprivation, it's behaviour that can only be regarded as selfish, ignorant and grotesque. But bracketing that, I had a good time.

Ok, here's the deal with Art Basel. I guess a country gets the art it deserves. America is a country embroiled in an ugly, dangerous war with no end in site, no exit strategy, and the potential to destabilize the entire world to the point of kick-starting a nuclear war that will make the other World Wars look like a friendly game of Battleship. (I urge you to read David Rose's article in the latest Vanity Fair about the neo-con revolt against the Bush Administration and their dire predictions for the future of Iraq, which basically boils down to the rise of a Shia theocracy and their alliance with the newly empowered Shia Mullahs in Iran; the nuclear ascendancy of the new Shia bloc pitted against a newly nuclearized Sunni Saudia Arabia facing off across the Gulf; and the manipulation by America of Israel as a nuclear proxy to fight these forces in the Middle East, to be followed by either a limited or all-out nuclear war.) The art at Art Basel was so far removed and so insulated from any of the political realities going on around the world, it was almost eerie. Whatever happened to the notion of art commenting on or critiquing or engaging even on a subconscious level the social and political realities of a culture or civilization? The increasingly aggressive policies and tactics internationally of the Bush administration and its military complex are inversely proportional to the isolationist quality of the American public consciousness, and that includes its artists. Very little of the art I saw addressed the unstable, violent, and bloody reality of the world at large even in an oblique, metaphorical or subliminal way. The art was shockingly docile and inert – either decorative or craft-based (Martha Stewart was there, sponging up the craft techniques for her capitalist exploitation machine) or so self-absorbed and self-referential in relation to art discourse that it gave the impression of being created in a vacuum. It was also surprisingly asexual, which makes sense when you realize that the only credo being ascribed to by artists and gallerists alike was that of commercial and economic viability. And explicit sex, at this particular historical moment, doesn't sell, Justin Timberlake's attempts to bring back sexy notwithstanding. The ascendancy of the gallerist, in fact, has rendered artists, and to a large extent, art itself, obsolete and superfluous. De Kooning's legendary crack about Leo Castelli's salesmanship – that if you gave the sonuvabitch two beer cans and called them art he could sell them – has become the du rigueur modus operandi of the new breed of gallerist. But the difference now is that it's not just the emperor who can't see his new clothes are non-existent: it's everybody. The gallerists, the artists, the critics, the dealers, the buyers: it's a brand of group hysteria. Of course Jasper Johns' response to de Kooning's quip was to make a sculpture comprised of two cast bronze replicas of Ballantine Ale cans and sell it for vast sums of cash. (For a cautionary tale of what happens to the human soul when it gets lost in the abyss of artistic self-reference, material overkill, and isolationism, read the chilling article about Jasper Johns in the latest New Yorker, which I read, appropriately, on the plane on my way to Art Basel Miami.)

To be fair, I was only in Miami for a weekend, so I didn't get to see any of the many alternative satellite art fairs that have cropped up around Basel, but the smell of what I'm describing permeated everything. The younger artists don't really seem to be critiquing the more established artists on any political or ideological or even moral level; they're just trying to figure out how to usurp their elders' position, to beat them at their own game. Everyone wants to be rich and famous these days. Ho hum.