American technology and politics set the tone at the 23rd Art Basel Miami Beach

• New style: The Vassouras Museum opens its doors today with works by more than 60 names, including Tarsila do Amaral
• Exhibited in Rio: Cartola at the Samba Museum, ten years of Solar, new Paço cycle, new releases at the MNBA and more exhibitions

From the opening to guests and collectors on Wednesday — the public visit, which began on Friday, ends this Sunday (7) — some of the first works that attracted attention indicated that the fair would be influenced by political themes. “Bones” (2025), a monumental Carrara marble sculpture by the always restless Maurizio Cattelan (the artist of the duct-taped banana and golden toilet), represented by Gagosian Gallery, is an upside-down eagle, leaving it up to the public to read how the American symbol was represented.

In the Meridians section, American Ward Shelley presented the installation “The Last Library IV: Written in Water”, in which books are piled up next to boxes with labels such as “Fear of Democracy” and “Alternative Facts”.

— The original installation was created during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we seemed to have lost our sense of common truth. You can tell the story to make it seem like it’s “on your side” – comments Shelley. — This happened during the pandemic and it’s still happening today in the United States, where they take fundamental ideas and twist them.

Nearby, another artist was marking (literally) his position in a solitary and much less obvious way. Sitting in a corner of the Cristin Tierney Gallery, Tim Youd typed the entire novel “Fear and Loathing in the 1972 Election Campaign,” by Hunter S. Thompson, on an IBM Selectric. The performance is part of his 100 Novels project, in which the artist devotes himself to rewriting a hundred classics on a single sheet (when the paper falls apart, he strengthens it to continue beating on it). The book choice refers to the Miami Convention Center, where the fair is held and where the father of gonzo journalism covered the Republican and Democratic conventions during the 1972 election, contested by Richard Nixon and George McGovenrn.

— Thompson used this same model of machine, he covered the campaign from start to finish. The novel tells the story of a very similar period in American politics. Looking back, we know the outcome and also that Nixon was forced out of office, Youd said. — We don’t know what will happen now, but the way Nixon and his cronies acted, and the way Thompson describes it, is very similar to what we have seen so far from the Trump administration.

For the first time at the fair, the Mexican Hugo Crosthwaite participates in a solo exhibition of his gallery Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, in the Nova section, focused on personal exhibitions. Born in Tijuana, on the border with the United States, he represents issues in the “Ex-voto” series of paintings which make him appear both as a symbol of Trump’s new immigration policy and of his conflicting relationship with artistic institutions. The stop-motion animation “A Portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci” (2022) made it onto the Smithsonian Institute’s list of exhibits and works the government considers “unacceptable” – Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and a prominent figure in the Covid pandemic, becoming the target of his actions.

— Fauci has dedicated 50 years of his career to fighting infectious diseases, from the HIV epidemic to the Covid-19 pandemic. And one day I found myself mentioned in the list of works published by Trump because of this animation, says Crosthwaite. — But that’s the role of an artist, to capture the moment in which we live. Tijuana is a border city, you cannot escape immigration problems and the violence of drug trafficking. The city has people who have lived there for 30, 40 years, but who never stop wanting to return to the USA. You are stuck on two planes, we are not Mexican enough for Mexico, nor American enough for the USA.

Director of Art Basel Miami Beach, Bridget Finn believes that the fair naturally presents itself as a space reflecting the issues of its time:

— Artists are always reacting to what is happening in the world, socially and politically. If this were not the case, it would be worrying. The galleries that are showing some of these works have decided to amplify the voices of their artists at this time, and the fair is a platform for that.

One of the new sectors Bridget developed in her second year at the helm of the fair, Zero 10, dedicated to digital art, has transformed one of the works into one of the busiest places at the fair. In addition to the technological part, “Regular Animals” aroused public curiosity for reading that connects politics to big technology. Created by Mike Winkelmann, one of the biggest names in digital art, better known as Beeple, the installation consists of an enclosure in which robotic dogs respond to commands guided by artificial intelligence. The detail is that each of the animals wears realistic silicone masks on their heads, created by artists – Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Beeple himself – and some of the most powerful men in the world: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, CEOs of companies such as X, Meta and Amazon, considered aligned with the current American leadership. At regular intervals, physical cards depicting the dogs and their personalities, with NFT QR codes, were distributed to the public, in bags similar to those used to collect the feces of real animals.

— The people I chose, and in this I exclude myself, have in some way changed the way we see the world. Picasso, Wahrol changed our vision. And now it’s people like Musk and Zuckerberg, who have drastic control over algorithms, who decide how we see things — emphasizes Beeple, who sold the digital collage “Everydays: the first 5,000days” for $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021. — And they don’t decide this through UN resolutions or by lobbying Congress. They just decide for themselves. And that represents immense power.

The biggest bet of the show this year, the Zero 10 section met expectations with a strong concentration of the public around large-scale works, with different AI applications. Canadian Dmitri Cherniak, based in New York, presented works from the “Ringers” series, which refers to the “Livro do tempo”, by the Brazilian Lygia Pape, based on the infinite combinations of how to pass a rope through a set of pins. The solutions are presented in both a digital generative art panel and stainless steel prints and sculpture.

Other works attracted their interactivity, such as that of the German Mario Klingemann, who brought the installation “Appropriate Response” to the fair. It consists of a physical panel with a large panel that changes the words depending on the actions of visitors, kneeling on a wooden kneeler, like those in churches.

— I have always been fascinated by the amount of meaning we can condense into very short sentences, like sayings, quotes. In five or six words, we express profound truths. So I trained a very early AI model, GPT-2, from 2020, with this type of expressions, to create new quotes, which may or may not make sense – details Klingemann. — Today, when you request something from ChatGPT, you receive an instant reward. The work turns this into a small ceremony, kneeling, with a little effort to achieve this result.

For Bridget Finn, Zero 10 promotes an increasingly natural presence of digital art and AI at fairs:

— We will see more digitally native jobs entering all sectors. It will be very different at each of the fairs, what we show here will not be the same as what we see in Hong Kong (at Asian Art Basel in March). I can’t wait to see how this develops.