The 20th Jornadas de Estudio de la Imagen is the kind of luxurious discussion event that happens regularly here in Madrid.

Saturday, November 27, 2010. Landing in Miami a few days before the wall-to-wall insanity commenced, I had a chance to take the temperature of the town, to selectively buzz through various Wynwood galleries and project spaces, to survey the tents of Art Miami, -Scope et. al. on Midtown Boulevard, to watch the graffiti boys throw up a mural on the side of a garage, to hook up both with the local scene and with other recent arrivals lured by the heady promise of Art Basel week.

In other words, I felt commendably and reassuringly early. That is, until Jill Clark, an art adviser from New York now relocated to South Beach, informed me that Basel-themed parties generally start in the middle of November, two full weeks before my arrival. Faced with the looming, inevitable immanence of the Great Influx and its concomitant doses of frenzy and glamor, many art dealers, club owners, party promoters, real estate speculators, fashion doyennes and benefit committees cannot resist the obvious marketing ploy. They resolutely hang their efforts on that familiar ABMB shingle, hoping to define their event as some sort of preamble

Den Marino (Russia), The Illustration of Life, 2009


Scope Foundation and Perpetual Art Machine presents

Scope Foundation and Perpetual Art Machine presents the [PAM] 4th Annual Last Minute Open Call for New Video Art

A Light at the End of the Tunnel
curated by Lee Wells

DEADLINE FRIDAY MAY 14, 2010
video must be delivered to the below address by this date

www.perpetualartmachine.com

"The Avant Garde Doesn't Give Up" - Asger Jorn

dancelovesart
presents
PDA
dancelovesart is a series of nomadic dance acts, installations, and video and performance interactions taking place in and around Art Basel Miami Beach.

dancelovesart will be hosted by Morgans Miami properties with daily performances and dance installations in the pools and onsite at Mondrian, Shore Club and Delano

Sunsets December 4 l 5 l 6 2009, 4 - 6pm.
curated by Natalie Kovacs

For more information go to PAM:
http://www.perpetualartmachine.com/content/view/677/48/lang,en/

Miami Art Fairs Week 2009

Art Basel Miami Beach
December 2 - 6

Timing is everything. Just three weeks ago, with the international art world about to descend on Miami for the annual Art Basel fair, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron unveiled their long awaited plans for the new Miami Art Museum, which will move from its current landlocked plaza near the civic center off Flagler Street to a breathtaking bayfront cultural complex.

As per inhabitat.com:

Located in downtown Miami in a park overlooking Biscayne Bay, the new Miami Art Museum will have 120,000 sq feet of programmable indoor exhibition space, plus 80,000 sq feet of space outside for art exhibitions, educational activities, relaxation and dining. Also located in the Museum Park will be the Miami Science Museum, as well as a branch of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, creating a tourist destination and cultural center in the heart of the city.

Artists Meeting Art Machine(SM)
premiers at PULSE Miami 2009, December 3-6.

For those of you that will be taking part in this years 2009 Art Basel Miami Beach / Miami Art Week, another art machine spectacle to be sure not to miss premiering at Pulse Maimi by fellow PAM conspirators the Artists Meeting Arts Collective. Looks like they are trying to undercut everyone and sell out.

The Buena Vista rail yards used to occupy a huge swath of 56 acres, bounded by 36th and 29th Streets north and south, and by N Miami Avenue and NE Second Avenue west and east, smack in the middle of a decaying area of light manufacturing, garage industry and broken down bungalows just a bit north of downtown Miami, a neighborhood that is now called Wynwood.

The yards were a fenced-in, weed choked eyesore, not a "buena vista" at all, although certain urban archaeologists undoubtedly found it charming. And the land was available, an unused graveyard for rusting rolling stock. But since most real estate development in Miami was done in typical subdivision method, reclaiming swampland to the west and south for new tracts of homes and shopping centers, and since the inner city ghetto of Overtown abutted Wynwood, the area was left stagnant for decades. It was considered unredeemable, too funky by far.

But the healing power of art (as a battering ram for real estate speculation) started to work its magic in Wynwood about a decade ago, as galleries opened up, then private museums (Rubell, Margulies), followed by speculators buying property (both warehouses and parcels of land) all through the neighborhood. Eventually even the train yards were seen as a potential source of development, and in one fell swoop the area was rethought as "Midtown Miami". It would feature big chain stores like Target, Circuit City, Linens 'N Things, Ross Dress for Less, Marshalls, West Elm and Loehmann's, as well as high rise condos and garden apartments. A little oasis of mixed use where rusting metal, garter snakes and (who knows?) the decapitated bodies of mob hits once held sway. Also included would be lots of parking space.