My Top 5 from Art Basel 2024

Art Week Miami Beach aka "Art Basel" is an international art festival showcasing the art world's newest, best, and brightest.

Every year in early December, the globe's art community converges in th palm tree-lined American coastal city of Miami, Florida to witness the cutting edge nexus of of art, economics, entertainment, and technology.

The week long event that revolves around the Art Basel show at the Miami Convention Center extends well past the multistory multidimensional exhibit, and commandeers a variety of venues to showcase artists works, including hotels, museums, night clubs, and even the shoreline of South Beach.

Read on for some of my most inpsiring and intriguing favorite standouts that I saw at my first ever Art Basel. I can say with confidence it won't be my last!

1. Visceral Glitch | The SLS Hotel

https://www.thevisceralglitch.com/

This artist's innovative digital graffiti with an animation component caught my eye at a gallery party at the glitzy SLS Hotel in South Beach. I was immediately intrigued by this creative and nifty blend. First the colors and the nostalgic textures and sights caught my eye - and then the animation when viewed through an app on a phone screen sent me. Utilizing the augmented reality app Artivive, Glitch adds another layer to his artwork - when viewed through the app on a smartphone screen, his 2D pieces become animated, gltching to life. The Brooklyn-based artist known as "Visceral Glitch" creates pieces mostly based on photographs of his neighborhood layered and "glitched" in various softwares, with his work landing at the intersection of analog nostalgia, memory, mental health, digital art, and evolving technology.

Something about his work reminds me of a digital dream, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind if it were an NFT. The party had a modern art - technology - crypto currency theme (Bitcoin had reached its All Time High commensurate with the event, and a pair of custome Bitcoin inspired sneakers were on display for the fair price of a full BTC).

2. Juan Gatti Murals | Faena Hotel

https://lafreshgallery.com/artista/juan-gatti/?lang=en

While not an exhibiting artist at artweek per se, Argentinian illustrator and art collector Juan Gatti donated a series of 8 incedible murals to the Faena hotel in Miami Beach. The upscale hotel chain, which also has a location in Gatti’s home city of Buenos Aires, boasts 12 foot high murals that feature philosophical concepts and beautifully detailed scenes of nature, philosophy and science. Each mural is intricate and complex, and could be observed for hours. Gatti combines scenic art with scientific illustration in his work. The pieces include Love, Poetry, Peace, Science, Knowledge, Energy, Illumination, and Revelation.

3. The Great Elephant Migration | Faena Hotel Beach

https://thegreatelephantmigration.org/

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/09/nx-s1-5028545/touch-one-of-the-100-life-size-indian-elephant-sculptures-now-traveling-across-the-country

An eco piece about Indian elephants, each of the 100 elephant sculptures featured in the migrating herd has a name and a unique posture and facial expression. Some even have blue eyes while others have brown. There are elephants of all size and ages true to a real herd - elders, mothers, fathers, teenagers, and newborns. The immersive and interactive exhibit invites the audience to wander through the crowd of elephants, created from woven wood.

When I visited during the day, the crowd of humans way outnumbered the elephants! This becomes an interesting meta-element of the exhibit, in that it created a comminity event, both for elephants and people. It was fun to see how different people of all types and ages interacted and posed with the sculptures. I was taking in the exhibit alone and several times had kind strangers offer to take my photo!

4. Dream - O Interactive AI Art by Dream Computing and Huemin Art | Art Basel Convention Center

https://www.dreamcomputing.io/dream-0

What would happen if you could prompt an AI with your voice to ceate an evolving flow of AI generated images? Something beautiful and offputting, like a strange dream, or what a computer would say if it could turn a stream of consciousness journal entry into a visual video.

Located in a large dark room, almost like a cave, the microphone was set up in front of the screen, and gathered a group of people who civilly took turns speaking their prompst and watching what the computers interpretations looked like. Almost like word association. While I was in there someone prompted it with "soccer" and a slew of evolving images of soccor balls and then players in various poses, and then it evolved into grass on its own, and then flowers, until someone prompted it with a new direction.

5. “Metaphysics” by Octavio Abundez | Untitled Art Fair

"What am I? Where am I? What am I here for? Why am I here? What is here?" Are the openeing questions in Mexican artist Octavio Abundez's work "Metaphysics." Abundez prints text on mirrors to provoke self reflection, literally and figuratively, as the viewer reads the text which, in this work's case, is a guided ontological examination of existence. A philosophical query text printed on a mirror, his work invites the viewer to contemplate both the ontology of existence, meaning, and life itself, while also examining one’s own reflection, and where oneself fits into these concepts. Thought provoking and interesting.

https://www.fountainheadarts.org/fhtv/artists/octavio-abundez