The best moments of the Miami Art Fair come late at night, when everyone goes down to the moonlit beaches. Collectors and dealers, even artists, exhausted from a hard day of art-wrangling, gather together around huge bonfires. These are built by friendly local natives to express gratitude for the economic benefit brought to their primitive village by the selfless art industry. The grown-ups sit in circles around the dancing flames while children, and childlike artists, play in the gleaming surf, gathering spent bullets and helicopter fragments tossed up by the tide, or building fanciful castles out of the damp cocaine that leaks from bales washed up on shore. Soon, everyone begins to drop their fierce social masks. We relax together, holding hands, telling stories and singing songs, dancing and passing around bottles of the special Basel Brew, made from the fermented blood of poor people. Gazing at the stars through swaying palm fronds, craggy art professionals bare their souls as they speak about the spiritual bond each has with the mysterious élan vital of creativity, and its concurrent cash flow. Later, they fill the profound silences evoked by these splendid confessions with hilarious jokes about the art world.
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