Art Miami Miami 2025

by philg

You’ve read in this space about Art Basel Miami (officially “Art Basel Miami Beach”), which isn’t in Miami. There’s also Art Miami, which is in Miami and, having started in 1991, predates Art Basel Miami (2002). Art Miami happens in a huge waterfront tent and is connected to CONTEXT Miami, which features less-established artists. Art Basel and Art Miami are connected by the Venetian Causeway and also by an every-10-minutes water taxi service organized by the cities (if a city doesn’t spend all of its tax dollars on migrants, those who choose to refrain from work, and migrants who refrain from work, there is plenty left over for public services!).

My companion and I had a late lunch at Motek Miami Beach and then took the water taxi over:

We quickly learned that it is okay to cover your Ferrari in fur, but don’t leave it unattended!

Art Miami seems to have art by bigger names than Art Basel, with less emphasis on what’s newest. Here’s a Yayoi Kusama to go in your $200 million house:

Any house with kids should have this work by Mr. Brainwash (confusing because almost the same work is attributed to Banksy):

If you’re Christmas shopping for an elderly photographer/engineer, how about this Rolleiflex 35mm camera embedded in Lucite from François Bel?

On the CONTEXT side, a vaguely similar idea (no acrylic, though) from John Peralta ($28,500; unlike at Art Basel most of the pieces at Art Miami and CONTEXT had price tags):

A view from the smoking terrace:

An Israeli gallery showed up with some huge glass works and a few original Yaacov Agams (remarkably, still alive at 97):

Speaking of Israel, here’s a photorealistic work by Yigal Ozeri that would be perfect for the redecoration of Gracie Mansion for incoming Mayor Mamdani. The intifada could easily be globalized if Israeli women loved Ayatollah Mamdani as much as progressive white American women!

Here’s some more work from Israel for Mayor Mamdani, all from Natan Elkanovich (he says that he uses “kitchen and sewing utensils to drizzle and sculpt plastic materials on canvas”):

If you are a peasant with a house worth less than $200 million, Art Miami is probably a better place to shop than Art Basel. If you want to find out what’s exciting to art nerds, Art Basel is perhaps better. But if you’re doing Miami Art Week, both are well worth visiting.

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If a declining population is a disaster, shouldn’t the world’s best places to live be those with a young and growing population?

by philg

Today is the first day of the bleak northern winter. Let’s celebrate by considering a bleak forecast. Our smartest minds say that China is heading for disaster because the Chinese aren’t having enough children and, also, the Chinese refuse to convert to the Church of Open Borders (they wouldn’t have welcomed Rahmanullah Lakanwal as we did, for example). Here’s one from RAND:

Population well-being (structural security) implications include broad strain on government finances; increasing costs of social insurance programs, including pensions and health care; varied but generally negative economic effects; high youth unemployment and disengagement from competitive labor markets in a slowing economy; and mixed effects on innovation capacity.

(There will be “high youth unemployment” with a reduction in the supply of youths?)

The “decline in fertility” that is described will result in China’s median age going up from its current 40 maybe to Switzerland’s 44 or Taiwan’s 45 (they’re so old that all they can do is make 2nm semiconductors for NVIDIA and Intel) or, in a true nightmare scenario, to Japan’s 50. China could become a hellscape like Japan, in other words.

If low fertility and a high median age is something that a society should try to avoid that must mean that the world’s nicest countries are ones with high fertility and a low median age, right? The CIA list highlights some paradises:

  • Afghanistan: median age 20
  • Sudan: median age 19
  • Mozambique: median age 17
  • Niger: median age 15 (population growth rate of 3.66%, higher even than what the Palestinians have achieved while fueled by unlimited housing, food, health care, and education funded by US and EU taxpayers through UNRWA)

How can our smartest people predict that China will become bad through low fertility if the nations with the highest fertility aren’t great places to live? A simpler formulation of the above: Africa has a larger population than China and Africa’s population is growing robustly (more than 2 percent per year); if the fertility doomers are right why isn’t Africa a better place to live than China?

Folks also fret about potential gradual population decline in the U.S. In other words, we’ll be farther up the list of countries ranked by median age and, thus, farther away from the fertility champs cited above. Why would it be bad to have 300 million Americans instead of 343 (or maybe 370?) if the 300 million never get stuck in traffic, enjoy decluttered National Parks, and are surrounded by AI and robotics any time that something productive needs to be done?

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Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

by philg

Here’s my report from this year’s Art Basel. All photos from the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Because paying $1,000 per night for a basic hotel room is just a rounding error for me… I stayed across the bay at the Marriott Biscayne Bay. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it was right next to Art Miami, which I hadn’t heard about and which I’ll cover in a later post, and also because it’s right next to a former Episcopal Church that has converted to Rainbow Flagism, consistent with Santiago de Compostela and End Stage Christianity.

If you don’t want to get stuck in traffic, the Miami Citibike system isn’t a bad way to get around. The bikes don’t seem to be in great shape and they don’t fit a 6′ rider that well, but the terrain isn’t hilly.

In Art Basel Miami Beach (2018) and Art Basel Miami 2021, UBS featured female victimhood and celebrated the handful of women who’d manage to overcome the “imbalance” and “make a difference”. The commitment to social justice seems to have evaporated and now UBS promotes getting richer:

Speaking of rich, the most talked-about installation echoed the UBS theme of rich-meets-art. Busts of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg on robot legs interacted with Andy Warhol, Picasso, and the creator of this work (Mike Winkelmann; a.k.a., “Beeple”). (Given Picasso’s fondness for teenage females, could he have survived today’s moral rectitude?)

Here’s Andy Warhol (the most famous gay person not famous for being gay?):

The Wall Street Journal says that $200 million is the new minimum for a decent house and there were quite a few pieces for sale that would have required a spare thousand square feet or two. Here’s an example from Anne Samat titled “The Unbreakable Love… Family Portrait.” It includes plastic swords, keys, wine corks, etc.

A work by Yinka Shonibare that inspired me to stop complaining for a few minutes:

I looked him up on Wikipedia: “At the age of 18, he contracted transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, which resulted in a long-term physical disability where one side of his body is paralysed.” If someone who is half-paralyzed can make it to Art Basel, what’s wrong with the rest of us?

Feel better about your middle-school dioramas (by Mondongo, a husband-and-wife team in Argentina):

Here’s a technique that I enjoyed, hand cut paper by Ariamna Contino (or maybe by her assistants?):

At the opposite end of the effort spectrum, Erika Rothenberg’s 2018 work America, A Shining Beacon to the World:

Only the Weinstein Gallery (they haven’t changed their name?) was crass enough to put prices on labels. Here’s a modest-sized $3.5 million Leonor Fini work from 1936 (imagine what it would cost to get an original oil painting by an artist that people have actually heard of!):

Some practical advice… pay a little extra for the 11 am entry tickets and go in right at 11 rather than at noon. The venue gets crowded by 1 or 2 pm. A 2:15 pm Friday image:

From 1:22 pm:

You don’t have to spend a lot to bring a souvenir home from the event. For only $5,500, for example, you can get a nice Taschen book of David Hockney pictures (printed in Italy):

Don’t worry about charging for your electric Rolls-Royce:

There are quite a few additional art events in Miami Beach and, covered in a later blog post, across the bay in Miami proper.

Here’s a Mayan pyramid made from Coleman coolers at SCOPE (Victor “Marka27” Quinonez of Mexico):

Finally, you can just walk around South Beach:

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Additional photos from Minneapolis

by philg

Despite the epic length of Minneapolis in December, I neglected to include a few photos. Here are official posters within the Skyway from the local government:

(Unless the person in the vaccine promotion photo is at least 75, he/she/ze/they isn’t eligible for both flu (age minimum: 65) and COVID-19 (age minimum: 75) shots in the Science-driven UK NHS system.)

What kind of person can drink a “Homie” Coke without being guilty of cultural appropriation?

The smartest folks in Minnesota says that Somalis “[contribute] $8 billion to the Minnesota economy” (presumably annually):

This could be true if $8 billion in federal welfare funds flow into Minnesota because 80 percent of Somalis in Minnesota are entitled to welfare:

But if this is a contribution in the conventional (non-welfare) sense, why isn’t there any other country in the world that will pay us to send them Somalis whom we have chosen to deport? Or that will set up a migrant recruiting booth in Mogadishu? Other countries don’t want to become $8 billion richer every year?

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Unprovoked genocide against the Uyghurs

by philg

I’m reading House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. I’ll try to cover the book’s main subject in a later post, but this one is about the use of propaganda.

The author:

Eva Dou covers technology policy for The Washington Post. A Detroit native, she previously spent around a decade covering international politics and technology for the Post and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, Seoul and Taipei. She is currently based in Washington D.C.

In other words, the author is embedded in U.S. corporate media. What does she have to say about our rivals in China?

By late 2017, there were growing signs that something was very wrong in China’s far-west Xinjiang region. Guards with machine guns manned checkpoints in and out of cities; travelers had to have their faces scanned and walk through full-body scanners. On the streets, pedestrians were stopped by police at random to have their phones checked for illegal political or religious content. Gas stations were barricaded and ringed with razor wire as a precaution against bombings. Officials warned that even modest expressions of Islamic faith, such as growing a beard or wearing a headscarf, would be scrutinized as potential signs of extremism. And a growing number of people—especially members of the Uyghur ethnic minority—were being hauled off without trial to prisonlike sites called “reeducation centers.” Estimates of how many people were detained (in either short-term or long-term detention) ranged from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million. Reports of torture, abuse, and deaths trickled out. Under the banner of counterterrorism, Xinjiang had become the world’s most repressive high-tech surveillance state. And Huawei had helped build it. The company’s next-generation fast networks, facial-recognition algorithms, and high-definition cameras had all combined to build an invisible net of enormous scale. Huawei was not the only tech company to sell surveillance gear into Xinjiang. But it was certainly among the major suppliers. In Xinjiang, and across the nation, Huawei was hawking a fulsome portfolio of advanced surveillance technologies, built in cooperation with hundreds of startups and other partner companies. There were smart glasses that police could wear on patrol to scan crowds for faces on a watch list. There were high-definition police body cams that streamed live to a big screen back at the command center. There was a listening device that could monitor and analyze conversations within a ten-meter radius outdoors, day and night. There were biometric scanners that picked up iris patterns in the eyes, which could be used to identify a person, similarly to fingerprints. There was a voiceprint database to match voices on audio recordings against known individuals. These gadgets were often marketed under the brands of Huawei’s partner companies, with Huawei satisfied to take a low-key role.

The Chinese, in other words, engaged in unprovoked aggression against the Uyghurs purely because of prejudice against “Islamic faith” and “ethnic minorities”. This was done “under the banner of counterterrorism”, but the author doesn’t mention any terrorist incidents in which Uyghurs might have been involved. What does American-produced AI have to say?

Various incidents described by Chinese authorities as terrorist attacks or riots by Uyghur separatists have occurred in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region, over the past few decades. 

“Major incidents often cited include:

  • July 2009 Ürümqi riots: Ethnic violence in the capital of Xinjiang resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 people, mostly Han Chinese civilians.
  • March 2014 Kunming railway station attack: A group of knife-wielding assailants attacked civilians, killing 31 people and injuring 141 others. This attack occurred outside of the Xinjiang region.
  • April 2014 Ürümqi train station attack: A knife attack and suicide bombing killed three people and injured 79.
  • May 2014 Ürümqi street market attack: Two vehicles were driven into a market and explosives thrown at shoppers, resulting in 43 deaths and over 90 injuries, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the conflict.

The Chinese government has consistently attributed these events to Uyghur separatist and extremist groups, notably the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP).”

I find it interesting how the official “Chinese bad; Islam is the Religion of Peace” line can be subtly supported even by a book about a telco supplier. (Note that the above passage, read by a skeptical person, actually calls into doubt the Biden administration’s “genocide” accusation. If the Chinese government were simply killing most or all Uyghurs they wouldn’t need to bother with high tech surveillance.)

(Of course, the Chinese response to jihad was quite different from what the U.S. has done, e.g., the deaths on 9/11 motivated us to open the borders to a vastly larger group of Muslim immigrants, the 2016 jihad of second-generation Afghan-American Omar Mateen motivated us to bring in Rahmanullah Lakanwal, one of his wives, and four of his kids.)

Related:

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We’ve deported a college student and are keeping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia?

by philg

We deported a Babson College student (CNN):

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still here and still providing full employment for American attorneys (NYT):

How is it possible that nobody wants to change U.S. immigration laws? I could understand a world in which both of these non-citizens were deported. I could also understand a world of open borders in which neither of these non-citizens were deported. Given the above facts, however, I can’t understand how anyone can argue that our current immigration laws are in the U.S. national interest.

Separately, the noble enricher Kilmar has been enriching the United States for 14 years (since 2011) and hasn’t needed to learn English. Thus, someone who doesn’t speak English turns out to be more powerful than the President of the United States and all federal immigration bureaucracy put together. WBAL:

Abrego Garcia on Friday stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by a group of supporters chanting “We are all Kilmar!”

“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high,” Abrego Garcia said through a translator. “I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family.”

He urged people to keep fighting.

“I stand here today with my head held high and I will continue to fight and stand firm against all of the injustices this government has done upon me,” Abrego Garcia said. “Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws and I believe that this injustice will come to an end.”

After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office, escorted by supporters.

The agency freed him just before 5 p.m. on Thursday in response to a ruling from Xinis, who wrote federal authorities detained him after his return to the United States without any legal basis.

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Massachusetts Immigration Update

by philg

Recent group chat from a friend in Maskachusetts who is selling his house in the rich NW suburbs:

  • another open house today – mostly Asians and Indians on indoor camera, as I predicted. MA burbs will go that way really fast. It’s a critical mass kind of thing

Later messages from a friend in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

  • Walmart had Columbian woman deliver to my house. I went to Walmart and two employees I tried to talk to could not speak English
  • Basically all of the cashiers at Hanover Market Basket are 4′ tall women from South America.

From the same chat group, regarding OpenAI’s text-to-video generator:

  • I asked Sora to make a video of a mugger. Every single time, it made the mugger white. I asked Sora to make a video of a happy family. Every single time, it showed a black man in a relationship with a white woman. According to ChatGPT: Black people make up 60% of robbery/mugging convictions. Black man/white woman marriages make up 1.3% of marriages.
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The Brightline experience (low-speed high-speed rail in Florida)

by philg

High-speed rail in China stretches for 31,000 miles and, in my personal experience, runs at about 190 mph. High-speed rail in Florida is Brightline and boasts 235 miles of rail at an average speed of 70 miles per hour (about 3.5 hours from Miami to Orlando including stops at Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and West Palm Beach. This is about my first Brightline experience, a trip home from Art Basel/Art Miami to Jupiter, Florida by way of West Palm Beach (tragically, some years ago, Jupiter rejected the offer of working with Brightline on a station).

I paid up for Premium, which worked out to $95 one-way for a 1-hour 16-minute trip. At 8:37 pm on a Sunday evening, Google maps says that the same trip would take 1-hour 8-minutes by car (73.3 miles, station to station).

The non-Premium areas of the Miami station are clean and comfortable:

The Premium lounge has unlimited free food (bizarrely, Chinese, which is not something that most people in Miami understand how to cook) and booze:

The Premium seats aren’t especially comfortable and seem overly upright even in the most reclined position:

Maybe because my train left at 8:45 pm or maybe because they don’t serve full meals on the short legs between Miami and West Palm Beach, I was offered drinks and snacks.

Hanukkah and Christmas are the two holidays that are officially celebrated by Brightline in the West Palm Beach station:

It would be insane to pay Brightline prices for a family trip, but it could make sense for one person given the unpredictability of travel by automobile in a country that is absurdly overpopulated. Here’s a Facebook post that I stumbled on just as I was getting off the train at 10 pm (an accident, apparently):

Screenshot

Conclusion: Brightline is one of the things that makes West Palm Beach one of the best places to live in the U.S. The station is walking distance from the part of town that has been spruced up by Stephen Ross. Orlando and Miami are then easily reached with hourly trains.

(Like the Florida East Coast Railway that opened up St. Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami, and Key West to rich New Yorkers, Brightline seems to lose money on its operations and make money on real estate development around its stations. However, unlike with Flagler’s 19th century railroad, Brightline serves places that are already mostly developed. So it is unclear that the real estate good times can make up for epic annual operating bad times.)

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NYU: Forced to learn about gender non-conformity among the indigenous people of French Canada

by philg

This is the week that eager schoolwork nerds will get their Early Decision answers from the nation’s elite universities.

Our mole at NYU (over $100,000 per year including a few required extras, such as airfare and going out in Manhattan) was required to choose from a short list of core courses, only one of which had availability… French in the Americas:

Here’s a slide from the 12th week of the course:

The teacher explained to our mole that the indigenous were natural followers of Rainbow Flagism and that this native religion was suppressed by European colonizers who were also passionate gender binarists. My email to the mole:

They’re making you learn about an economically irrelevant subgroup within an economically irrelevant subgroup within an economically irrelevant country. (Natives within Quebec, which is on track to lose its language, religion, and culture to recent immigrants, within Canada, whose manufacturing output is perhaps 1/50th that of China?) It feels to me as though they’re teaching this because they have some professor who is an expert on the subject, not because any American needs to know this information. How could this possibly be justified compare to learning about the history of China, for example? Or if you want to talk about ethnic minorities, why not talk about the ethnic minorities of China or the noble Muslims who’ve settled in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. despite rampant Islamophobia?

(I later checked with Grok and learned that China does not have 50X the manufacturing output of Canada, measured in dollars, but rather only 36X.)

Here’s another slide from the same PowerPoint and I would love to know how it could relate to European migrants conquering the noble natives 200 years prior to the invention of the tank.

On the other hand, it is tough to come up with a scenario in which understanding the above images and being able to answer the “What do they have in common?” question posed by the professor would have a $100,000 value. On the third hand, maybe the ability to answer the question is worth $trillions? Let’s see how our future AI overlords do with it.

Grok:

Gemini disagrees almost completely!

ChatGPT also disagrees with Grok:

It seems as though NYU could replace all of its students with these three LLMs and still have a lively in-class discussion!

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Artificial stupidity meets the bathtub faucet

by philg

Loyal readers may remember Moen Flo Artificial Intelligence Water Overlord, in which the intelligent water overlord was dumb as a rock. This post is about what happened after I got the cartridge out of the faucet.

ChatGPT confidently identified the Roman tub faucet based on a photo of the top of the cartridge. The identification came with “100% certainty”:

The Pfister cartridges it told me to buy are plastic and don’t have a splined top:

When I pointed this out, ChatGPT told me to buy some other Pfister cartridge that was obviously wrong and intended for a sink faucet, not a tub faucet. I managed to get the cartridge out and sent ChatGPT a photo:

(Of course, this was obviously false as well.)

I went to Broedell Plumbing Supply here in Jupiter. The guy at the counter quickly found a Phylrich web page with dimensions that matched the faucet. I asked ChatGPT “You sure it isn’t a Phylrich 10240?”

The Phylrich web page says that its cartridge has 16 points, not 12 as ChatGPT confidently says. When I sent ChatGPT close-up photos of the top of the old cartridge and the bottom of the handle, it found 20 splines (I counted 16). ChatGPT still wanted to replace the failed cartridge with a Pfister. It came up with a dog-ate-my-homework story:

Grok was a little better. Shown a picture of the top of the cartridge (not the entire cartridge):

The dates have to be wrong since our house was built in 2003 and I don’t think that they used vintage materials. A Google search for the suggested “Phylrich Regency” and “Phylrich Versailles” doesn’t bring up anything with dual spouts. When I pushed back on Grok it changed its mind to Newport Brass or Jaclo. When I sent a photo of the complete cartridge, Grok said that it was American Standard or Pfister. Grok seems worse in terms of hallucinating the existence of similar-looking dual-spout roman tub faucets.

The plot thickened a little further. I ordered two replacement cartridges (one hot, one cold) from Phylrich ($155 including shipping, i.e., about the same price as a Glacier Bay deck-mount tub faucet from Home Depot (bizarrely rated at 2.4 gph, which I don’t think can be right because that’s roughly Federal shower flow limit and a standard Delta tub filler is about 20 gph at 60 psi)). The cartridges fit and work perfectly. So the faucet is definitely Phylrich, right? I emailed a photo to the company’s customer service department and they say that they never made a faucet like that. ChatGPT, to its credit, did have a plausible explanation:

Many manufacturers bought cartridges from the same OEM suppliers. … Boutique brands (including Phylrich) often used “generic” brass compression stems early on. … So Phylrich’s cartridge fits simply because the valve body was designed around a widespread industry-standard stem pattern. … Your faucet is almost certainly a “private label” or discontinued OEM roman-tub set

(It still erroneously believes that the stem pattern is 20 splines and referred to that.)

Maybe I could order two of these swan sets and use two of the spouts on the existing rough-in kit? That would cost only about $10,800. That’s a mere trifle for some of our Palm Beach County neighbors.

I think the above tale at least demonstrates that (1) AI is not always ready for the real world, and (2) one should never install anything in one’s house that didn’t come from Home Depot.

Speaking of Home Depot, nearly the complete range of South Florida vehicles in the parking lot: airboat, Tesla, Rolls-Royce (I have seen Ferraris in that lot before, but not on the same day as the below photos were taken):

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