Happy World Art Day to those who celebrate…
Newer and less famous than its Miami Beach cousin, Art Basel, Art Palm Beach 2026 happened at the end of January and your fearless host braved Climate Change and fallen iguanas (down to freezing overnight!) to bring you the story. It’s the same concept at Art Basel and Art Miami: art galleries from around the world set up booths within a big open space and those interest in art roam the aisles, with a ratio of 1000 ticket-buyers to every collector.
First, hats off to the HVAC engineers who set up the Palm Beach County Convention Center back in 2004. Except for the bathrooms at the edges, the cavernous structure was warm and comfortable despite what was likely a temperature seen only about once in every 5,000 days.
I valet-parked the Honda Odyssey because it was too much trouble to park in the adjacent $2/hour structure and walk for 5 minutes:
(Grok: That’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III convertible (also known as a Drophead Coupé), likely from the 1963–1966 production run. The model was the last iteration of the Silver Cloud series, featuring a 6.2L V8 engine, updated quad headlights, and bodywork often customized by coachbuilders like H.J. Mulliner or Mulliner Park Ward.)
Tickets were $40/person and easy to buy at the door. Kids are welcome, but each must have a full-price ticket (unusual for Florida, where kids are typically free or heavily discounted).
If you show up without a service dog, you’re doing it wrong.
Unlike Art Basel Miami Beach, this show seemed to be geared to active shoppers. Gallerists sought to engage and were approachable. Nearly every work was labeled with a price as well as a description. Prices were often reasonable, e.g., $3,500 for a small Hockney print, $15,000-30,000 for an original work by a not-so-famous artist, and hundreds of thousands of dollars at the top of the labeled range.
Adam Greener’s $14,500 works to inspire young scholars:
Perfect for the kitchen if you’re fully stocked with Ozempic (Rogerio Piexoto, “Be Butterfly” 2024, $188,000):
I can’t figure out who would pay $17,000 for this 48×60″ David Drebin C print (standard photo paper for printing from a color negative or digital file). Would a woman want a photo of naked women being showered with $100 bills? If not, how would a man get approval from Senior Management to bring this work into this house? Maybe a man who was single and wanted to remain single would be the customer? Someone who appears in the Justice Department’s 3.5 million pages of Emmanuel Goldsteinism and who tells visitors “I took this photo at Jeffrey Epstein’s place in Manhattan”?
Doug Powell made this 54×54″ Monopoly mosaic from “upcycled” keys:
A couple of New York gallerists wearing masks to protect themselves from the Science-deniers of South Florida (I hardly ever meet anyone here who is sick; by contrast, a tremendous number of friends in Cambridge reported recent or current respiratory illnesses when I was there in January):
An $85,000 Warhol Mao for your elite progressive friend:
A $10,000 3′-square Sarah Fishbein glass mosaic that would be perfect for our righteous brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Minneapolis if the characters were redesigned to make it clear that it was a native-born Kamala voter promising “I’d set the world on fire for you” to an undocumented migrant:
Here’s an entire wall of Obama-era Hope from Robert Indiana at $50,000 in today’s fascist dollars (edition of 125 since the rest of us 350 million must live without hope?):
The cafe in the middle is remarkably good and not insanely priced considering the captive audience. Here’s a $26 poke bowl with which I fortified myself before a Swiss friend’s Raclette dinner (complete with the special ovens):
A 6.5′-square $27,000 reminder to limit the population to 1 inch of fish per gallon of water, from Eric Alfaro:
Here’s an $18,500 Porsche 911 painting by Conrad Leach. How tough would it be for an AI+Optimus robot to design and paint this?
(The gallerist noted my interest and said, helpfully, that they had a wide range of car models on canvas from the same artist. I replied, “We have a Honda Odyssey.”)
Here’s a clever $12,000 work by Caroline Dechamby (Dutch-born; now in Switzerland?) highlighting the ease with which Optimus might recreate a Mondrian:
A medium-sized Calder that I would love to own ($165,000):
If you want a gift for an older person, here’s a $14,000 mid-sized painting by Scottish-Italian Leon Morocco in his 83rd year. (“Marocco” was the original family name, but it got corrupted to “Morocco”.)
Any friend who is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community might enjoy this $125,000 30×36″ John Whorf painting of Provincetown, Massachusetts:
Compare to present-day (Cape Cod Times 2022):
If you need a gift for Zohran Mamdani, a couple of paintings of IDF soldiers by Natan Elkanovich (#FreePalestine #FromTheRiverToTheSea):
Speaking of Israel, Tali Almog’s encaustic-on-cork works seemed like great choices for public spaces:
If the public space is a Rolls-Royce dealer, maybe this 6′-square $362,000 print of Ormond Gigli’s Girls in the Windows (1960) photo? Wouldn’t this be easy to update with Photoshop or ChatGPT? My version would have a Honda Odyssey on the sidewalk. All of the humans would be nonbinary. There would be a range of golden retrievers, Samoyeds, and Sheep-a-doodles sticking their paws and heads out the windows underneath the humans. It would be called “Hes/shes/zes/theys in the Windows”.
A photo of the valet area on my way out. Check the range of vehicle size between the Bronco in front and the Ferrari 296 GTS Spider ($400,000) in the background. An alien might conclude that these vehicles were built for different-sized species. (If the Bronco back up and rolled over the Ferrari, would the driver even notice?)
Summary: It’s a great event that is less snooty and more kid-friendly than Art Basel Miami Beach. It’s a better place to learn about art and artists because the gallerists are more open to conversation and the artists themselves are more likely to be there in the booths.
Separately, it’s Tax Day. If you’re mailing in a hardcopy return and check make sure that you put some extra stamps on the envelope. Your money needs to go all the way to Somalia by way of Minnesota.