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:
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.
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.
One American fencer is highlighted as important. Her achievement was fencing while wearing hijab as a positive example to counter the horribleness of Donald Trump:
Trump apparently wrongly questioned the value of importing millions of Muslims as U.S. residents/citizens shortly before Omar Mateen, child of immigrants from Afghanistan, killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub (June 2016). (Note that children of Muslim immigrants are statistically more likely to be interested in waging jihad than their parents were (Harvard report on Danish study).)
A TV actor is highlighted for identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+:
Anthony Fauci is featured as the most notable physician in our nation’s history (note the modeling of a cloth mask rather than an ineffective N95 mask):
(I am desperate to see a Fauciland theme park on the campus of NIH Bethesda!)
Speaking of coronapanic, a separate part of the museum reminds us to “fight the virus, not the people”:
Science fiction has been important to the extent that it has been about women:
Clips of some of America’s greatest television moments are available. There is a Sesame Street show in which kids are exhorted to wear masks and also one in which kids are told that immigrants, especially Muslims in hijab, always make America a better place for everyone:
In a separate section of the museum, visitors are reminded that today’s immigrants have “much in common with those who came before” (i.e., a no-skill Islamic asylum-seeker immigrant from Somalia has a ton in common with Heinrich Engelhard Steinway, who built pianos in Germany prior to building pianos in New York):
The entertainment section has a “micro-gallery” about racism and comedians of color:
Those who appreciate engineering will be pleased to learn that the museum displays a portrait of Elon Musk:
The World War II exhibit reminds visitors that the U.S. and U.K. defeated Germany without significant assistance from the Soviet Union.
Likely unrelated to Trump and his war on wokeness, the museum falsely states that German-Jewish immigrant Ralph H. Baer invented “the first video game” circa 1966. Baer was perhaps the first to try to make a consumer-priced device that could attach to a TV, but Wokipedia correctedly credits earlier efforts on mainframe computers.
The currency exhibit reminds us that most of the world’s important societies for most of human history have been governed by females:
A $100,000 bill is displayed as well. Although intended for transferring funds from one Federal Reserve Bank to another in 1934, if Congress continues its deficit spending program this could be useful to feed into Coke machines:
The 10-year-old and I found ourselves in the “American Enterprise” exhibit in front of a wall of business pioneers all of whom just happened to be female. I said to the kid “standing here and looking at this wall you can learn that the success of American business was entirely due to women.” This generated some righteous indignation among a couple of 40ish people nearby (presumably furloughed government workers). They proceeded to lecture us to “open your eyes” and look at other walls within the same exhibit. We actually did as they suggested and found Eli Whitney displayed as having equal importance to American enterprise as “Jemmy”, an “enslaved entrepreneur” who made baskets (this pairing makes a certain amount of sense because Whitney’s cotton gin kept slavery going longer than it otherwise might have).
The de-woked attacked-by-Trump gift shop offers this classic American candy, invented by Johannes “Hans” Riegel Sr.:
Some of the apparel in the gift shop celebrates 2SLGBTQQIA+, but most of it celebrates those who identify as “women”. Women are voting, doing science, building WWII weapons, being legends rather than ladies:
Maybe the books would feature some victimhood category other than “female”? Well, a few did:
But mostly the books ignored Blacks and the Latinx in favor of victims whose victimhood was a consequence of female gender ID, just as most of the jobs and government contracts set aside for descendants of American slavery have been scooped up by white women:
Ironically, for a museum that features certain Americans because of their gender or race ID, the gift shop sells a book celebrating the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection:
We are informed that Donald Trump has attacked America’s museums in general and the Smithsonian in particular. “Will Museums Fight Back Against Trump?” (New York Times, August 22, 2025):
The president’s attacks on the Smithsonian Institution and other museums have become an effort to redefine why such places exist.
President Trump has sought to govern with an iron grip the federal bureaucracy, the economy and even the finer details of White House architecture.
He wants to put his stamp on the culture of the nation, too.
The president, once a fixture of tabloids and reality television, is waging a war on the rarefied cultural spaces he says have become too “woke.”
We took our boys (10 and 12) to the de-woked Smithsonian National Museum of American History on October 4, 2025. Just inside the front door, the boys learned that they “belong” in girls’ sports just as soon as they raise their hands and say “we identify as girls”. It’s not a matter up for debate, but simply “fair play” when “transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality”. The Smithsonian certainly doesn’t mention that there are any dissenters (“haters”) from this dogma, though, as we would find throughout the museum every sign is translated into Spanish (but not Arabic, Chinese, Somali, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, or any of the other languages of migrants who make America great).
There’s a lot of explanation for the womanly skateboarder at right:
Our primary objective was to see the lowrider show (see also Lowriders in Fort Worth for these machines in their native increasingly-Islamic element). Spanish 101: the word for “lowriding” is “El lowriding”.
The de-woked curators remind us that American Hispanics claim victimhood going back at least 75 years:
If I can get our Honda Odyssey’s batteries to stop failing (the most recent 4-year AGM battery survived for about 1.5 years) it would be awesome to find the paint shop that did this one:
The depth of color isn’t achievable with a wrap, I don’t think.
Father of the Year Daniel Tovar made a lowrider for his daughter:
One hundred percent of the people described and depicted in the exhibit as actually building lowriders of significance had traditional male names and appeared to identify as men (moustaches, male attire, etc.):
(the dapper gentlemen is Sonny Madrid, who founded Lowrider magazine in 1977)
The gift shop, on the other hand, explains that it is actually Latinas who are responsible for lowriders:
Marjorie Merriweather Post famously built Mar-a-Lago, but lived in that modest $18 million (value used by New York judge) shack only during “the Palm Beach season”. She lived in Northwest Washington, D.C. during the spring and fall and in the Adirondacks during the summer. Her DC place, cozy by Mar-a-Lago standards, opened as a museum in 1977 and somehow I missed it while growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. My excuses: I started working full-time at NASA (on Pioneer Venus in 1978); I was too young to drive; the museum is nowhere near the Metro; despite high crime rates, Jimmy Carter wouldn’t send the National Guard into the city (he was too busy appeasing the Ayatollahs).
Ms. Post loved dogs, decorative art, orchids, Japanese gardens, and aviation (her private four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount ferried everything but the gardens with her among the three estates).
The Museum costs $20/adult, but it is free for federal government workers suffering the trauma of receiving 100 percent pay for 0 percent work:
… offering free admission to those receiving SNAP benefits. Present your EBT card upon check in at the visitor center. and receive complimentary entry for 4 guests.
Ms, Post was apparently prescient regarding the kind of society that the U.S. would one day become. A sculpture on the outside of her mansion shows a youth with a swan:
ABC (“Three of four suspects were apprehended” but, as far as I can tell from searching, our noble media never updated us regarding the names or backgrounds of any of the suspects):
The “mansion” itself is unremarkable compared to Mar-a-Lago and, but the contents and gardens are spectacular. A hillside Japanese garden is small, but awesome, and contains some of the stone lanterns that are virtually impossible for consumers to buy today (cheap cast concrete versions are available):
Ms. Post loved her dogs and built a cemetery for them, as well as for the departed canines belonging to family and staff members, on the estate grounds:
Ms. Post built a greenhouse for her orchids (note the modest Islamic dress; in any group of people in Washington, D.C. in October 2025 there was typically at least one person wearing hijab or abaya and at least one person wearing a COVID-19 mask (both indoors and out)):
Some fake iOS background blurring:
The interior is jammed with interesting objects so it is impossible to do justice to them. There are a couple of Fabergé eggs (maybe Optimus can make replicas of these for all of us?):
Here’s an idea of how much there is to see in the “icon room”:
Ms. Post collected a ton of figurines that included dogs. A few examples:
Homage to the highest tech devices of the day:
A couple of personal favorites:
Let’s exist through the COVID-19-safe gift shop:
As far as I can tell, 100 percent of the objects in the museum and estate were made either by East Asians or white Europeans. Ms. Post’s prime years coincided with an almost complete shutdown of immigration to the U.S. Nonetheless, the gift shop reminds us that we should celebration immigration/diversity:
We are informed by Science that there are at least 74 gender IDs, but most of the books for sale celebrate the achievements of people who identified with 1 out of 74:
I wonder if today’s insanely rich people, who are far richer than Marjorie Merriweather Post ever was, will one day leave us beautiful estates in which to wander. It doesn’t seem as though we’re going to get this, though. When Bill Gates sends $200 billion to Africa, for example, it doesn’t even leave a lasting mark on Africa (there are more needy Africans today than ever before, I think). So let’s raise a plastic glass before we eat our Costco ramen to the woman who left Americans this evidence of what the dining experience used to be:
In June we learned that undocumented migrants were big customers for the Metropolitan Opera (AP):
Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.
The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most renowned performing arts companies, is turning to Saudi Arabia to help it solve some of the most severe financial problems in its 142-year history.
The company has reached a lucrative agreement with the kingdom that calls for it to perform there for three weeks each winter. While neither the Met nor the Saudis disclosed financial terms when they announced a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, the deal is expected to bring the Met more than $100 million.
The Met hopes the agreement will help it emerge from a period of acute financial woes. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has withdrawn more than a third of the money in its endowment fund to help it cover operating costs — about $120 million overall, including $50 million to help pay for the season that ended in June. The withdrawals have raised questions about the viability of staging live opera on a grand scale in the 21st century.
As we prepare for Bisexual Awareness Week (Sept 16-23) and LGBT History Month (October) and Trans Awareness Month (November), it will be interesting to think about how the Met’s LGBTQ+-themed lighting will be used in Saudi Arabia:
Here’s what the new opera house in suburban Riyadh will look like when it opens in 2028, but before the Met’s rainbow lighting scheme is applied:
The Met began spending in a whole new direction in 2021 (NYT):
Mr. Nézet-Séguin — who has been openly gay for his entire professional career and nonchalant enough about it to post a smiling partners’ beach selfie on Instagram — is impossible to miss.
“The fact that he’s so comfortable with who he is is part of what makes him a powerful, effective artistic leader,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview. “Because he is proud of who he is, and that’s very important.”
ChatGPT:
In Saudi Arabia, engaging in same-sex sexual activity—whether between two men or two women—is illegal under the country’s interpretation of Islamic (Sharia) law. The legal consequences are extremely severe and can vary depending on the specifics of the case and judicial discretion. Same-sex acts are considered sodomy or illicit sexual intercourse (zina) and are punishable by death under traditional Wahhabi interpretations of Sharia law. Even when the death penalty is not applied, those convicted may face indefinite prison sentences, flogging, financial penalties, or deportation in the case of foreign nationals. … Saudi Arabia enforces some of the strictest laws against same-sex relations in the world. Punishments include—but are not limited to—execution, flogging, prolonged imprisonment, hefty fines, and deportation.
The Murakami show at the Cleveland Museum of Art includes some murals that would be awesome to have in a kid’s room if only a humanoid robot could be adapted to do the work of either applying wallpaper or directly painting.
Another area where the robot could work… recreating Sol LeWitt murals in the home. Different color schemes for every holiday.
For my friends in health care, the artist’s conception of what a nurse looks like:
Circling back to the principal theme for today… if you had nearly-free high-skill labor from a robot would you use some of it to have wall murals in your house? Or would it make more sense to cover a wall in large tiles of flat-screen TVs and do this electronically?
I’ve been reading The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, a collection of New Yorker magazine articles, in order to develop some understanding of what our neighbors down in Palm Beach go through. One chapter is devoted to “privates” in which successful music stars perform at corporate events and private parties, e.g., for a birthday or a wedding. The costs range from $250,000 to $24 million (Beyoncé in Dubai) for something that was considered shameful during the Classic Rock period. Artists who express solidarity with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ are delighted to perform in Muslim countries where homosexual acts are punishable by imprisonment or death. Artists are also happy to perform for various dictators, e.g., in Central Asia. That said, our much-loved stars do have some scruples. With the exception of some Christian bands, no artist will agree to work a Chick-fil-A corporate event.
A recent New York Times article covers a kind of “inverse private” in which the musicians stay where they normally perform and the rich douche comes to them:
The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.
He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.
Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.
“I had watched the videos and heard the recordings,” Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of ComputerTalk Technology in Toronto, said in an interview. “I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick. So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”
He added: “I can afford to do it, that’s the main thing. So when it came across my mind, I said, ‘Hey, maybe I should give it a try.’”
This man is my hero!
How’s the book, you might ask? There are a lot of interesting tidbits. Just be aware that it is the New Yorker and, therefore, all of the world’s ills are blamed on the existence of Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular. Trump is mentioned roughly every three pages, despite his apparent lack of connection to any of the events chronicled. The author never explains why California is plagued by inequality, a high poverty rate, and envy given that nearly everyone there is a Democrat. If Republicans were eliminated, rich Democrats would give most of their money to social justice nonprofits and to community-building (Andrew Carnegie is cited approvingly for his funding of libraries). There would be no war (just as Andrew Carnegie prevented any wars from happening in Europe via his 1910 founding of a peace institute). The author never explains why rich Democrats can’t do all of this starting right now.
Downtown Boise has quite a few movie theaters and my “escape from the Florida heat” plan featured 100-degree temps so I dragged a somewhat reluctant 10-year-old to see Elio, a movie about a Latinx boy who ascends into the heavens to join the “Communiverse”. Hard SciFi fans will be disappointed to learn that all of the universe’s life forms are able to breathe the same atmosphere and drink the same drink. The bad guy who ultimately is turned into a good guy bears a strong resemblance to Satan in The South Park Movie. Queers for Palestine members will be disappointed to see “Jennifer Jew” in the credits.
All of the good humans in the movie are Latinx and/or Black. The senior military officers are Latinx and female. The military base is Latinx (“Montez Air Force Base” in a city called “Montez”). The big bad bully kid is… white male.
I’m not sure why this movie gets 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Star Wars is more interesting in terms of trying to conjure up what an alien society might be like. Elio envisions a universe inhabited entirely by Jar Jar Binks’s spiritual and intellectual cousins (plus a few bad guys who are, in fact, all male (the movie does not seem to envision anything beyond the gender binary).
Separately, here’s a Communiverse F-86 aircraft shared during the Korean War by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. From the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho (not to be confused with NAMBLA):
In case you need to duck into a #SafeSpace to escape the completely unnecessary military occupation of entirely peaceful Los Angeles, some recent photos from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Broad (both free, even to those who aren’t smart enough to have SNAP/EBT cards). The Broad:
It’s apparently rare for a Black person to enter the Broad, but in case one does his/her/zir/their flag is ready:
Did you know that “artists are marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation” (LA MOCA)?
It’s important to look at the world through a “queer lens”:
If children want to adopt the queer lens they can start in the gift shop:
Equality is so important that artists who don’t identify as “women” are excluded from books in the same gift shop (the late great Louise Nevelson, who explicitly said that she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “woman artist” is pigeonholed as a “woman sculptor”):
The gift shop was a Black-free environment rich in books regarding the Black Queer lifestyle (also a book about abortion care):
Did a Deplorable get into the museum woodpile or does the painting make fun of the Deplorables? (Christine Tien Wang):
A painting about the Black body in a museum where I didn’t see any Black employees or visitors:
A painting about “LGBTQ+ rights activism” and “the AIDS epidemic” (which is not in any way a “gay disease”?):
Speaking of a virus that is not in any way “gay”, if you’re concerned about SARS-CoV-2 infection, Science says that the best job you can choose is one in which you’re guaranteed to be exposed to hundreds of potentially infected humans every day (extra points for the below-the-nose mask):
