Miami Beach art fair has a Swiss accent

It’s a classy art show. It’s a funky happening on the beach. It’s a hot social scene. It’s a cool video lounge where you lie on a foam-covered ramp while watching arty pictures on a big screen.

Bottom line: Art Basel Miami Beach 2002 -- the New World’s first taste of Europe’s most important art fair -- is about buying and selling modern and contemporary art.

And here’s what you can buy:

A $250 collage made of printed fabric, splats of pigment and bits of fluff by Los Angeles artist Johnathan Pylypchuk.

A $1,500 watercolor listing the items Winona Ryder shoplifted by the Basel team Claudia & Julia Muller.

A $48,000 stuffed-animal “Misfit” with the head of a Doberman and the body of a calf by Cologne, Germany, artist Thomas Grunfeld.

A $275,000 gouache image of a woman by French modernist Fernand Leger.

A $590,000 patchwork fabric head mounted on a tarnished silver bowl and encased in vitrine by French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

“That’s a Rothko,” a woman said to her husband, spotting “Maroon on Blue,” one of Mark Rothko’s trademark paintings of ethereal clouds of color. “It’s got to be a million.”

In fact, the price is $8.5 million. And yes, you can buy that too.

But broad as the range of styles and prices is, Art Basel Miami Beach is anything but a free-for-all. Indeed, the organizers of the event, which opened Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Miami Beach Convention Center, are banking on prestige and quality control to make it a success.

The fair is the creation of Art Basel, a division of MCH Swiss Exhibition Ltd., which runs a 33-year-old annual fair in Switzerland that is also called Art Basel and is considered to be the top global marketplace for contemporary and modern art. Years in the making, Art Basel Miami Beach was scheduled to debut last year, but it was postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Miami fair is Samuel Keller’s baby, and, as its director, he calls it “the little sister of Art Basel.” It probably won’t pack in 50,000 people, as its big sister does, and the organizers decline to predict attendance or even issue a day-by-day head count.

But their goal is clear. “We want this to be the most important art show on the American continent, a cultural and social highlight of the Americas,” Keller says.

That isn’t easy in an art world where fairs have been proliferating. But Chicago’s marketplace, once the Americas’ premier modern and contemporary art fair, has lost its luster, and Art Basel Miami Beach has created quite a buzz.

So far, the participating dealers say the Swiss organizers’ track record and selection process have instilled confidence.

“It’s a well-oiled machine,” says Los Angeles dealer Louis Stern, who is showing French and American modern art and Latin American painting at his booth. People like fairs because they can see a lot of art at one place in a few hours without the intimidation factor of galleries, and this particular one increases “the comfort level,” he says, because the participants have been screened and encouraged to bring their best work.

The 160 galleries represented in the fair were chosen from more than 450 applicants, Keller says. An international committee of 11 dealers, including Shaun Caley Regen of Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, made the selection, coming up with galleries from 23 countries on five continents. Participants include top-tier veterans of the Swiss fair, such as Gmurzynska of Cologne, Richard Gray of Chicago, Beyeler of Basel and Karsten Greve of St. Moritz, Cologne, Paris and Milan, along with dealers in business for a few years.

At the convention center, participants had a choice of booths ranging from about 550 square feet to 1,330 square feet, at a cost of $34 a square foot. In addition, 20 young, cutting-edge galleries--including L.A.’s China Art Objects and Sandroni Rey -- paid $5,000 apiece to set up shop in shipping containers on the beach. Total expenses per dealer -- including rental fees, shipping, transportation and lodging -- run from about $15,000 to $100,000.

It sounds like a huge gamble, but the dealers aren’t complaining. “It’s double the cost of the Art Show at the Armory in New York,” says New York dealer James Cohan, referring to a prestigious annual fair sponsored by the Art Dealers Assn. of America. “But the organizers have done a brilliant job of marketing.”

Thousands of people -- including artists, critics, museum directors and curators with collectors in tow -- turned out for the invitation-only opening on Wednesday night. Dressed up in suits and evening gowns, or dressed down in denim and sandals, the crowd filled the aisles.

At New York-based Deitch Projects’ spacious booth, Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu’s “Corporate Warrior” attracted double takes that turned into fascinated stares. Her artwork is a motorized sculpture of a life-size -- and very lifelike -- man in a dark suit, white shirt and tie who lies on the floor and drags himself along on his elbows.

“I became very interested in competition after I moved to New York six years ago,” she says. “This is an American businessman, and I would like to make two more, a European and an Asian. The three of them would bump into each other.”

Meanwhile at nearby Collins Park, where the shipping container galleries are installed in an enclave called Art Positions, throngs of people jammed plywood walkways laid over the sand and crammed themselves into the steaming hot containers. Those who made their way into the space set up by Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, another New York gallery, found Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford at work in a beauty shop as art installation.

“My grandmother was a hairdresser, my mother is a hairdresser and I’m a hairdresser,” says the artist, who also uses permanent wave papers to make abstract wall pieces. In Miami he is creating new hairdos for fair visitors by adding strands of hair selected from a rack of braids, curls and falls.

The price?

“Just tips,” he says. “I’m not doing a full job. It’s a gesture.”

Many dealers say they made sales at the opening reception. By the time the doors closed on Thursday, the first public day, others had put red dots on labels, indicating works were sold, and replaced small pieces carried away by their new owners.

“It’s good,” says Los Angeles dealer Margo Leavin. Meeting new clients and reconnecting with old ones, she sold works to collectors from New York, Florida, Germany and France.

“It’s fantastic,” says Ana Iturralde, who operates L.A.’s Iturralde Gallery with her sister, Teresa. She is pleased with the international mix of the crowd, including collectors from Venezuela, Brazil, Puerto Rico and Mexico.

“Everyone asks, ‘Why Miami?’ But once you get past that, it makes perfect sense,” Keller says. The city has sufficient facilities within easy walking distance. Its location is relatively accessible for South Americans and Europeans. And of course the climate is a draw.

Miami’s art community has rolled out the red carpet with a slew of openings at museums and private collections. But perhaps the most telling tribute to the potential power of Art Basel Miami Beach is the appearance of a piggybacking art fair, Scope, which popped up at the Town House hotel, just a few blocks from the convention center.

For $3,000, a dealer could get lodging and an exhibition space. Thirty immediately signed up.

“It came up at the last minute,” said one, Los Angeles’ Jean Milant, of Cirrus Gallery. “But I figured, why not?”