Out There Art Basel, More Parties and, Yes, Some

Chi LamJennifer Rubell’s tasty food installation “Incubation” at the Rubell Collection.

Wednesday morning, the 10th edition of Art Basel opened for preview. But first a stop at the Rubell Collection was in order for an experiential snack by the artist/cook/daughter Jennifer Rubell. Her breakfast installation this year is called “Incubation,” with yogurt incubating in a grid of sleek fermentation machines and honey perpetually drizzled from overhead — a commentary, according to the press release, on “the creation of food, the creation of life and the creation of art,” among other things, surely.

Nominally nourished, it was on to the fair, where at 11 a.m., the doors of the loudly carpeted Miami Beach Convention Center were thrown open — game time!

The fair seemed fairly sane — not too crowded, or at least not yet. There were the requisite artworks that incorporate tropical botany, like Yutake Sone’s rattan renditions of Jurassic palms at David Zwirner and Friedrich Kunath’s desert-island-for-one tableau at Andrea Rosen. (Also at Rosen: striking, self-cannibalizing plaster pieces by David Altmejd of hands that appear to have dug and drawn themselves out of another part of the work.) Gavin Brown went for hippie minimalism with his very attractive booth near the entrance, pairing Hans Josephsohn’s earthy Easter Island-ish heads with Rob Pruitt’s cutesy stick faces drawn onto big pastel gradients. Art Positions had a strong showing of galleries from Latin America, like Silvia Cintra and Box4 from Rio de Janeiro, whose booth the Belo Horizonte artist Cinthia Marcelle walled off with cinder blocks and filled with corn stalks. There was a traffic jam at Art Kabinett, where Madrid’s Galería Helga de Alvear hosted Elmgreen and Dragset’s latest, signature-style immersive booth, “Amigos.” It entails roughly enough loosely connected scenes (about a sinister sauna/morgue) for a music video; and a brawny, and photogenic, sleeping marble nude hooked up to an IV provided much iPhone candy.

The evening’s festivities began at the bayside party pad of Alex Rodriguez, where an eclectic crew (Owen Wilson, Yvonne Force, Tobias Meyer, Waris Ahluwalia, Real Housewife of Miami Lea Black) gathered to see a new installation by the New York artist Nate Lowman. In fact, there was art all over the place coach bags on sale on, from Warhol to Cyprien Gaillard. Lowman’s piece was in the batting cage — a dozen or so bullet (or baseball) hole paintings stretched on punchy, polygonal canvases, hung from the nets surrounding the room. Outside, a screen-licking Marilyn Minter video looped on a monitor above the bar, inspiring the sort of jockish exchange one can always depend on in Miami for comic relief: “What is that?” “It’s art.” “It’s nasty.”

Joe Schildhorn/BFAnyc.com Nicky Hilton Nike Air Max 360 Mens, Jeffrey Deitch and Paris Hilton at the Raleigh.

Apparently the king of the Yankees didn’t check calendars with the king of Morocco, because by the time folks filed out, the dinner at the Raleigh for the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, hosted by the latter monarch, had already begun. There were no spinning heads, no lab coats, no scandal of any variety in fact, unless you count Paris Hilton simultaneously puffing a cigarette and smiling, or the black Maybach someone had left in the swimming pool.

Around 11, Jeffrey Deitch’s annual beach party behind the hotel took shape, and Soulwax and 2manydjs took over the tunes for an audio throwback to the early days of Art Basel. Meanwhile, at the Delano, the goth rappers known as Salem played a show for the former Deitch Projects director (and current director of the Hole) Coach Wallets, Kathy Grayson, and a dinner at the Opa-Locka Airport for the Wolfsonian Museum featured a performance with American Apparel models and staffers by the former Deitch artist Vanessa Beecroft — 2manyDeitch-ites!

Alexandra Wyman/Getty Images for SoHo Beach House Dasha Zhukova at the SoHo Beach House Wednesday night.

Over at the SoHo Beach House, a byzantine system of iPads and paper tickets led to a tent on the water where Dasha Zhukova and Wendi Murdoch hosted a party for Art.sy (“the Pandora for art”) with Louis Vuitton. Proximity to bonfires, waves, sand and shrimp kept guests in high spirits, even as the computers demonstrating the art Web site appeared to be in constant mortal danger. Afterward, guests decamped either to their respective hotels, to Le Baron at the Delano or to Le Baron’s latest offshoot, the Paris Paris Cabaret at the Shelborne, where the supremely regrettable option of late-night karaoke was on offer.