Dispatches from Miami's Art Basel
on keeping a notes app
Soon after I left Los Angeles, I was greeted by the temperate winds of the tropics. Miami. The thick air was a flirt – licking away the last of New York’s icy tentacles wedged between my limbs – and my mind – tired but hopeful – was as limp as a beach chair.
I came to Miami’s Art Basel without expectations. I heard of the international art, the hard-to-get-into parties, and the maximalist crowds but all of that washed over me. I was there for work and had a handful of friends in town but I hadn’t planned a single thing. But I was curious. Inspired by Marlowe Granados’s Notes From My Phone: Miami ‘22 (read, loved it) and Joan Didion’s South and West: From A Notebook (didn’t read, admiration unknown), I decided to keep notes to document my expedition. I admired how their small snippets could illustrate a larger experience. And so, armed with my Notes app, I descended into the catacombs of Miami, eager to catalogue the beautiful art of Basel and the beautiful people who frolicked amoung it.
Below is what I saw, below is what I wrote:
I find myself behind a velvet rope, nursing a lukewarm vodka soda, when a stranger begins to speak at me.
She looks like Sonja Morgan and I assume she’s actually meant to be here.
A self-proclaimed “close friend” of the artist we’re celebrating, she tells me that she has been going to Art Basel since its inception. I tell her it's my first time and ask her what I should be looking for. Unflinching, she responds: romance.
I later discover, via Page Six, that she was accused of biting a passenger on a flight.
During the flight, she was also wearing a tiara.
The tiara was reportedly made by Marie Antoinette’s jeweler and is worth six million dollars.
“You here for Basel?” the concierge asks me.
“Yeah, but I’ve never been before.”
“Me neither. I’ve always lived in Miami but it’s one of those things that you don’t go to because it’s always been in your backyard.”
To close a rambunctious forty-minute set, the singer Janelle Monae dives into the pool of the EDITION and swims away.
The attendees of the party race to the deck to join her, stripping off garments.
I head to the kitchen in search of fried calamari instead.
There’s a line to get into the bathroom and a man in a leather dominatrix mask cuts to the front. When he’s done, he looks at me through the mirror and demands to know what agency I’m signed to.
He doesn’t clarify what kind of agency.
I lie and tell him I’m represented everywhere but New York.
He never washes his hands but I take his card anyway.
“Ah,” my friend announces as we finish drinks. “To die and be reborn as a Bagatelle lady would be a dream come true.”
I follow his gaze to witness an employee being hoisted in the air wearing a one piece swimsuit. She holds a bottle of champagne ablaze with sparklers and I am convinced she’s the happiest person I have seen all year.
After ten minutes, an influencer leaves a brand event to link up with her friends who weren’t granted access to the party.
She stands in the center of her squad and raises her purple purse. One by one, I watch as she pulls seven beef sliders from a mini Jacqumus to share with her friends.
A modern-day Robin Hood.
A popular British musician cuts a hundred-person line in a shimmering, lemon meringue suit to check if his name is on the list.
It is not.
A popular British musician retreats to the back of a hundred-person line in a shimmering, lemon meringue suit because his name was not on the list.
A man who looks as though he was the second person voted off of a season of Love Island US (derogatory, but if it was UK it wouldn’t be) cuts the line to a popular magazine party.
He grunts “the DJ is playing” as rationale as he weasels by.
At this point, no one is moved enough to question him. I mean, I kinda get it.
An employee hands out stuffed pizza bagels as he weaves through the dance floor, bagels in a bucket rest on his shoulder like a beer guy selling lagers at a baseball game.
I’d never heard of stuffed pizza bagels and suddenly I feel stunted. It’s only midnight.
“You can’t miss me,” a friend tells a lost Uber through his phone. “I’m in head-to-toe snakeskin.”
Three weeks ago, a popular New York TikToker went viral for documenting her breakup.
A few days leading up to Basel, she exposed another TikToker for going on a date with her ex-boyfriend and not being a ‘girl’s girl.’
A day leading up to Basel, she released a podcast about it.
Tonight, at the popular magazine’s party, a mob of admirers line up to take selfies with her.
A handful of teary women – seemingly strangers – patiently wait their turn to hug her.
Against my better judgement, I take a step forward to offer her support. Then I remember myself and pull out my phone instead. I begin a text to tell someone what I just saw, what I was prepared to do, but I can’t think of what to say or who would care.
The instance only makes sense only at this particular millisecond and nowhere else, rendering the experience both urgent and useless.
At lunch in the design district, we order two sets of spring rolls, three spicy tuna rolls, four crispy rice, one shrimp fried rice, two grilled chicken, one grilled asparagus, two green salads, two poke bowls, one tuna avocado roll, one California roll and three tall chilled bottles of Saratoga Sparkling Water.
I order two Coca-Colas with my order but only make it through one and a half.
A motion to play Daft Punk’s “Around The World” at every party is raised and then put to bed quietly.
As we make my way through a party, a woman in the hallway smiles at me.
Her smile is arresting. It doesn’t suggest that she knows me but suggests that I should know her.
I begin to pass her, her eyes still locked on me, and suddenly I realize who it is. I snap my neck back and ask: “Are you Lil’ Mama?”
She relaxes her smile gently, evidently comforted by this recognition, and responds “Yes. Yes, I am.” Only then, do I feel released from her gaze.
Carter Flachbarth. One night, I am woken up by beams of light through the curtain.
As I press my nose against the balcony window, I see a burning figure slowly stepping its way across the beach and into the waves. Its dancing flames wither when the humanoid figure descends into the ocean.
Soon I see nothing. Black.
When I wake the next morning, happy families lounge on the beach, in the place where the fiery man once stood.
I think I see a sandcastle but I can’t say for sure.
“What kind of food did they serve at the McDonald’s brand event?”
“McNuggets.”
“Ah, that’s perfect. No notes.”
