by RAF KATIGBAK

They walk around in a daze, sort of like the cast of mindless, brain-starved zombies from some grainy Italian horror flick, or maybe like gangs of post-lobotomized Jack Nicholsons at the end of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The problem strikes people of all shapes and sizes, regardless of age, race or gender. You can recognize them from their slack faces, glazed eyes and slightly open mouth. It’s a certain look that says only one thing: “We’ve seen too much art and now we have no idea where we are, or what the fuck we are doing.”

After a full weekend of being over-arted, this was the general state of the population at North America’s biggest international art fair, Miami’s Art Basel. I should know. I was one. Like the hundreds of people who surged into the gorgeous Art Deco District last weekend, I had seen more art from more galleries and dealers than should be legally allowed. I had, in effect, become retarded by art.

As much as I love art (and the arty artists who make it), after a certain amount of time I think the human mind can only process so much of it before it shuts down and turns to baby food. You can actually plot the degradation of thought as a function of time, and as you walk from brightly painted canvases to high concept installations over and over and over, your thinking eventually moves from, “Hmm I wonder if this piece was influenced by Italian Neo-Realist cinema?” to “Hmm, I wonder if I left the iron on in the hotel room?”

But I had not come to Miami to attempt to comprehend how a piece of art comprised of a piece of yarn and three blocks of ice could command the going price of a small Montreal triplex. I had come here to accompany a pair of young Montreal artists who happened to be showing. Carlos and Jason Sanchez (aka the Sanchez Brothers) are the young fraternal photographers who are on their way to becoming the darlings of the Montreal art scene (you may know these guys from the billboard of a dog fighting a pack of wolves, next to the highway in the Quartier Éphémère, or from the eerie large format photo displayed in the MAC’s recent acquisitions).

The Sanchez Brothers aren’t new to Art Basel. They’ve been showing at Scope, the off-Basel collection of exhibitors, since 2002, and their experience shows in the contents of their hotel room, or, at least, the rather run-down double room at the Claremont they are sharing with four of their friends.

Miami during Art Basel is a strange mix of young poor-ass emerging artists and the high-rolling investment brokers and generally filthy rich types who support them. In the VIP suites of the patrons, you’ll find bottles of Grey Goose leisurely arranged amongst hot and cold modernist hors d’oeuvres. In the artists’ rooms, king cans of Bud are piled like a haphazard Stonehenge around Snack Master 2000s (perfect for money-saving grilled cheeses).

But Miami has always been about weird contrasts; the warm lushness of the vegetation surrounding the cold mathematical minimalism of the art deco architecture; the tanorexic, buoyantly-busted bikini bunnies, whose chest circumference is only rivalled by the pectorals of the muscle-bound tribally-tattooed rollerblade companions frolicking amongst the slow-moving, old Jewish retirees in pastel tracksuits and gold, gold, gold.

This strange contrast only added confusion to the strange feeling of déja-vu that I had once I touched down in Miami. I felt like I had been here before and that I knew the streets more intimately than someone who has never been there should have. Why was that? How could I have felt like I’d sped through these very byways and beachside throughways before, even though I had never been here or even ever had a driver’s licence, for that matter?

Then I figured it out: a couple of years ago, I had spent an ungodly amount of time playing a little game called GTA Vice City, whose virtual environment was based on Miami. They had done such a great job of modelling the city in the game that now, as I raced through the city streets with the Sanchez Brothers, we felt invincible; ready to fulfill our dual destiny as Québécois to retire to Florida, and to complete our Vice City mission to build our drug/art empires, one palm tree at a time.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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