While revisiting Miami in February, I attended the launch of this year’s edition of Art Wynwood, a fair that began in 2012. It has survived the waning of the art-fair phenomenon by allowing a takeover of pop surrealism in the booths, and by anointing enough Ps as VI to ensure a vip vernissage full of vigorously engineered décolletage. Thus the soul of the city was on display.
Nevertheless Miami permits something lost in blue metropolises in the age of medicalized technocracy and performative identity-consciousness: freedom to think whatever the hell you want. The trends were already in motion, but under the leadership of their respective governors, the swelling population of Florida blew past the withering one of New York. Ron DeSantis’s style of hardball is cheered by the dissident Right, which is the closest thing that America circa 2023 has to a counterculture. One of its organs, the magazine IM, recently featured a writer known only as Florida Woman in its Florida-themed second issue. She likened DeSantis approvingly to Abiaka, whose viciousness assured that the tribe of Seminole would never walk the Trail of Tears. Freedom is life.
My companion for the outing to Wynwood and environs was the sculptor James Croak, who sniffed the zeitgeist and abandoned New York for South Florida this year, echoing my own flight from Boston last year to well-armed New Hampshire. While in principle the art world’s reclamation of the work of demographically marginalized artists is welcome, the
