Seattle looks to Miami for success in art

One measure of success---how others see you:

Seattleites look for success at Miami art fairs | The Arts | The Seattle Times: "When the Affordable Art Fair visited Seattle Center last month, the organizers were keen to point out that our city had not hosted an art fair for many years. So imagine this: Last weekend, in the adjoining cities of Miami and Miami Beach, which even between them have a smaller population than Seattle, you could have visited any one of 24 art fairs all happening at the same time. What these fairs showed almost exclusively, and sold in huge quantities, was modern and contemporary art, or art of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a rule of thumb, the newer the art is, the more of it you’ll find in Miami. At the heart of all of this activity is what many in the art world consider the largest and most important art fair in the world — Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), which comprises temporary booths occupied by 250 of the world’s most successful galleries and attracted 70,000 visitors over five days. . . . There was, however, a significant Seattle presence in Miami last week, though to find it you had to take a step down the fairs’ hierarchy. . . . The final measure of success at an art fair is almost entirely commercial. What sells, in this context, is the very measure of what is good. Thus the necessary third element in the Miami mix alongside dealers and artists is the huge international community of art collectors that it attracts. A lot of these people like to keep their heads down, but there were probably more Seattle collectors in Miami last week than Seattle artists and dealers put together. . . ."

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