Your bag is empty.
If you’re among the tens of thousands of art lovers currently flying south to brave Art Basel Miami Beach 2016, you face the daunting prospect of prioritizing which of #ABMB16’s hundreds of events and exhibits to pack into a single weekend of sandy, overstimulating days and sticky, mojito-drenched nights. While there’s plenty of beauty and talent to glean from Basel’s official programming, you’re likely to reach a point when the thought of one more confusing minute with a velvet-roped, armed-guarded Banksy car door with a $145,000 price tag makes you want to exit through the Miami Convention Center gift shop.
Luckily, there are other options. One of them is SATELLITE, a smaller, seedier fair that champions uncensored creativity and a multi-disciplinary mix of high- and lowbrow contributors, and serves as an antidote to Basel’s more white-walled fare. The second edition of the concept-based, artist-driven event features 45 exhibitors spanning four stories of repurposed hotel rooms in a Miami Vice-style dive hotel in the art deco mecca that is South Beach’s Collins Avenue. Highlights of the second annual edition of the Basel satellite’s #notbasel lineup include a queer “strip club” hosted by a Julliard-trained ballerina, virtual reality aromatherapy lounges, a 24/7 performance art space, a fully operational “post-feminist” tattoo parlor, and an 800-gallon cereal bowl perma-lubed with a live-action stream of artificial milk. Visitors can top off a day of cultural enrichment with post-art partying in a nightly after-hours penthouse.
Along with the rare chance to ‘gram a giant milk fountain, the indie fair’s takeaways include the opportunity to view visual art in combination with other creative and sensory experiences, all of which are cool but don’t require a fat checkbook or the ability to discern cubism from surrealism. Where else can you check out a Venice Biennale U.A.E. Pavilion artist, enjoy a lap dance and leave with some fresh ink? As the fair’s director Brian Whiteley puts it: “We believe art can be marketable and still have a soul.”
