Art Basel Miami Beach week: The Saturday report

The day started with the usual gorgeous view from my friends' condo and then it went bananas from there... cough... cough...

Saturdays are usually the busiest days at the planet's primary art venue week... today Pulse debuted a discussion panel in Spanish, with me, blue chip artist Sandra Ramos and art consultant Tessie Penin.

Tim Tate and Sandra Ramos

The subject of the discussion was my now over 10-year-old discussion "On Identity in the Arts: What does it mean to be Latino/a?" and it went really well, with Ramos and Penin adding really substantial points to this issue.

As it had been doing for the first two days, Michael Janis' main piece in the fair was receiving a lot of attention, and by the end of the night, two separate art consultants had placed it in their list to showcase to their clients.

Work by Michael Janis

The wall of drawings of unfired Bisque kept selling well throughout the day as well... and I re-arranged it to shrink it a little...

Campello drawings on unfired Bisque

New works on Bisque

A lot of these stayed with new collectors as they were sold at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami Beach last week...

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Art Basel Week Miami - the Friday report!

By Friday opening at Pulse, the Maurizio Cattalan stunt with the $120K banana is all over the news and all over Al Gore's Internets.

All of a sudden we are approached by a middle aged man who claims to be the buyer of the banana. He tells us that he bought the banana because he was hungry and thought that the banana was for sale at a pop up bodega at Art Basel Miami Beach.

He confused his dollar exchange for his own South American currency from a South American country with sky-rocketing inflation due to Socialism (he thought that the banana was 12 cents... not 120K) and thus he bought it... and then he ate it.

He then threw the peel in the back of his Tesla and never thought anything more about it until he came up to the story in the news.

The next day he drove up to 46th street to Pulse, and walked the fair... at the restaurant he heard the buzz about the "banana" and realized that he and his intestines were the owners of 2019's most famous work of art.

He almost panicked realizing that he had eaten most of his "art" acquisition... but not too much, after all, he was... ahhhh... OK as far as Samolians went... after all again - he was part of the Socialist top tier, and thus OK.

When he walked by our booth, he heard me speaking in Spanish and he approached me.

"Hermano", he said.

I looked at him, already a little suspicious.

"Tengo algo interesante para vender", he added ["I've got something interesting to sell"]

"Gracias...", I said, "pero..." ["but"]

"No. no... no...", he said, using the classical Latin/Jewish triple "no."

"Es sobre arte." ["It's about art"] He said.

He explained that he had been the person who had acquired the banana for $120K... but noted that he had bought it because he has hungry.

"Tengo la cascara en el carro... la puedo vender?" ["I've got the peel in my car... can I sell it?"]

Why not?... I thought.

Soon it was up... half priced, because after all... cough, cough... the banana had lost a lot of its a-peel... get it... "ahhhh - peeeeel.'

200K retweets later... the slippery parody had run its course... except that two people actually try to buy our parody!!!!

On a more serious note, the cool people from #ArteconTwitter seemed to fall in love with Tim Tate's Canario - The Tatester remains the DMV's premier artist!

#ArteConTwitter