Work by Gavin Perry, above, was included in a recent group show at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery.

BY BRETT SOKOL

Reports of the art world’s demise are greatly exaggerated. That much was clear from the enthused crowds that swarmed through Wynwood during this past season’s monthly gallery walks, blithely unaware that the Miami art scene was now supposedly “dead”—another victim of the economic downturn.

To be sure, there were more than a few instances when some of our local boosters looked a bit startled, as if they’d been sucker-punched in the stomach. How else to explain their reaction upon seeing the addresses of several high-flying galleries, only months earlier filled with gawkers and competing corporate sponsors, now darkened and shuttered? Meanwhile, those galleries still standing have pared back their staffs as well as their ambitions. And many of Miami’s younger artists, who similarly took this past decade’s freeflowing cash for granted, suddenly find themselves forced to contemplate getting day jobs.

Yet those flashes of career despair co-exist with a flurry of activity—new galleries opening, new artists coming to the fore, and yes, new artworks being bought and sold.

Debra and Dennis Scholl

“This is nothing like the ’90s,” scoffed collector Dennis Scholl as a small powwow gathered around him and his wife, Debra, inside Wynwood’s Fredric Snitzer Gallery on a recent Saturday night. Having lived through the 1990 art-market crash, Scholl insisted the current skid in prices was hardly a replay.

“In 1991 the art market was dead,” he explained. “There was no movement at all. Everybody just woke up one morning and said, ‘That’s it, we’re through buying art!’” In contrast, he continued, while today’s prices “may be off 40, 50, even 60 percent, work is still selling.” The reason? “There were only 600 collectors back then,” he chuckled, recalling a contemporaryart milieu that was publicized far out of proportion to its actual numbers. “There are 10 times as many people buying art today!” And while plenty of newcomers have sheathed their checkbooks, he believes enough remain to keep Miami’s battered art infrastructure intact through the coming lean years.

What does this mean for our city’s artists? Fresh opportunities, at least for those willing to seize the moment. The proof was right across the street from Snitzer, in a newly vacated space owned by ubiquitous area landlords Tony and Joey Goldman. Rather than leave such a prime spot empty and further depress their real estate values, the Goldmans allowed plucky video artist Mélanie Bellue Schumacher (aka M Lafille) to curate the appropriately named “Self Made Exhibition” there. Featuring a crew of worthy locals still struggling for hometown attention, entire rooms were given over to sensory-overload painter Brandon Opalka, slyly unorthodox sculptor Sinisa Kukec, M Lafille’s own lushly hypnotic film en route to display at the Venice Biennale, and the meticulously assembled schooner-like “feather vessels” of her husband, sculptor Reeve Schumacher.

Even more impressive work by Schumacher—a set of 19th-century hardbound encyclopedias lovingly détourned and molded atop a handcrafted piece of wooden furniture—was around the corner at the Dorsch Gallery, another Wynwood mainstay gamely pressing on.

Meanwhile, the latest crop of New World School of the Arts wunderkinder were showing no signs of disappointment at a separate Goldman rent-subsidized show. Intensely vivid portraits by Jose Perez, eerie tableaus of armchairs brought to life and battling their owners by Herman Felipe, and abstractly tweaked photographic lightboxes by Veronica Sierra all augured well for the class of 2009.

Up in the Design District the story was, encouragingly, much the same. Pursuing a similar art-fueled development plan, area landlord and art maven Craig Robins has also been turning over otherwise vacant spaces to temporary exhibits. One of the best so far: “Coupling,” curated by painter Kristen Thiele. Amid work from heavyweights such as Robert Chambers and Mette Tommerup, Thiele also shone a well-deserved spotlight on the figurative brushwork of Mary Malm, whose portraits of emotionally clouded beachgoers were all the more memorable for their inscrutability. Here’s to seeing a further series in this vein—especially since paintings that make such an immediate visceral connection are about to become much scarcer around town.

top: A painting by Daniel Hesidence at the Kevin Bruk Gallery in Wynwood; bottom: The scene in Wynwood on a recent Saturday night

Indeed, if history is any guide, get ready to be swamped by a rash of intellectual nonsense. The impenetrable artspeak is already thick on the ground in Wynwood, but as the number of active buyers shrinks, expect much of the art world to become ever more insular, laboring chiefly for an audience of museum curators and grant reviewers. The result? Work that is all too often theoretically sound, emotionally glib and ultimately forgettable. Of course, for those willing to sift the aesthetic wheat from the chaff, treats should still abound.

Again, if history repeats, art critics will look back on our ongoing financial dislocations as shockwaves of fertile cultural gestation, just as the early-’70s art-market crash gave rise to the now legendary conceptualists Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Gordon Matta-Clark, and the early-’90s market collapse saw the emergence of kindred “relational aesthetics” standardbearers such as Félix González-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Needless to say, for all of those figures’ professed antimaterialism, and for all of the noncommerciality initially ascribed to them, their work is now fiercely clamored over. And as their six-figure price tags attest, it’s anything but free.

On that note, it’s also worth remembering that many of Miami’s reigning übercollectors either first began buying work during the chilliest depths of the ’90s bust (Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz) or took its deflated prices as an opportunity to plunge in even deeper (Don and Mera Rubell). That was certainly the tack being taken by Norman Braman—despite being personally hit by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, he still flew to Switzerland for June’s Art Basel fair on the hunt for fresh acquisitions. “We’re hoping to see something that grabs us,” Braman enthusiastically told an Art Newspaper reporter who spotted him boothhopping there.

Back at the Snitzer gallery, Dennis Scholl was reminded of his own precrash musing on the market’s seesawing tempo. “When the market goes in the toilet, we’re happy, because we know what’s special to us, even if other people have lost interest,” he told Ocean Drive back in 2007, then eagerly awaiting the return of comparatively affordable art. “When the market isn’t quite as effusive, we just get more things.” Back in the early ’90s, he recalled with a fond chuckle, “they were giving it all away!” So now, two years on from that pronouncement, were he and Debra relishing the opportunity to dive back into the collecting fray? The couple both flashed knowing smiles. “Absolutely,” replied Dennis. OD

Email brett@oceandrive.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER RICHARDSON/RED EYE PRODUCTIONS (GALLERIES); NAVID (SCHOLL)