Madonna and madness in Miami Beach

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

It’s that time of year again. The Miami art world is ramping up the excitement for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair and its various satellites. And, as ever, the programme contains its fair share of oddities.

Once again, Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody is seeking to consolidate his position as a self-styled Renaissance Man with an exhibition of his new paintings. Last December, Brody showcased his artistic talents with a series entitled Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Handguns. More recently, he has turned to fish. ‘Most artists distill a concept into one style. They will do a series of that style. I am not doing that. Just like my acting. I feel like I should be a chameleon, as an artist and as an actor’, Brody told Newsweek last year. ‘I should be able to just f****** create!’, he added.

Brody isn’t the only interdisciplinarian dipping his toes into the oily waters of the art world. At the Context fair, musical polymath and sometime Apollo contributor Brian Eno is also promising to showcase his artistic talents with a series of lightboxes that will apparently ‘seamlessly phase through combinations of seductive self-generated “colourscapes”’. Not to be outdone, Madonna is also getting in on the Art Basel action. Following a charity auction featuring work from her personal collection (compered, of course, by James Corden), the singer will stage a clown-themed concert at the Rem Koolhaas-designed Faena Forum on 2 December. The event, for which she will perform in costume, will apparently be ‘rough as f***’, a ‘work in progress’ that comes ‘from the heart’.

But that’s enough about the art. So far, the biggest story of the fair has come courtesy of Jeff Koons, whose work can justifiably be described as ‘smashing’ for the first time in years. One day into the Design/Miami fair, one of the artist’s balloon dog multiples inexplicably toppled off a pedestal and promptly disintegrated. ‘It just fell out of the display’, said a collector who witnessed the accident. ‘The girl standing next to it had it cleaned up in five seconds’. Presumably they have special bags for this type of thing…

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