The 10th iteration of Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB for short throughout)—which has now become a fixture on the art world’s calendar and another source of civic pride for a city better known for basketball teams and beaches—showed the fair settling into its status as the premier commercial exposition for contemporary art in the United States. Since its first appearance in 2002, ABMB has inspired the development of satellite fairs—among the most prominent being the NADA (New Art Dealers Association) fair. It has also been aided by various entities and individuals in Miami “stepping up their game” with the opening or expansion of public spaces devoted to private collections or curated exhibitions—the de la Cruz Collection, World Class Boxing, the Cisneros Foundation, and the Rubell Family Collection, among others—as well as museums and alternative spaces such as Locust Projects or the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, putting on more ambitious shows. Perhaps it was just me but despite the seemingly healthy business being done, one couldn’t help but feel that things were somewhat more subdued, with the fairs moving into their “mature” phase and, celebrity spottings of P. Diddy, Val Kilmer, A-Rod, and Owen Wilson aside, the context of a still uncertain economy made the carnival a little less … carnivalesque.

A shortlist of my picks that clicked:
• Los Angeles-based artist Ruben Ochoa’s dynamic, site-specific project at Locust Projects featured excised sections of the gallery floor propped up on precariously pitched steel beams.

• Larry Johnson’s presentation at Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, was one of numerous so-called “Art Kabinett” presentations at ABMB that featured in-depth mini-exhibitions of a gallery’s artist. I’ve admired his deadpan text-and-image-based photographic work since first seeing it in the 1989 exhibition The Photography of Invention and am glad to see him finally getting further exposure.

• Two Art Kabinetts for John Miller at Praz-Delavallade and Meyer Riegger (both at ABMB) were welcome presentations of another artist who’s quietly established a strong career for iconoclastic works that touch on the quirkiness, disposability, and abjection of American culture.

• Alan Reid and Michael Bauer both were represented with strong paintings at Lisa Cooley Gallery (NADA)

• The third floor at the de la Cruz Collection featuring phenomenal works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jim Hodges, and Gabriel Orozco. A welcome reminder of the Collection’s earlier days and a good counterpoint to the visual “maximalism” of the first two floors.

• Works by Jack Whitten and Hassan Sharif and an Art Kabinett for Joan Semmel at Alexander Gray Gallery, (at ABMB), a space that specializes in celebrating figures working somewhat outside of the art historical spotlight.

• I found the suspended sculpture by Alan Shields at Greenberg van Doren’s booth in ABMB very hard to resist.

• Maybe I’ve been spending too much time in a mesh-clad building but I was very drawn to Valerie Snobeck’s works incorporating plastic-scaffolding mesh at Essex Gallery (NADA).

• Mary Reid Kelley’s black-and-white video at Pilar Corrias (ABMB) made an indelible impression with its meditation on the plight of prostitutes during the First World War. The use of poetically dense dialogue and elaborate costuming and make-up—most unsettlingly Kermit-the-Frog-style eye coverings—makes the work that much more strangely affecting.

• Philip Hanson’s paintings at Corbett vs Dempsey were tucked away on a side wall but that positioning did little to diminish their compelling combination of stylized text and inspired handling of color and composition.

• Brendan Fowler’s maze of paintings and broken photographic wall structures at Untitled (ABMB) demonstrate a great sense of progression and ambition in this L.A. artist’s practice.

• Finally, something about Carissa Rodriguez’s ultra-subtle object-based sculptures at Karma International (ABMB) struck a chord with me …