Last night, I attended Art Basel Miami Beach, a yearly international contemporary art exhibition that takes place at the Miami Beach Convention Center and other shows all over town. I wandered among a huge crowd, inches from thousands of original works by Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Matisse, Hockney, Rothko, Calder, Kandinsky.
But this isn’t an art museum. This stuff is for sale. And people are buying. I eavesdropped on a conversation about price: “300,000? Hmmm.”
I began doing nothing in the presence of the crowd: young New York hipsters in amazing, creative outfits, Cuban couples holding hands, women with straight red hair cut in angular shapes. Everyone looked so beautiful through eyes looking out with joy.
I stopped at a photograph by a favorite, Sally Mann. It was her daughter, probably about twelve, holding a candy cigarette as if it were real, the insolent, defiant face of a young teenager stopped in time and on full display. I’ve seen the shot in a book I own, but there, full-sized, it was even more powerful.
I saw that same look on my daughter’s face so many times during that stage of half-adult, half-child. A look of I love you but I’m going my own way now and I’m going to experiment and break rules and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.
I stood before the photo, happy to see it and even more happy that I don’t live with a thirteen year old girl right now. A small crowd began to join me. I turned to the woman next to me. She was smiling lovingly too. And everyone who had stopped was looking at this child in the photo with the same loving eyes.
We began to chat and laugh about the photograph. One woman said she used to love candy cigarettes too. And I remembered the fun of pretending to “smoke” them. Someone else said they were living with that face at home right now—their own fourteen year old. We all laughed together, in our collective adult wisdom.
I’ve never had this kind of experience at an art exhibit before. Who knew there was such overwhelming joy in the presence of a defiant teenager?
