MIAMI (12/04/04)—One way to tell that the NADA art fair, now in its second year, is officially on the map: Collectors snuck in Tuesday, two days before the official opening, while galleries were still unwrapping works fresh off the trucks. One way to tell that the NADA art fair is still experiencing growing pains: At the press preview just before Thursday's opening, many of the booths were still in darkness as electricians made last-minute adjustments. (There were audible cheers whenever a booth's lights would unexpectedly switch on.) Inability to see the art didn't seem to slow down the buying: New York gallerist Oliver Kamm reported selling almost everything in his booth within an hour of the opening; the owner of another young gallery (also based in New York, home to almost thirty of NADA's sixty exhibitors) said “All day Tuesday it was L.A. collectors saying 'Me, me, me!'” When asked whether anything was still available at his booth, Daniel Reich, characteristically laconic, replied, “No...nothing's available...no...not really.” A prominent New York collector, contrasting NADA with ArtBasel, summed it up thusly: “This one: Refreshing. That one? Ho-hum.”

With so many people packed into the space (along with collectors and members of the press, gallerists Andrea Rosen and Jay Japling, Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehmann and other power players were on hand) it was often difficult to assess the art, and the prevalence of incredibly dense salon-style installations didn't help. No gallery opted for a single-artist statement—a la, say, Michelle Maccarone's presentation of Christoph Buchel & Gianni Motti's pointed “Guantanamo Initiative” in her Art Positions container on the beach—and only IBID Projects, based in London and Vilnius, kept things minimal: Three walls, three artists. Their booth included the paintings of young Janis Avotins, born in 1981, whose age and stylistic influences might, pace Artforum's November issue, suggest the descriptor “'The Tuymans Effect' Effect”. There was, as expected, a bi-coastal onslaught of small, brightly colored and often faux-naïve works on paper. Worth noting among this crowd were Canadian artist Brad Philips' delicate watercolors presented in a vitrine at Wallspace Gallery's booth. The best of these—a rendering of his girlfriend, lying in her underwear on a bed beneath a kaleidoscopically-bright blanket—uncannily recalls an Egon Schiele drawing on long-term view at the Neue Galerie in New York. If you're going to copy, you should, like Phillips, choose your sources wisely. Elsewhere, several Europeans stood out. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for straight lines or maybe I simply needed something cool to take my mind off the Miami heat, but I was especially taken with Camilla Løw's sculpture of four diamond-shaped Perspex panels dangling in the sunlight just outside Sutton Lane's booth and with Felix Schramm's demure architectural fragment (an art fair-scale example of his larger installations) at Grimm/Rosenfeld. But the latter work points to another problem that besets artists at both fairs—particularly those working in media that don't allow multiples and editions: what they send to fill their dealers' booths may be interesting, but it's not always representative of their work at its best. Faced with a production-line schedule requiring a solo show every two years at one (or several) galleries and works for an ever-increasing number of fairs, many artists in Miami voiced a wish that they could simply slow down. They were savvy enough coming out of MFA programs to find strong galleries to represent their work (and despite its increase in size over the last year, a majority of those participating in NADA are indeed galleries with strong programs); will they be savvy enough to leverage their sold-out shows into time for concentration in the studio?

None of these concerns were voiced too loudly at the raucous Friday night NADA party at the Sagamore Hotel, where ArtBasel and NADA dealers rubbed shoulders with scruffy twenty-something artists and their local friends in the rear garden by the pool. At 1:30a.m. the crowd was herded out the front door so hotel guests could get their sleep, and the party split in two: some headed north to the Raleigh Hotel and others south to Bar Deuce. The procession of artists, dealers, collectors, and curators felt like an impromptu recreation of Fancis Alÿs' parade from the midtown MoMA to Queens in June 2002 (though thankfully no one was holding Kiki Smith aloft). While walking, one New York dealer, who despite my prodding insisted on remaining anonymous, said: “This year the Frieze Art Fair felt like Basel set down in Regent's Park in London. I think the NADA Art Fair is what Frieze was meant to be.” An odd comment perhaps, given that the London fair, also two years old, has emphasized exclusivity and the presentation of top-drawer galleries in a pristine venue designed by architect of the moment David Adjaye—a marked contrast to NADA's help-everyone-along mentality. But she wasn't the only one making the connection. Will NADA's charmed run last? One hopes so, because for the second year running the sharpness of its gallery selection has provided a welcome contrast to cookie-cutter corporate fairs across town and around the world.