Art Basel Miami Beach: The 24/7 Fair

The daily start time is noon for the main art fair at Art Basel Miami Beach that was wrapping up on Sunday, but art was available - with food and drink - at all hours. On Saturday morning, for example, Cricket and Martin Taplin welcomed an estimated 2,000 guests for an annual art brunch at their hotel, the Sagamore, on Collins Avenue. An ebullient Ms. Taplin, who has been hosting the brunch since 2001, said the art was mostly from her personal collection. “It ‘s an extension of our home,” she said.

This year the Taplins have four loaned works by Emil Lukas on display. “She's a beautiful mix of insanity and super focus,” Mr. Lukas said of his host. Across from Mr. Lukas's creations, a circular blue-and-yellow light sculpture composed of crushed headlights by Jacopo Foggini, whi ch Ms. Taplin bought on a recent trip to Italy, hangs from the ceiling.

Ms. Taplin said she had had to replace a work that adorned a hotel wall for eight years, a video installation by Megan McLarney. The monitors had broken, and when Ms. Taplin asked for a replacement, she said the artist told her that she was no longer making that sort of art (also, the monitors weren't being made anymore). In its place, Ms. Taplin displayed five Helen Levitt photographs from the 1930s. She also added a video, “Lux Matter,” by Beatriz Millar, a sensual depiction of bread making. The artist Michele Oka Doner was also on hand for brunch, standing near her large 2008 work “Sargassa,” made of seaweed that she carried back in plastic baggies from the ocean in back of the hotel.

In the evening visitors could have an even more immersive art experience a few blocks away by visiting the bar set in an outdoor egg-shaped wooden pavilion, “Güiro,” constructed by the Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez).

Sponsored by Absolut Vodka, Güiro - which means gourd in English - resembled a space ship from another galaxy when it was illuminated on the beachfront at night. Mr. Rodríguez said the pavilion was constructed in Germany and shipped to Miami Beach. The collective's work was generating a lot of attention at the main fair as well. Janine Cirincione, the director of the Sean Kelly gallery, said on Sunday that every piece of its work had been sold. “Kosmaj Toy,” a playful large red sculpture of Lego bricks, sold within 10 minutes of the fair's opening, she said.

IHT Quick Read: Dec. 10

NEWS Cerebral, bespectacled and more at home at a seminar than in the bear pit of Italian politics, Prime Minister Mario Monti for the last year has quietly restored Italy's weight in European diplomacy while helping mend its battered credibility with the financial markets. So Mr. Monti's announcement over the weekend that he intends to stand down from his job running the euro zone's third-largest economy poses a worrying question: Is Italy about to go back to its bad old ways? Stephen Castle and Jack Ewing report.

The political crisis over Egypt's draft constitution hardened on both sides on Sunday, as President Mohamed Morsi prepared to deploy the army to safeguard balloting in a planned referendum on the new charter and his opponents called for more protests and a boycott to undermine the vote. David D. Kirkpatrick reports from Cairo.

Xi Jinping, the new head of the Communist Party, made a visit to Shenzhen in south China, in a strong signal of support for greater market-oriented economic policies. Edward Wong reports from Beijing.

The Social Democrats formally nominated Peer Steinbrück to run for chancellor, despite controversy over $1.7 million he earned from speaking fees. Melissa Eddy reports from Berlin.

Romanians went to the polls on Sunday in parliamentary elections that have threatened to pus h the country further into political upheaval and acrimony. Dan Bilefsky reports.

EDUCATION A recently announced charity program is offering British students of less-privileged families the opportunity to attend some of America's top colleges at little or no cost. D.D. Guttenplan reports from London.

The government of Singapore will stop releasing the names of top-performing students in an effort to put less academic stress on young people. Kristiano Ang reports from Singapore.

ARTS David Kirkness, an ent erprising woodworker on the remote Orkney Islands, made thousands of humble chairs that have become prized artifacts. Alice Rawsthorn on design.

SPORTS Two soccer games this weekend- one in Germany, the other in England- saw questionable refereeing decisions affect the final outcome. Rob Hughes writes from London.

\'Garlands and Mud\' for Nobel Laureate from China

HONG KONG - The novelist Mo Yan will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature on Monday, a first for China, but after a particularly nasty backlash over his selection, it's understandable if some members of the Swedish Academy might be having some buyer's remorse.

Herta Müller, the Romanian-born writer who received the Nobel in 2009, told a Swedish newspaper that Mr. Mo's selection was “a catastrophe” because of his failure to speak out about ongoing state censorship in China. She called his award “incredibly upsetting.”

Liao Yiwu, 54, a Chinese author and dissident now living in Berlin, told Der Spiegel magazine about Mr. Mo's selection: “I am stunned. To me it is like a slap in the face.” He also derided Mr. Mo as “a state poet.†

Mr. Liao, who spent four years in a Chinese labor camp for anti-state writings, was asked if he knew Mr. Mo personally:

“Yes, he once visited Chengdu and we met there. After that there were a number of opportunities for us to meet but he always avoided me. He knows that he represents a superficial China, one that can seem very glossy. Whereas I stand for a grassroots China, its dregs, its dirt.”

Der Spiegel provided a counterpoint to Mr. Liao's critique, quoting Martin Walser, 85, a controversial German writer.

“I have never read another author who explains so much history in a present day plot,” Mr. Walser said. “It is literature, but is also informative about a country and its pasts. Mo Yan describes everything historical in full sensory detail, not as statements but as expressions.

“If one talks about China today,” he added, “then he should first read Mo Yan's novels, which, for me, reach the level of Faulkner.”

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobels, told my colleagues Andrew Jacobs and Sarah Lyall that the academy was “awarding a literary prize, and it's on literary merit. The political fallouts and effects don't enter into it.”

“That doesn't mean we regard literature as unpolitical or that this year's prize winner isn't writing political literature,” Mr. Englund said, speaking of Mr. Mo. “You can open almost any one of his books and see it's very critical about many things to do with Chinese history and also contemporary China. But he's not a political dissident. I would say he is more a critic of the system, sitting within the system.”

The Nobel citation said Mr. Mo's “hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

Mr. Mo gave his Nobel lecture on Saturday in Stockholm as a prelude to the official ceremony on Monday. (The event includes the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, given this year to the European Union.) Mr. Mo titled his lecture “Storytellers,” and it appears on the Nobel Web site here in several languages. An excerpt:

The announcement of my Nobel Prize has led to controversy. At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I've come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me.

Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers.

I was afraid he would succumb to the assault, but he emerged from the garlands of flowers and the stones, a smile on his face; he wiped away mud and grime, stood calmly off to the side, and said to the crowd:

For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works.

His remarks did not appease the dissident poet Ye Du, who was quoted in an article in The South China Morning Post: “In the last few days, he has defended the system of censorship . . . then in his lecture, he talks about storytelling - to use a Chinese expression, he is like a prostitute insisting her services are clean.”

“As far as an assessment of him,” Mr. Ye added, “in literature he has some merit, but as a living human being he is a dwarf.”

Global Times, a mass circulation newspaper affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, had a story on Monday headlined, “Mo Yan is wise to avoid talking politics.” An excerpt:

People should stop pressing Mo. He has already faced many questions he would have preferred to avoid.

Mo described himself as a storyteller during his speech at the Swedish Academy, while many expected him to talk about politics. This is a sad day for literature. It seems that literature is worth nothing if it does not serve a political master.

Mo is the real defender of literature. He refused to mix politics with literature. He has barely made any political claims and showed no strong tendency toward political rights.

Regarding the Mo-Nobel coverage, the Chinese media apparently received their protocols and talking points from Beijing, according to China Digital Times, which published this official memo that was issued after the Nobel award was announced in October:

State Council Information Office: To all Web sites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the Party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details. Reinforce on-duty staff during the weekend and prioritize this management task.

The state-run newspaper China Daily seemed to be on message, offering an article on Monday that said Mr. Mo's Nobel haberdashery had become “a national topic of discussion.”

“Casual or formal? Traditional or Western? A Mao suit or tailcoat?” the paper asked, noting that “the country's masses wonder how a literature laureate will present himself on the world s tage in Sweden.”

The paper said a designer, Chen Bei, has put together a wardrobe for Mr. Mo and his family for the Nobel presentation. She said the design would be “essentially a Western cut with Chinese characteristics.”

Art Basel Miami Beach: How the Art Fair Lifted a Neighborhood

Breathing Life, and Art, Into a Downtrodden Neighborhood

Jason Henry for The New York Times

BLANK SLATES A seemingly endless supply of warehouse walls presents an inviting canvas for graffiti artists in the Wynwood section of Miami.

MIAMI - Ski, a New York graffiti artist, swirled a can of spray paint, blasting a riot of neon in this once-forlorn slab of Miami called Wynwood. A few doors down, in a pop-up store, another artist, Asif Farooq, was selling an array of firearms - actually cardboard replicas for those who like everything about a gun except the shooting.

Wandering past was the Art Basel mob, thousands of people moving from mural to mural, gallery to gallery, reveling in the neighborhood's nooks and crannies: looking, buying and, just as invaluable, creating word spreading the word. This 10-year-old December migration from the core of Basel, the prestigious four-day art show at South Beach that ends on Sunday, to Wynwood, one of Miami's grittier sections, has propelled the neighborhood onto the year-round must-see lists of intrepid visitors and locals.

The newfound allure of Wynwood is the latest testament to how art - and creative developers, like Tony Goldman, who helped remake SoHo and South Beach - can sprinkle its metaphysical magic and transform even the bleakest places.

“It's unbelievable, the transition from desolate streets to completely filled energy where everybody is happy,” said Ski, who worked on the mural with 2esae and Col, two other graffiti artists, and is an Art Basel veteran.

A hiccup of time ago, trekking to Wynwood, a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood, was a test in urban fortitude. Drugs, crime and a general sense of foreboding clung to the empty streets and warehouses.

The neighborhood, which sits in one of Miami's roughest sections, endured a small riot in 1990 after a police officer was acquitted in the shooting death of a drug dealer. The riot was symptomatic of the area's sense of isolation and served as a punctuation mark on 10 years of restiveness in Miami.

“There were a lot of body shops and dogs behind fences,” said David Lombardi, the founder of Lombardi Properties, who bought his first parcel here in the early 2000s. “Every window that had been a window had been locked up. Every fence that was here had barbed wire.”

Then Art Basel came to town in 2002, and the art slowly spilled over to lesser-traveled neighborhoods across the bay from Miami Beach. Satellite fairs popped up in the design district, which had long been home to furniture showrooms. When that became too expensive - Louis Vuitton and Hermès set up shop last year - attention drifted to midtown and Wynwood, both a bit farther south.

In the aesthetic hierarchy of Miami, which boasts an iconic waterfront skyline, synthetically sculptured women and crystalline beaches, Wynwood is as appealing as a dollar store. But, as the axiom goes, its location (and price) were irresistible.

Mr. Lombardi, fresh off buying properties that had turned to gold in South Beach, first visited Wynwood in 2000. His initial impression was that the neighborhood was too close to downtown Miami and Miami Beach to ignore. His second thought was that cheap warehouse space would be useful and the bargain rates were impossible to beat. So he started to buy.

As he meandered around streets littered with broken glass, he stumbled across two renegade art galleries in the neighborhood. Young people were hanging out, having drinks, talking art.

“It went off in my head like a light bulb,” said Mr. Lombardi, who, it seems, cannot wander too far without a greeting from a tenant. “I saw what could be done.”

Mr. Lombardi began to court struggling artists who did not have gallery representation and could no longer afford South Beach. As they moved into the neighborhood, he started Roving Fridays, a stroll for cutting-edge art lovers who wanted to see the new scene for themselves. It was the precursor to the overwhelmingly popular and raucous gallery walk that happens in Wynwood on the second Saturday of every month.

“By '04, we probably had 15 to 18 galleries,” Mr. Lombardi said. “It was starting to happen. People liked the fact it was gritty and edgy. It was that dirty little secret.”

Serious art collectors like Martin Z. Marguiles held similar notions; he began the first phase of his gallery in a Wynwood warehouse in 1999. Donald and Mera Rubell were there even earlier; they kept their collection in a building that once stored goods confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 9, 2012, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Breathing Life, and Art, Into a Downtrodden Neighborhood.

Ignoring Planetary Peril, Profound \'Disconnect\' Between Science and Doha

In one of the most poignant moments of the Doha climate talks, the Philippine Climate Change Commissioner, Naderev M. Sano, appealed to his fellow negotiators at a session deciding the contours of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

“Please let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around,” he said as he choked back tears.

Just days before, Typhoon Bopha had hit the Philippines, killing hundreds of people. The typhoon, having been both unusually forceful and out of season, was deemed - like Hurricane Sandy - to be an extreme weather event, exasperated by climate change.

You can see Commissioner Sano addressing the plenary of the working group dedicated the continuation of the increasin gly ineffective Kyoto agreement above and here.

Despite the pleas of the Philippine commissioner and those of many others, the Doha Summit, was almost politics as usual. It did take 24 hours of overtime, but the Doha Climate Gateway was finally approved on Saturday. The agreement extends the Kyoto Protocol until 2020 when a more global emissions reduction agreement is to take effect.

“The Doha package represents a modest but important step forward,” said Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Action, according to news reports.

Though the new, tougher and more inclusive treaty will be under negotiation until 2015, environmentalists warn that any deal that goes into effect in 2020 comes too late.

“We can't wait until the 2020s to start cutting emissions, we are going to have to do it this decade,” said Samantha Smith, who heads the Global Clima te and Energy Initiative at the World Wildlife Fund in a telephone interview from Doha.

The American media reported little on the climate talks, compared to European media. That may be in part, as my colleague John Broder reports: “It has long been evident that the United Nations talks were at best a partial solution to the planetary climate change problem, and at worst an expensive sideshow. The most effective actions to date have been taken at the national, state and local levels, with a number of countries adopting aggressive emissions reductions programs and using cap-and-trade programs or other means to help finance them.”

But, as John writes, climate change is “a problem that scientists say is growing worse faster than any of them predicted even a few years ago.”

“What this meeting reinforced is that while this is an important forum, it is not the only one in which progress can and must be made,” said Jennifer Haverkamp, director of the international climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The disconnect between the level of ambition the parties are showing here and what needs to happen to avoid dangerous climate change is profound.”

“The biggest problem is the disconnect from the science,” said Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace international, who also spoke to Rendezvous from Doha.

“We should peak in 2015 and then come down,” he said, referring to global emissions, “and we are just so far from that.”

Environmentalists charge that national economic interests took priority over the fight against global warming at Doha, even as an increasing number of people worldwide are becoming aware of the urgency of the problem.

A popular tweet that went around on the final days of the two-week summit:

Environmentalists al so call on developed nations to be more transparent, both in their plans for emission reduction and their green financing pledges for the developing countries.

In a best-case scenario, the United States would have “come in explaining how they would cut 17 percent from 2005 levels,” said Ms. Smith.

The head of the United Nations also called for transparency in Green Climate funding. Ban Ki-moon arrived in Doha earlier this week to demand that rich countries show how they will achieve the pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 in funding to help poor countries deal with the negative effects of climate change.

“It is important that developing countries, especially those that are poor and vulnerable, are presented with a roadmap on how this commitment on long term financing will be met,” said Mr. Ban.

An agreement on pledges between now and 2020 will be p ut off for another year, though individual countries and bodies - including the United States and the European Union - have already made firm pledges for the coming years.

The European Union, long seen as the dominant force in these negotiations, was criticized for weak leadership at this summit. Strife within the European family on whether unused emission credits - dubbed “hot air” - should be carried over into the second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol weakened the European position. More importantly, the Union backed down from previous suggestions that it would cut its emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, remaining committed to the 20 percent cut target it had initially promised.

Poland, one of the 27 European member states, is still heavily reliant on the most polluting fossil fuels. The country, which just recently w as declared site of the COP19 meeting in 2013, is seen as opposing both “hot air” compromises and more severe emission reduction targets within the larger European Union. (Each annual meeting is formally known as the Conference of the Parties.)

Despite such failures, the European Union is still seen as the most plausible leader among rich nations.

“Europe still offers us the best opportunity to be the global environmental champion,” said Mr. Naidoo of Greenpeace, while insisting that Europe needs to do a lot more.

Despite the discord within the Union on “hot air” credits, Ms. Hedegaard, the European climate commissioner, still worked at getting assurances that the credits, or assigned amount units (AAUs), would not be bought by others.

In the final session several other countries - Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway and Australi a, to name a few - declared they would not buy unused credits.

Actions by United States negotiators were under special scrutiny this year both because of the extreme weather events the country has suffered and President Obama's post-election vow to make climate change part of the national agenda.

“It was a year when the U.S. could have come by putting more money and more cuts on the table,” said Ms. Smith.

“Obama's team exhibit no improvement from previous COPs,” Mr. Naidoo of Greenpeace said in a press statement issued on Saturday. “Obama's legacy could turn out to be no better than his predecessor's.”

In one session, The Alliance of Small Island States were seen to be fighting the United States on the issue of loss and damage, a proposal that was ultimately adopted and would pav e the way for heavy emitters to be held financially liable for the effects of climate change in developing countries affected by climate change (For those interested, here's a short primer).

“The disaster of Copenhagen happened on Obama's watch and a failure in 2015 would be really bad for his legacy,” said Ms. Smith.

Despite Canada's first place finish at the Climate Action Network's Fossil of the Year award and the clever trick of activists who claimed to have registered the Canadian environment minister in some undergraduate atmospheric climate science classes, environmentalists said not enough official reprimand had been made of Canada's decision last year to leave the Kyoto Protocol.

“Another good outcome would have been for other countries to publicly chastise Canada,† said Ms. Smith of WWF.

Despite a commitment to grow its own renewable energy share to 2 percent by 2020 (read John's report here), Qatar, the oil-rich host country, was criticized for not showing enough leadership at the summit.

Activists who dared unfurl an unregistered banner that read “Qatar, why host not lead,” were immediately thrown out of the convention center by U.N. security guards and had their access privileges revoked. Several news sources reported that the activists were then deported from the country.