Beautiful jockey & Canadian Hottie Chantal Sutherland not only has talent and enough determination to be one of the best female jockeys in the world right now. She also apparently has good taste – look how well her nails, helmet and GURU Original match!

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Beach Peeping, Art Basel Miami 2008

Can you judge an artist by its cover? These days, disregard the paint under their nails, it’s harder and harder to spot the artists. True, if you are John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, you enjoyed Art Basel Miami like royalty, sashaying through at A-list soirées, imbibing in lobster parfaits and hoo-hooing and ha-hahing with your best buddies in front of Patrick McMullan. At Art Basel Miami Vernissage, top-tier artists were forced to wave and smile on a pedestal through the convention center as though the g-string and garter model of an elitist champagne-filled peepshow.

Just a scene, Art Basel Miami 2008 vernissage

Lesser-known artists, like graffiti artist Mr. Brainwash at Scope, took public adulation with bravado, posing for pictures with fans and autographing posters.

But while they are all treated like celebrities, most of today’s artists didn’t seem to be as swayed by fashion as a means of expression, unlike the sequin and cocaine 1980s. It’s rare to see Currin in anything but a crisp suit, while Ryan McGinley and Aaron Young, members of the NY school of LES elite artists, opted for cool, quiet button-downs this year, rather than skinny-jeaned hipster or punkish biker waif like their work may suggest.

Mr Brainwash.

To further our social experiment, we started shooting and collecting pictures of various stereotypes of ‘artist’ and then asking what the subjects were, in order to see how far the genre could transcend. We noticed Northeast boho mixed with Sobe hobo in many cases. People we thought were artists were slick-suited investors, and vice versa. Fashionists put on their best I-haven’t-showered-in-three-days-so-you-better-think-I-am-an-artist looks (did y’all see Mary Kate Olsen’s hat?)

Other times, it seemed the curators, organizers and spectators were more punk, funk and spicy than the celebrated curators. It was delightfully ambiguous who is posing as whom. Thus, while a popular theme in Miami Art Basel 2008 was post-modernist art that challenged stereotypes and identities (i.e. Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Glenn Ligon), the artists and attendees themselves proved to be the biggest social experiment of all.

1) Cut hair, retro vintage clothes, a Rachel Feinstein protégée?

Answer: Nah, just young firestarter and Design Miami co-founder Ambra Medda

2) Character at Art Basel Vernissage- horse and cowboy tie, army jacket; an investor, artist or mad-man?

Answer: artist, and perhaps mad man.

3) Man with severe 5-o’clock shadow, spotted by the Ultra Exhibit by Art Positions @ The Containers. Famous DJ?

Answer: Esteemed designer of Ultra Soundscape environment, Federico Diaz.

4) White-collar Investor?

Answer: Nope, photographer who was shooting the fair for Art & Absinthe, with personal art projects as well.

5) Too suave for investor?  high-end artist?

Answer: Investor/collector who just arrived in town the day after Vernissage and was relishing the sun.

6) Coveted Berlin Artists?

Answer: Nah…  Euro tourists.

7) Which Way To The Beach? Body builder?

Answer: Street Painter, see the paint splatters?

Tattoos, blind ambition? The next Fresh kid?

Answer: Nope, SoBe kid, drunk by 3…

Stay posted for more… Words and photos by Faith Ann Young

Kim Joon, Birdland

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir

We already mentioned that the Bevnet.com **the GURU of all Beverage Editors** have created their own Arnold Palmer mixing GURU Iced Tea Honey Lemon and GURU Full On Lemonade – well we just found out that we won the prize for Best revamp of an existing product line in the Bevnet.com Best of 2008 awards. Congrats to the team

Download The Bloody Beetroots’ new track on Girlie Action, “Butter”.

We obviously must hookup this masked Italian duo @ Dim Mak Records with some GURU Original.

When I told our friend Guruphiliac that I was going to cover Art Basel Miami Beach 2008 for the blog and asked him to share some thoughts about the gurus of the Art World, he took a crack at it, picturing Warhol as the GURU of the current scene:

“The contemporary artists with the biggest buzz and the biggest prices— Hirst, Prince, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami—are all sons of Warhol, chameleonic pop ironists who could have master’s degrees in marketing.” In times of recession, pop art captures the spectator’s mind and symbolism reaches climax.

Deric Carner, collector and manipulator of signs and messages, was one of the 26 artists chosen by Takashi Murakami’s artist-led art entreprise Kaikai Kiki to showcase their work at Gesai Miami 2008. He was photographed by Faith Ann Young early evening on Saturday, December 6 when we sneaked into Pulse after opening hours (thanks to my unshakable power of persuasion.)

Log onto his site to browse his artist portfolio.

Photos by the New Yorker, Faith Ann Young, words by Ladyshark