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My first full day in Miami was the “preview day” at Art Basel, the nation’s most prestigious contemporary art show. I had never been to anything like it and we had VIP passes, so I was raring to go. We ended up spending something like six hours at the show, in two separate visits during the day – one of the group said we had actually been there eight hours, though we weren’t quite counting.

Even in that time we hardly saw two-thirds of the art on display, because the show was enormous. Gallery owners from all over the world had come bringing their best (or at least most expensive) pieces, and while I saw no famous works of art, there were plenty of famous names for sale: the first booth I walked into had several large Picasso canvases.

Large as the show was, the art all looked pretty much the same: Picasso was the oldest artist there, but he fit in, and it seemed that someone at some point had determined that “contemporary art is art in the tradition of Picasso.” Though there might be some Sargent canvases in the world younger than the Picasso canvases shown, it was clear that he was not “contemporary” as Picasso was. I will quote the famous Picasso definition which perhaps sums up the style, and explains why it has never been of any particular interest to me: “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.” I think this statement is fabulously interesting and concise, but as an artistic philosophy it is escapist and therefore ultimately boring and spiritless – besides of course being futile in the end. Escape is the one thing there is not. But the artists were soldiering on with the script. Abstract expressionism was the dominant mode – still – with the addition of non-art objects as art objects. One of the pieces was a medicine cabinet, full of medicines. Ultimately, you could have walked into any contemporary art museum in any country in the world and would have found the same type of objects as these.

In general I had no reaction to anything at all, neither to blame or praise. I found two photographs moving – because they showed to some extent what nature is as opposed to what it is not – one of the Pantheon in Paris (which is cold in reality but very photogenic) and the other, which really did sum up something about Rome, a juxtaposition of a Roman waiter, a fashionable woman, and a man carrying a Baroque canvas on an architecturally suitable Roman street.

One of the most interesting things I have had to do in my life was give tours through the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to fourth graders. When you have to bring thirty nine-year-old boys through a room of statues of naked men, you really have to have something to say to prevent complete chaos. It makes you think about why we have “art” anyway. I know that my answers will be different from other people’s, but for me art is the servant of life, and thus serves the same goals that life does. Things that I consider goals in my own life – goodness, wisdom, memory, honesty, love, friendship, magnanimity, nature, worship, gratitude, compassion, proportion, simplicity, skill, humor, sensuality, dynamism, inventiveness, brilliance, happiness – I like to see in art, with some hope that the objects will have some value in helping me to those goals. I have a few objects here in my cabin which would be considered “art” in the traditional sense, and I find them directly relevant to my life here: prints of Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert and Barna da Siena’s Christ Bearing the Cross. The former’s meaning to someone who seeks to live in some kind of harmony with nature is obvious enough, and the latter is striking because it shows Christ entirely in red – I usually call it “the Jesus of the Red Pyjamas” – the color of the Passion, the capacity to suffer meaningfully, which I find in life is a very useful and important skill. The painting never fails to remind me of it. The painting of Francis shows him receiving the Stigmata, which is analogous.

The dictum of Jung is that all transformation takes place in the presence of images. The image need not be on a canvas or in stone – it is often best in the form of a living person. But we cannot always be present and we cannot always be alive, and so the image of other people is brought to life by the things they make and the images they leave behind. At Thom Collins’ place I had a long and enthusiastic discussion with the artist Holly Zausner about Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, in Venice, one of the most extraordinary paintings I have ever seen. She had seen it as well, and though she was quite a different person from me, she was as enthusiastic as I was. It was an image operating in her mind still, which was why she had not forgotten it – the things you remember are the things that you subconsciously understand are significant. And the images don’t need to have an easily expressed meaning. That painting had an effect on us, though it might require a clairvoyant genius to express how.

The works at Art Basel had no such effect on me, whether that is to my credit or discredit. I certainly didn’t see much that reminded me of passion or compassion or wisdom or love or the like, and whole genres of art simply were not present: icons, saints, mythological scenes, historical scenes, religious scenes, portraits, landscapes, architectural drawing, anatomical sketches, nudes, busts, freestanding figures, still-lifes, interiors – all these were absent, even in surreal forms. All that sort of thing, from the prosaic veins on our hands to our twisted visions of hell, was not “contemporary,” I suppose.

And so in looking for passion or compassion or wisdom I found my eyes turned much more to the people walking through the galleries, and I will say that they were very satisfying to watch. For some of the time I was with the interesting artist Zhivago Duncan, who had lived a most unusual life, and whom I started calling “the Doctor,” for the obvious reason.  As for the strangers, there were three categories of people, insofar as they needed categories: the rich people who were showing their wealth in some conspicuous way or other, the artists who were attempting to show their individuality in some cliché way or other – please, artists, no more plastic-rimmed glasses to show how smart, or baseball caps to show how down-to-earth you are – and the third group of the people who looked “normal,” and who might as well have been walking down a street in Kansas City. After speaking with some of these people, I guessed that a number of them must be writers and press people.

The preview day was for VIPs – press, artists, and “buyers,” the wealthy. It is said that most of the sales occur on the preview day. I don’t really know any celebrities, but even I recognized P. Diddy, and a friend recognized Calvin Klein. Others were there, and the world of fashion put in a good showing – I presume the large numbers of well-dressed women over six feet tall must have been models. They certainly were beautiful enough. Some looked like no sort of woman I had ever seen before – beautiful but strangely beautiful. There were plenty of old men with women half their age, beautiful women with ugly men, short men with tall women, all the usual sorts of things you find where money and beauty are the romantic ideals of women and men.

People were unusually well dressed, and conspicuous consumption appeared to be the beau ideal. There were a hell of a lot of high heels, and I don’t know how much they cost, but I have experience to know that those handbags are not cheap. This at first surprised me – did rich people really care about contemporary art? I thought of contemporary art as something like contemporary poetry – something that was somehow kept alive by foundations and universities but which no one really cared about. But I was wrong. This was big business. Money was really changing hands. Contemporary art was fashionable, in a way that nothing I really knew much about was.

And the more I thought about this, the more it made sense. “Contemporary” art had merged with fashion – they were really dealing with the same things. I might like an Old-Master painting because it had a subject I felt was relevant to my life, such as Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple, even if I did not particularly like the coloring or brushwork or composition of the painting itself. In fashion the emphasis is elsewhere: the coloring and texture and composition are very nearly the whole of the thing. So I felt as I walked through the galleries: as with certain pieces of clothing, sometimes it was obvious that the stripes either were or were not in a position I liked. Unfortunately this doesn’t really matter to me too much, and I wear clothing all the time that I do not like from an aesthetic perspective. When it is winter I wear my warmest coat as opposed to the one that looks best, and as I have never purchased an overcoat in my lifetime nor ever owned one not being thrown out by someone else, fortune or fate determines what coats are in my possession.

So the fact that the fashion world would turn out for contemporary art made sense: contemporary art was fashion for walls. (Contemporary sculpture is fashion for floors). I think most contemporary artists would recognize someone like Alexander McQueen as their own, which is why the biggest art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in decades was McQueen’s.

In college I was aware of, and at times participated in, the argument that art has sometimes with fashion, that they are opposed. Fashion is the moment: art is eternal. I don’t buy the distinction, and in fact I strongly shy away from all exclusionist definitions of the word “art.” Art is from the Latin word ars, meaning skill, and I am willing to say that all artifacts (lit. “things made with skill”) are art enough. Just north of Terracina Trajan had a cliff of stone cut away from the seashore to make room for the Via Appia. For every ten feet of stone cut away, the masons placed a Roman numeral to mark their achievement: X – XX – XXX – XL – L – LX – LXX – LXXX – XC – C and so forth (I believe it runs to 130 feet). This act of cutting and measuring and boasting, by cutting visible letters into the cliff-face, speaks the name “Romans” as well as anything more “arty” they achieved. A picture of that cliff-face is as good and as meaningful as a good portrait-bust.

But I do think an awareness of a type of art different from fashion is very useful. Fashion, at least in the sense of something changing with the seasons, is a very new art form and certainly one of the least interesting to anyone who believes in such ideals as simplicity and sustainability. The Romans did house painting jobs, or interior decoration jobs, that have not had to be redone in two thousand years. As far as sustainability goes, this is great work. Unfortunately, you really have to like something before you commit to it for two thousand years. And they did, I think, evolve a language of ornament which really has held up well: columns, pediments, arches, marbles, coffers, Greek keys, eggs and darts, and the like still adorn some of our most beloved buildings, and probably still will a thousand years from now.

I recognize that most people are different from me, and have their own aesthetic, but being at Art Basel made me wonder to what extent sheer capitalistic materialism was the driving force behind both contemporary art and fashion. Much of this art could be cheaply made and expensively sold. The artists themselves were often obviously in bed with the crassest kind of materialism. Rem Koolhas, whom many call a great contemporary architect and whom I call a great charlatan, said, “In a world where shopping is everything and everything is shopping, what is luxury?” Statements like this make me think that there might be a purpose for everything, even nuclear armageddon.

But Art Basel in many ways was not about the artists and their horrid ideas, but about the buyers, the people with money who had walls and floors in their houses that needed covering. And if they might not have all been interesting to talk to, at least they were interesting to look at. Some of this was the plastic surgery bizarrerie, the weird fake rubbery lips and facelifted eyes and fake boobs hovering over tiny waists. Some was the fashionable clothing and the exposed skin in unexpected places. Some was beauty pure and simple. Some was the air of arrogance and contempt and vanity. And some was the human virtue that can appear anywhere: the kindness in the eyes, the refinement and delicacy in the bearing, the intelligence scanning the world.  As with Miami in general, I felt very much on the outside, and hence in a privileged position to just gawk at it all.