By Sophie Videment Dupouy

As gallery owners and art professionals from New York, London, Paris or Sao Paulo returned home from Art Basel Miami Beach, the key question on their mind, and one that has no immediate answer, is: has anything changed in the art world? If no revolution is shaking contemporary art despite the world’s economic, technological and social tensions, is there anything that inspires artists in new ways, creating new approaches to a new art scene?

Dada, Surrealism, Pop art and other less known or forgettable movements punctuated most of the 20th century. But one remarkable element in the art for the past twenty years has been the lack of artistic organization. And art looks, on a first approach, increasingly similar everywhere in the world in a globalized uniformity. Does it mean that art with capital “A” is dead? Of course not. Art Basel indicates the emergence of new inspiration sources and artistic exploration fields. There are sparks of creativity, invention and ideas, even though they are undefined to call themselves a movement. 

One example is the Libanese-born Lamia Ziadé who lives in the West to avoid confining cultural pressures of the Moslem world. Her work is quite provocative, demystifying space. Her paintings and erotic collages break open the world of the hidden and exhibit it to the gaze. In her work, female identity is completely eroticized and liberated. In Great Syrian Nude, it is not the woman sex or her breasts pointing through the black chador that draw the gaze, but her crossed arms.

Bubble, the most dramatic public art piece of this year’s Art Basel, is a beautiful installation of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, made in collaboration with Olaf Breuning, which consists of one hundred ceramic blue bubbles spread over an area of 600 square meters on Watson Island. As most of Ai Wewei’s works, it incorporates Chinese tradition and items taken from the modern culture. Ai Wewei is overtly full of contradictions, criticizing the Chinese Olympics and describing them as a superficial spectacle a “fake smile” with no relationship to the true face of China. This, just after having designed the Beijing stadium in collaboration with the architects Herzog and de Meuron.

Geopolitical tensions and cruelty are strong inspiring subjects for  Andreï Molodkin, a former Russian soldier whose work Democracy is still on view at the Bass Museum. His context is a political spectacle fueled by imperial ambitions of power brokers whose dream is to monitor the whole world from the top of the oil rig.  

French artist Laurent Grasso places nature or reality in contrast with the false or artificial. In his Les Oiseaux  he plays with our natural attraction and fear of bird groups flying, deceiving our senses. Virtuality and fiction also gives new ideas to the fantasy of Total Art. 

After having seen the emergence of artists from China and India, artists from the Arabic countries are rising in the art world; full of energetic contradictions they are cracking cultural pressures.

Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri exhibited a remarkable work, Run like Hell. The artist based in Teheran gives voice to his critical and astute observations on present day culture in Iran. He is well known for his ironic interpretations of hybrids between traditional Persian forms and those of the consumerist and globalized popular culture widespread in his country. Moshiri’s work ranges from the conceptual to the candidly beautiful, often within one piece.

The Arabic art scene is of course boosted by the gigantic projects of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi. The city, with its cultivated elite, might become one of the leading capitals in the art world in the near future and an Art Basel venue.  With the collaboration of the Sorbonne and the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi plans to open in 2011 the biggest contemporary art biennale of the world.

Maybe even more important for the art professionals and artists, Abu Dhabi is about to pass a law that would protect all the museums and artistic manifestations from censure. Will the female power in the Arabic create a new artistic trend in the world?