Miami is best known for vice, Vice and art deco. But in the past decade it’s also become famous for hosting the equivalent of Schoolies Week for wealthy art buffs — Art Basel | Miami Beach — the “|” is essential, apparently.

It now rivals the original Art Basel in Switzerland for the title of the world’s largest art fair, and this year attracted 263 of the world’s fanciest commercial galleries, showing over 2000 artists. More than 40,000 visitors flocked to the fair, many sporting berets and nearly all overusing the word “darling”. Honestly, it’s not just a stereotype, they actually do that.

I joined them to review the event for the cultivated readers of The King’s Tribune. Well, okay — I was there because my artist brother was exhibiting at one of the satellite fairs, and I thought it’d be fun to tag along for a week in the Florida sun and some uber-pretentious art parties. And it was fun, especially at the so-called Salem party at the Delano which featured toxic quantities of dry ice and European techno, along with fake-boobed women cavorting naked in the pool. It had all the artistic credibility of Shane Warne’s bucks night.

The fair itself was classy, though — so much so that entry cost $40, which is a lot to pay to visit a mall in a shed, even one with $2.5 billion worth of art on display. On entering the cavernous Miami Exhibition Centre, we discovered a host of works by some of the most famous modern artists, with Picassos, Miros, Lichtensteins and Legers that any major gallery in Australia would have loved to purchase, but will probably end up in the collection of Roman Abramovich, Donald Trump or Adrien Brody. And I mention the latter only because we spied him there, looking like he hadn’t slept for weeks or recently became a vampire. And sure, namedropping is crass, but it’s what you do at an art fair, darling.

Much of the contemporary art was impressive. My favourite work was ‘Tree’, by Ai Weiwei, of Chinese imprisonment fame. He’d chopped up the trunks of several dead trees and bolted them back together to produce a hybrid that looked like a giant, dead bonsai assembled by Dr Frankenstein. The perfect lounge room adornment for any collector with eight metre-high ceilings and clinical depression.

I couldn’t help wondering exactly what it takes to break into the big league of world art and get your work displayed at Art Basel. Could I just paint a stop sign surrounded by a couple of finger smudges like Josh Smith did for several works called ‘Untitled’? — I mean, the guy’s creativity ran dry before he could even think up a name.

After browsing through dozens of stalls run by fancy galleries like London’s very literally-named White Cube, I decided that a successful contemporary artist must be able to create images of such transcendent beauty that they practically drag the viewer over to get out their chequebook — or have a gimmick.

That’s what Doug Aitken did, erecting lightboxes with giant photos of smashed iPhones — very 2011, at least if you work for Samsung. Another artist just laid mirror tiles on the floor, three of which were smashed, leaving me to wonder whether the artist was making a searing comment on the unreliable nature of all imagery, or if people had just accidentally walked on them, not realising they were supposed to be an artwork. There were more smashed items in the fair than at your average Greek wedding, making me wonder if there’s a fad for smashing at present, or if one of the courier companies simply had a shocker.

Among other gimmicks, Carlos Huffman used bulldog clips to hang a bunch of magazines on the wall, open to spreads of ads featuring hotrods, while Ronnie Cutrone’s Quick Change Artist answered the age-old question ‘what if Superman had boobies’? Let’s just say they were perhaps lucky to be exhibited in the same space as Picasso.

The most successful gimmick though, at least financially, was Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Dwarf (Bashful), a pink silicone model of one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves which clocked in at a mere $950,000. I suspect Disney might pay that much just to destroy it.

But there was one work so audacious in its gimmickry, so lazy in its conception and execution, that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to shout angrily at the artist Cory Arcangel, or abandon my writing career to become a conceptual artist myself. It was called To Protect Taste, and consisted of twenty empty Coke Zero cans in a black rubbish bin. I had to look for the label just to be sure it was an artwork and not simply the gallery’s actual rubbish bin reflecting a lack of diversity in their drink purchasing.

Was it intended as a profound statement about what constitutes art in our disposable, consumerist society? Or is Arcangel merely a Diet Coke loyalist who resents the Johnny-come-lately entrant to Coke’s sugarfree cola lineup? I can’t be sure. All I can tell you is that anybody who wished to perfectly recreate the work could do so with a quick trip to Officeworks and a servo, instead of paying Team Gallery in New York $12,000.

That’s what the editor of ARTnews said it was selling for, anyway — I didn’t dare ask at the gallery, in case they thought I was in any way considering buying it.

This work made me wondering what properly constitutes art, and who gets to make it. Is any old shit automatically art simply by virtue of being placed in an art gallery and having a label placed next to it? Why doesn’t somebody pay me $12,000 every time I put my bins out for the council?

And I don’t care if raising these kinds of questions was the point of the piece. The artist doesn’t get to win the argument just because he had the audacity to turn in something so dubious that it questions the very boundaries of art. Exhibiting Arcangel’s work at Art Basel is, in my view, like Metallica recording thirty seconds of Lars Ulrich hocking up phlegm and selling that as an album — or worse still, making Lulu with Lou Reed.

Besides, playing with the margins of what constitute art was revolutionary when Marcel Duchamp autographed a urinal in 1917, but even by the time Yoko Ono put an apple in an art gallery in 1966 it seemed a touch derivative. Even the idea of cans as art has been done by Warhol, and also Playboy.

I looked into some of Arcangel’s other work and can happily concede that it’s impressive. He once edited together YouTube cat videos until he’d spliced together a clip of moggies playing Schoenberg’s groundbreaking discordant piece Opus 11, and he once produced an amazing piece where he hacked an original Super Mario Bros cartridge and deleted everything except the clouds, which float by like eerie tumbleweeds. (Both those works are on YouTube.) He’s even produced some interesting soda-based work, filling rooms with Coke Zero and Sprite vapour.

But To Protect Taste, along with the worst of the works at Art Basel, confirmed my suspicion that the art world often suffers from an “emperor’s new clothes” issue. Cory Arcangel’s gallery should have sent him back to the drawing board – or, more likely, to a drawing board for the first time.

There’s one thing that would redeem the Coke Zero fiasco in my eyes, and that’s if Cory Arcangel was simply playing a joke on the overmoneyed patrons of Art Basel Miami Beach — sorry, Art Basel | Miami Beach. I hope he spent the money on a massive party for his mates so they could sit around laughing about someone paying $12,000 for twenty soft drink cans in a bin. Ideally with dry ice, and women with implants cavorting in a swimming pool. Because if that’s what art is about at its upper echelons, all I can say is that I want in.

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Dominic Knight is a novelist and one of the founders of The Chaser. He tweets as @domknight and blogs at domknight.com.

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