The BLUR of Art Basel Miami and Design Miami

There was a pervasiveness of BLUR at the art shows - in our culture, life seems to blur in many ways. For example, there has been a full generation of the blurring of gender roles, more recently it is the blurring of gender itself. On the beach side stage was a performance by the performance artist Donald Urquhart and his high camp "Palace of Tears" which left gender irrelevant. This fall there were three prime time television characters with ongoing roles whose gender was more than slightly bent. TV may not offer the high art of Art Basel, but in its cultural perception, it is art. The art in Miami expressed the ambiguity of our times.

Freud touched on the topic over a century ago: “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.” Does art help us cope with the times? Taking up art appreciation certainly beats taking tranquilizers or hours on the couch. So, ambiguity is one of those topics best left to the arts community, rather than to marketers. Although the photographer Michael Prince shows how marketing may tap into this trend through blurring in this photo shown in Miami by the David Gallery . His photo called Push forces the viewer to focus on the topic at hand in an almost ethereal way.

In the built environment this blurring trend will lead to more subtle and less defined transitions from one surface to another for the moment. Like every other fashion cycle, this blurring will eventually lead to a new (as yet undetermined) FOCUS. Stay tuned.