I’m waiting for Adrien Brody with Domingo Zapata, the guy whose Porsche Lindsay Lohan was driving that time she hit a guy in Manhattan a few years ago. We’re in a makeshift green room in the back of Miami’s Lulu Laboratorium gallery space. Zapata is also a successful Spanish artist, and after 30 seconds he gets bored with my small talk and takes out a cigarette. He’s wearing plaid pants, and his hair is styled into some sort of artfully unkempt hybrid of dreads and cornrows. In the back of the room, four young women dressed as identical ’50s soda shop girls giggle in front of a vanity mirror. The door opens, but it’s not Brody; it’s Zapata’s friend and formerReal Housewives of Miami star Karent Sierra. She sheepishly asks if she should have a shot of whiskey before taking two. Sierra was the original owner of the Porsche Zapata lent to Lohan.
When Brody finally arrives, he’s wearing a leather jacket covered with the flags of the world presented in the shapes of the countries they represent, reflective mirror sunglasses that are actually more of a visor and a glinting McDonald’s Golden Arches pendant on a chain that dangles around his neck. He is also holding a toy gun. Zapata isn’t. This is a problem. Brody tells him to do pushups.
“That’s part of the punishment,” says the Oscar winner. “You have to. If you leave your weapon, you have to do pushups. Do five.”
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week
Zapata happily obliges, and as he’s pumping his elbows, I ask Brody if he had the McDonald’s bling custom made for the night. “No,” he says. “But it fits.”
Outside the door to the green room, Brody’s debut art exhibition, “Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Handguns,” is on display for the first time. The gallery is packed with beautiful, ostensibly important people, and there are more people who ostensibly aren’t quite as important waiting outside the door. Maybe they have a friend inside who knows somebody. Maybe they’re hoping the hulking bouncer has a change of heart. Maybe some other force will direct their attention back to the kaleidoscopic carnival teeming throughout the streets of Wynwood, Miami’s rapidly gentrifying arts district known for its colorful murals. But the streets are exclusive to no one, and at Art Basel being somewhere others cannot is often more important than anything hanging on a wall.
Context and staging are just as important for the lipo, the tans, the coiffed chest hair, the heels, the boob jobs and the linen suits as they are for the art. In the gallery, they are valuable. Next to a celebrity, they are valuable. On the street, they are nothing. So the people outside the door wait……..
