Miami Art Basel 2009, champagne bottle pop and a lost diamond flip flop.

To wrap up Miami Art Basel in one sentence– it is the best party this nation has to offer. While most of the crowd hails from Manhattan and Brooklyn, people from Europe, London and the Americas fly in for the event as well. How can one go wrong with a mix of 80 degree weather on the beach, fancy dance parties and incredibly inspiring and awesome art everywhere you look? Not to mention endless bottles of Veuve, flashy sport cars and the beautiful people. My bathing suit is still wet from late night hot tubbing, packed in my rolling suitcase, but in the world of reporting, timing is important. So, I will reflect first and unpack later.

I arrived on Thursday morning at the Standard Miami, an impressive yet unassuming hotel with bath tubs in front of simple, elegant white linen rooms. We sipped $12 guava mojitos by the saltwater pool as we soaked in one of the best days weather-wise of the weekend, pretending to telecommute while coordinating plans and RSVP lists- a very important to-do before heading out into the who’s who, who-you-know night.

I left the Standard just as The Whitney party (celebrating 75 years of its biennials) was getting started to attend a friend’s gallery opening, for their show “Mine But Not Me, which featured young, hot photographers including Yale’s David Sherry and Chinatown’s Gabe Ferrari, whose photograph of a blue pool float is below.

Across the street, GenArt’s leathered and feathered crowd raged outside of Aqua, one of the popular satellite fairs at Miami Basel. I bought my first painting of a robot here by Williamsburg artist R. Nicholas Kuszyk. (Pictured below) He is my favorite robot, building a purple mountain out of wreckage, all on his own.

Friday we woke up around noon (thank the gods for late check outs), had one more guava mojito and visited Scope, one of Basel’s popular satellite fairs. Aaron Taylor Kuffner, also known as Zemi 17 brought his robotic orchestra down to Miami this year from its Brooklyn home. (Check out the article he wrote for me on artificial intelligence.) The Gamelatron was a crowd favorite and sat outside the entrance to Scope.

Scope was my favorite fair at Miami Art Basel this year, featuring a small collection of kinetic, youthful and talented galleries. Chelsea’s Joshua Liner Gallery featured mix-media scavenger Kris Kuski who assembles junk and trinkets into very cool art.

I stayed at the Eden Roc on Friday night so I was far enough uptown to order a $17 martini at Morris Lapidus’ Fontainebleau hotel. A beautiful work of architecture with recessed chandeliers but the crowd was a little Vegas-y for my comfort. We jetted to the infamous Delano for the Kid Sister party where sexy entourages lined the cabana row alongside the pool while everyone else crowded around Svedka’s open bar. I can only imagine what one of the cabanas cost, since the W hotel charges $400 for one on a Sunday morning. Kid Sister should never, ever be given a microphone, ever again.

This year I checked out the Verge Art Fair which took over the Catalina Hotel with a gallery in each room. The Front Room Gallery featured Stephen Mallon’s stirring and timely photographs of the aftermath of Flight 1549. The stairway featured a restoration project, growing plants in little cups attached to the window. I think it would be cooler with a beta fish in each one.

On Saturday night, Detroit based Ghostly International threw its 10 year anniversary party at the White Room in Wynwood– Miami’s graffitied version of Bushwick. The venue was packed with Miami locals, which was odd considering the rest of Miami was packed with revelers from Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Ghostly party featured music by Audion, a.k.a. Matthew Dear, electro-tech producers Michna and Bodycode, and synthpoppers Solvent, along with Get Physical’s M.A.N.D.Y. and Miami’s own DJ Conway. While it took a little caution to get used to indoor smoking and ducking burning cigarette butts, the heavy beats left no man standing still. Each DJ was righteous on his own, (although I am a particular fan of Matthew Deare’s) with a light show and set list that audibly transplanted me to the warehouse Brooklyn parties I call home.

By the time Sunday morning arrived, there wasn’t enough coffee in the world and the thought of alcohol made me want to cry. (A special thank you to the Lowes hotel for a late check out and for pomegranate lemonade, the best juice I’ve ever chugged.) I saved the trip to Art Basel’s main convention center for last, mostly because it is the biggest (and thus the most exhausting) of the shows– but also because it lacks a certain amount of intrigue in comparison to the smaller, younger shows. Klimpts, Picassos and Miros poke out from every corner amid collections of large, tacky art, and it can be very overwhelming.

In the 45 minutes I had to run around Basel, I saw one of my favorite Richard Prince photographs, “It’s A Free Concert.” Noted fashion photographer David LaChapelle’s Michael Jackson photographs were an odd sight. And Evan Perry freaked everyone out with his “4D” sculptures (head below).

Behind the scenes of almost every world renowned art festival is AXA Art, the world leader in art insurance expertise. AXA plays a very special and important role at a fair like Miami Beach Art Basel where cash heavy king pins and their high heeled ladies often need a place for not only free champagne, but critical advice.

AXA teamed up with Cranbrook Academy of Art, one of the foremost graduate art programs in the US to design its art lounge at the fair (pictured above). The lounge is used to host guests and provide clients with guided tours of the fair. Cranbook’s Beverly Fishman, Elliot Earls, William Massie and Heather McGill designed the space, which impressed with laser-cut cardboard, steel armature, and projected moving patterns.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time and missed two highly regarded satellite fairs— Nada and Design Miami, but both were well received and thus, worthy of mention.

Yes, the weekend is a playground for gem dipped ladies, Maserati driving art collectors and their hunky assistants but  unlike what you may have heard, anyone who appreciates art and warm weather can have a great time at Miami Art Basel. I have many gracious friends who are on their way up the ladder of life, none of them with last names like Niarchos, Jopling, Gagosian, Armstrong, Hilton, etc., but all with enough influence and charm to guarantee this lucky robot girl the best party this side of the Atlantic.