A vast array of analytical essays exists in the blogosphere that seeks to explain why we collect art. Like trying to understand why we fall in love, the gamut of explanations is at once highly diverse yet difficult to nail down. The need for decorative embellishment, the expected investment value, the putting on of sophisticated airs, the desire for direct participation in culture… These certainly affect acquisition decisions and add fuel to the art market fire but they do not explain the emotional, cerebral pleasure collectors receive from their art trophies. Ask anyone who truly values the pieces they have acquired and they will describe a deep love and connection with these objects quite unlike any relationship with other inanimate things they own. What is the source of this bond?

A decade or so ago, I gradually came to the realization that, much to my disappointment and stunned shock, I was not the artistic talent I had previously believed myself to be. Though I had the temperament, passion and desire, it turned out I had none of the vision, dedication, originality nor persistence prerequisite for a life as an artist. The realization shattered my heretofore self-identity -- one I had worn like a wetsuit since my earliest teen years -- and set me off on various tangents that eventually led to my current satisfactory, pleasant and lucrative life, happy yet lacking the gushing creative outlet I had once dreamed possible and naively believed to be inevitable.

The website of the Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recently posted a six-minute long time-lapse video of the production of an onsite mural painted by the artist Dalek (James Marshall) and his team of assistants. Created for the exhibition North Carolina New Contemporary, Dalek’s vibrant and kaleidoscopic abstraction of video-game aesthetics slowly assembles in front of the camera lens to the beat of a jazzy soundtrack. As I watched the video this past Saturday night, with a touch of cabin-fever inspired by the Hoth-like Toronto winter outside my window, I thought about how great it is to see a deserving and brilliant Street Artist given time, space and resources by a museum, particularly one as charmingly off the beaten path as the SECCA. Here is more evidence, I realized, of the ongoing ascendance of the most important art movement of the new century.

Brass Knuckles by Robert Lazzarini at O.H.W.O.W. Gallery

I’ve resisted attending the annual art carnival that is Art Basel Miami Beach since my last excursion in 2003. From that trip, during the convention’s second iteration, all I remember is a blur of expensive cars, beautiful women at exclusive parties in boutique South Beach hotels, and an ocean of vodka. (Some figments also remain of a moment when I posed as film director Wes Anderson in order to successfully Jedi mind-trick my way past security into the Visionaire party at the Raleigh Hotel; but that’s a story for another blog posting.) What I don’t remember from that first trip was what I went there for in the first place: the art.

Al Farrow sculpture made entirely of real weapons at Pulse 2010

The problem with these kinds of art super events, such as the Armory show in New York and Frieze in London, is that you are bombarded with a tsunami of art, all at once, and none of it is contextualised. Whereas the biennial-type events in cities such as Venice, Sao Paulo and Istanbul and are curated and seek to provide a cohesive and critical social commentary, the art fairs (and the dozen-odd simultaneous outrigger fairs that attend them such as NADA, Scope, Seven and Pulse) make no conscious, intellectual effort; they don’t even pretend to. Instead, they are flea markets for millionaires and billionaires. This is where buyers and sellers of this most expensive of commodities come together to transact; it doesn't leave much nectar for critics and curators like me to be nourished.