Baltimore OUTloud - Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trangender - LGBT - Equality - News - Arts - Culture - Baltimore OUTloud - An Independant Voice for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community

In 1972, Italo Calvino published his genre-bending masterpiece Invisible Cities, a hypothetical dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo describing fictional hamlets in a newly-globalizing Orient.The book has somewhat of a cult following across diverse disciplines; architects and urbanists can spend hours letting their minds wander the streets of Calvino’s mythical metropolises. Others celebrate the text for its novel approach to thinking about human interaction and the languages, tools, and places we create to communicate with one another.

After a politically-charged 2011, 2012 culture-producers seemed to be more interested in the minutiae of contemporary life and our relationship with our cultural heritage. 2012 itself seemed to be the focus of many exhibitions; after all, “2012” had come to symbolize “the future” of our immediate past. This year, more than ever, really felt like we had arrived in the future: we talked about the apocalypse via iPhone video calls, flipping channels on flat screen TVs between a tropical storm battering New England in autumn, fluorescent-haired digitally-retouched pop stars, holographic Tupac, advertisements for electric cars and live video streaming from Mars.

I landed in Miami last Monday with a bag full of press passes and the intention to write some thoughtful art criticism. The art fair has become a massive event; spin-off shows pepper Dade County, private jets land from all over the world, and the global art industry descends upon South Beach.