Art District

Have you ever felt like wanting to spend your life with somebody you love? Even if you didn't, that's what inspired one of Tracey Emin's famous neon works, on exhibit at the Museum of Arts of Fort Lauderdale (MOAFL). Heavily influenced by the recent trends in fine arts and design launched by Miami's Art Basel showcase, and by the related flourishing of arts schools and districts, it was obviously a walk through a compendium of pieces of modern arts. A wing fully dedicated to William Glackens, Courbet-influenced painter from Philly, was the "element of unpredictability" in the middle of the visit.

It goes without saying that a part of the artworks, mostly paintings, put sex-related themes on show. Usually there is a sense of bare cruelty in this kind of representations, as if the artist himself had exacerbated the topic in the course of his life; maybe this was Emin's thought - take a past exhibition dedicated to sex, entitled Everyone I've Ever Slept With (1963-1995), she claimed the count was 102; probably that was when she showed the neon sculpture People like you need to fuck people like me.

Nowadays we are awash in artworks about sexual representation; I guess this is the result of centuries where the need of portraying erotism was inhibited by repression and censorship. Have we ended up amidst oversupply? Uncomfortably uninformed enough to give an answer, I can say there's a type of nudity for everyone. There's the hilarious representation of almost lesbian scenes in the women-populated paintings by Hilary Harkness, or the luscious and abundant breasts depicted by Lisa Yuskavage (said to have Vermeer's technical ability), or the same subject made cartoon-like by Tom Wesselmann. Someone went further and introduced intercourses in the game, with the greedy lovers of John Currin or the softly dissolved scenes pictured by Cecily Brown.

I spotted Currin at the MOMAK in Vienna, but now that I'm in the USA I fully understand the (simple) meaning of his portraits of fake women...