The following conversation took place poolside at the Soho Beach House on Friday, April 19th. As LAXART Director Lauri Firstenberg and Miami Art Museum Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander spoke about Los Angeles, evolving audiences, and the viability of the non-profit model…

The navigability of a space is crucial to your experience in it. The way light enters and exits, how sound travels and how visitors are guided through all play into the functionality and aesthetics of a building designed around the sensory experience. The newly renamed and remodeled Emerson Dorsch Gallery’s co-owners and architectural collaborators clearly considered these factors and articulated a thoughtful, sleek new home inside the Wynwood warehouse they have occupied for over a decade.

Charlie Smith has published seven novels and seven books of poems, has received countless awards, and has no Wikipedia page. If you Google him, you’re more likely to come across tales of another Charlie Smith—a man who claimed to be 137 years old when he died in 1979 (incidentally in central Florida). That Charlie Smith spent his later years telling his life story, all the while researchers tried to debunk it. This Charlie Smith is the 65-year-old author of the new novel Men in Miami Hotels, set primarily in Key West. In the early ‘90s, George Plimpton called him “a young William Faulkner.”

Hernan Bas has characters—boys. How he places these young men in their landscape is his conceptual project. A method of reusing and repurposing historical systems is devised to create a blueprint for the work, with identity politics, medium specificity, studio labor poetics, and market dependency all functioning as proof of its own language.

When I recite Hopkins, hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium bubble up instead of…

Artists have always had a funny relationship to this kind of neighborhood change. There is the way that they relate to the neighborhood’s history, their political practice, their values—these things seem to vary from case to case, with different stories coming out of San Francisco and SoHo, etc.. Miami has its own very peculiar history as a city, never mind who these artists are and who the people in Wynwood are.

It was a utopian scene. More than 80 folding chairs faced a chalkboard adorned with multihued verses as coworking campus The LAB Miami hosted a Friday night poetry and ballet commission as part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Tables of complimentary wine and desserts flanked Minerva Cueva’s égalité mural, a defaced Evian ad profiling the archetypal French revolutionary adage, the peer-progressive slant of which mirrors The LAB’s goal: to provide an urban home for a very mobile creative class.

A range of factors explain the ebbs and flow of attendance at art museums. General interest exhibits or renowned artworks on display can generate enthusiasm,but perhaps one of the most exciting events is the unveiling of a new museum itself. On April 13, 2013, following 10 grueling years of unpredictable delays, the Rijksmuseum opened its doors to an anxious crowd of nearly 20,000 visitors.

Fly into Dubai and even post-recession 2008 the glitz and the gold are still there as billed. The red-bull energy that shot up the tallest building in the world, an all-missions-possible airport, and a mall that has made shopping a natural resource, is still filling five-star hotels, stocking three-star restaurants and erecting corporate verticals.

A quarter-century ago, Joan Didion wrote about the peculiarity and the warp of Miami, describing what we, as Miamians, find unique and amazing, yet sometimes ugly and despicable about our city. Much has changed since she published that line in 1987, but the peculiarity and the warp are still here, and O, Miami was here to remind us.