This blog has languished a bit as I’ve been busy penning market reports from Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellites for Artinfo.com. Now, a brief word about parties. The art market may be cooling off a bit, but events in Miami have, with a few exceptions, been as packed as ever, and just as absurd. More to come on this, but for the moment, here is one snippet. Last night two parties — you could say they represented, respectively, Japan and Russia — were held simultaneously at two different locations within the Gansevoort Hotel. Downstairs, Rolling Stone magazine put on a soiree for Takashi Murakami and the artists in the Pulse and Geisai art fairs. The party’s gushing press release gushed in terms baroque but confusing: “Guests will take a romp with pomp at Louis Bar-Lounge, where new school elector-glam takes a crash collision course with the regal elegance of the belle epoque.” Um, ok? What was the second part? Anyhow, guests, who were greeted by a cluster of  women outfitted as glammed-out Kabuki strippers complete with sequined pasties –

gathered around ten, and there was a kind of implicit waiting around for Murakami to arrive, which at last he did, with hair worn down on this occasion, but no bulbous flower suit like the one he donned in the Design District the night before. There he is in the center, chatting with revelers:

Meanwhile, upstairs — that is WAY upstairs, on the roof – there was a party for the exhibition “Russian Dreams,” a show of young Russian talent at the Bass Museum. The event was paid for by Mercury Group, the new owners of auction house Phillips de Pury & Co., and Mercury head honcho Leonid Friedland was to be seen wandering about, against a backdrop of — wait for it — a spritely dancer wearing a furry looking white hat striking poses on a platform in the center of a swimming pool, engulfed in a cloud of real flurries emitted by an electric snow machine. “It’s Dr Zhivago in Miami!” quipped an onlooker. Indeed.