If you happen to find yourself in Miami or London in the near future, I would highly recommend that you check out Superblue. Neat B and I visited Superblue Miami this past weekend and it was an incredible experience.

Above is a short video of one of the immersive installations (click here if you can't see it embedded above). This one is by the Japanese art collective teamLab and what you're seeing is a whole year's worth of seasonal flowers coming to life and then dying off.

It's meant to show you the continuous change and cycle of life and death that we all live through every day, and you certainly feel that as you go through the space. The installation itself also responds to how you move and interact with it, with some actions encouraging more blossoms.

It's, of course, all very Instagrammable.

But I think this descriptor is old news and doesn't do the work justice. Superblue is a serious cultural experience. One of the other works on display right now is a piece by light and space artist James Turrell. And for this one, there were no photos and talking allowed. The timed experience was meant to be more meditative.

It was the first time that I had seen something by James Turrell in real life and it didn't disappoint. It made me feel things, as did the entire Superblue experience. So again, a top experience that I would highly recommend.

On a related real estate note, the 50,000 sf Superblue space is located in an area of Miami called Allapattah (which is west of Wynwood and 5 miles east of MIA). I'm an outsider to the city building undercurrents of this city, but I keep hearing people talk about the area as the next Wynwood.

The other cultural institution in Allapattah is the Rubell Museum, which I wrote about in 2019 as it was moving over from its original home in Wynwood. Supposedly the family now has the largest private collection of contemporary art in North America. So that's something.

Maybe these two anchors will be what does it for Allapattah. When we walked around the area there didn't seem to be much else going on. But we all know how quickly that can change.

A new 50,000 square foot experiential art center (EAC to those in the know), called Superblue, has just opened up in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood. It includes installations by Tokyo-based teamLab, Amsterdam's DRIFT, James Turrell (amazing), as well as many others.

This is noteworthy because experiential art is both fun (and Instagrammable) and because it is another example of the continuing rise of Allapattah. Art, design, and culture are usually pretty good for city building.

At the same time, the New York Times raises an interesting question: "Is this a forward step in the march of modernism or a debasement of art into theme-park entertainment?" Arthur Lubow goes on to say:

The popularity of this genre is driven by contradictory desires, as demonstrated memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 who waited up to six hours for a one-minute stay amid the twinkling lights in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourished by their phones and computer screens, people yearn for real-life visceral experiences. And yet they remain stuck in the gravitational pull of virtual reality: The experiences they seek are ones they can record on their phone cameras and post on social media.

I get this logic.

But my own view is that just because something has commercial appeal, it shouldn't mean that the art is any less serious. And just because people want to photograph and share it, doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't appreciating it in the same way as someone just standing around and pondering it.

Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Snap has also just announced the next version of its Spectacles. These ones come with the promise of augmented reality. What is real anymore?