“Art Basel in Miami Beach has a challenging new element called ‘Survey.’ An ‘art-historical’ section, it contains just 13 shows, some solo and some thematic. Displaying names both strange and familiar, from places as far-flung as Uruguay and Tokyo, it aims to provide mid-20th-century context to the contemporary work on view elsewhere: many of these artists, as Art Basel director Marc Spiegler explains, were models and mentors to today’s better-known names.

“If its aim is to boost the academic quotient, in the midst of the selling frenzy of the rest of the fair, it succeeds: the lists contain enough ‘-ists’ and ‘-isms’ to satisfy any academic. ‘Precisionism,’ anyone? That is, as if you didn’t know, ‘a uniquely American Modernist movement,’ and celebrated chez Menconi + Schoelkopf with work by Canadian artist Ralston Crawford….”