The worlds of art, music and culture intersect at Art Basel in Miami, but sometimes the synthesis isn’t quite so smooth. Art dealer and collector Jeffrey Deitch bumped into Sean “Diddy” Combs at the booths and mistook him for Kanye West.
Witnesses said Deitch, the former director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, had an awkward moment when he walked up to Diddy at the Art Basel hub, the Miami Beach Convention Center, on Wednesday.
One said, “Jeffrey said, ‘Hi, Kanye . . .,’ then immediately realized he’d made a mistake, and looked absolutely mortified. There was a moment while everybody held their breath, then Diddy burst out laughing. He took it really well.”
Deitch, who has relocated back to New York, where he plans to produce big art shows geared to a broad audience, confessed Thursday he got his rappers confused, but said it wasn’t entirely his fault.
He told Page Six via e-mail, “There was a big crowd gathered at the entrance to an art fair booth. I asked the dealer what the commotion was about and she said, ‘Kanye is here.’ I could only see the person from the back, and went over to say ‘Hi Kanye’. To my great embarrassment, it turned out to be P Diddy. He thought it was very funny, especially since we had spent several hours together visiting my street art show in Los Angeles.”
Meanwhile, Kanye himself was making his own impact by appearing at Surface magazine’s Design Dialogues to discuss art, architecture and design with architect Jacques Herzog moderated by the Serpentine Gallery’s Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Describing himself as “considered to be prodigy at age 14 in Chicago,” Kanye talked about his youth as an artist, attending art school, before he realized that “my paintings were music . . . I would paint music because I could see it.”
Kanye also went on to describe how design changes people’s lives, saying, “I am not speaking out against other rappers here, but nobody needs a watch anymore. Even those who have a watch check the time on their iPhone.”