You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think

OK, so I've been here a couple of months now. I've seen some alligators, been on a beach, massively increased my chances of skin cancer - the list of Miami cliche activities is being ticked off. One cliche I hadn't investigated till this weekend, though, was the city's reputation as having less culture than the average Brie. It turns out to be half true, half not (take that, bivalent logicians).

A dig around the internet and the local listings mags reveals a few art galleries, theatres and the like, as you'd hope in a city of two million people. As with everything, access to most venues is a problem for anyone who doesn't drive, but on Friday, I managed to get to the Carnival Centre by public transport easily.

The Carnival Centre is an enormous performing arts complex North of downtown, in the middle of pretty much nothing -it's surrounded by building sites, and seems to be the vanguard of an attempt to reinvigorate the Omni district. In the best tradition of big public projects, the Centre was built at a cost hugely in excess of the original budget, and is currently facing big running cost overspends, exacerbated by smaller audiences than was expected. It seems they might not come even if you build it. So it was good to see the auditorium almost full for the Classical Theatre of Harlem 's production of Romeo and Juliet.

As you might guess from the name of the company, this was a version of the play set in modern times, with hiphop playing in the party scene, gunfights instead of swordsmanship, and so forth. The language was unchanged, apart from a few extra anachronistic exclamations (Nurse: 'scurvy knave!' Mercutio: 'ya mama!'). It worked fairly well, but ran foul on the problem that afflicts most productions of R&J; Romeo is such an idiot, such an unsympathetic dithering twit, that attempts to emphasise, say, the tragedy of the main story or the theme of warring families are stymied by his presence as the main catalyst for events. Another of those superficially heroic, but actually quite unpleasant, main characters Shakespeare did so well (cf Antonio in Merchant).

Saturday, and back relying on lifts, the Miami phil dept foreign legion (four of us) took a trip to the Bass Art Museum on South Beach. A relatively small museum with a much larger collection than in can show, and plans to expand, the Bass has three galleries for its collection and one for transient shows. The collection galleries do a lot with little space; in particular, the gallery of Renaissance and Baroque art gave an excellent overview of the period despite only displaying a handful of paintings. The touring exhibition this time was by a Cuban-American artist, and included an installation that was the first I've seen, I think, to include smells as part of the art.

On the way out, the volunteer (I think) at the entrance desk stopped us and gave us each a lovely book documenting a previous show at the museum, and chatted to us about the Miami art scene, giving us some tips about events, places to go and so on. This could have been kindness to foreigners, or it could have been a reward for (my) attentive listening on the way in to his tales of his trip to 'your wonderful country' and his adventures in 'Edinboro' and Parsons Green.

Or it could simply have been because, on a Saturday afternoon, we were four out of only six people to visit the gallery in an hour and a half. And that seems to be the true part of the Miami culture cliche; the infrastructure's there, but persuading the residents to partake is hard when there's all that tanning to do...