As the snow turned to sleet in New York, many of the city’s creative class took refuge in sunny Miami for Miami Art Week, joining attendees from across the globe. Between Art Basel and the 20-plus other fairs, gallery and museum exhibitions, and events spanning fashion, music and everything in between, attendees squeezed plenty of culture out of the week — and undoubtedly missed some, thanks to the traffic — with more to come this weekend.
This year, there was more industry overlap than ever — between fashion, sport, music and food — perhaps, even more than expected. Fashion, in particular, has fully embraced the week, not just with dinners and parties, which is now par for the course, but by taking direct cues from the art world and hosting their own exhibitions, or getting involved with those already going on. Each year ups the ante, says Art Basel director Bridget Finn of the cross-industry descent into Basel.
Many brands intersected not just with the art, but with one another. Inside the walls of the Convention Center, the fair was somewhat of a microcosm of this industry overlap. By the show’s exit, lines snaked as attendees queued up to buy T-shirts and bags in collaboration with Marc Jacobs, and soccer jerseys in partnership with Inter Miami CF. Upstairs, artists were in conversation with sports industry players. The collector’s lounge was designed by Lissoni Partners, featuring 20 ‘Made in Italy’ brands, under the fair’s partnership with Salone. Musician and actor Kid Cudi premiered a documentary by Joshua Charow about his artistic practice.
“It’s very pop,” Marco Falcioni, creative director of Boss, tells me of the fair at the inaugural Art Basel Awards on Thursday evening. (Boss is the awards partner.) Showing up in this way in Miami makes the most sense of all Art Basel fairs because of how unbuttoned it is relative to its contemporaries, Falcioni adds. “It’s the last Basel of the year. This is the fair where people are a bit more relaxed; it’s Miami, you know?”
“I feel like it was a really good week. Because it’s a harder time in the market, galleries really knew that they had to bring good work to actually get people to buy. Sometimes people can be a little lazy with Miami because it’s the end of the year, so people are trying to spend before the fiscal year is up, but they knew that because the market is bad that they had to overperform,” says LA-based art dealer Carlye Packer. “Every year, I like it a bit more,” one European journalist, who has been attending Art Basel Miami since 2021, said at the awards cocktail party.
Coming off a tough year, sales at Art Basel have been promising from days one and two. On day one, Hauser Wirth sold two major Louise Bourgeois works — a sculpture for $3.2 million and a painting for $2.5 million — and David Zwirner reported a Gerhard Richter Abstract Painting for $5.5 million. On Thursday, day two, Lévy Gorvy Dayan sold Andy Warhol’s Muhammad Ali (1977) for a listing price of $18 million.
The mood was “unusually mellow” on day one, Finn says. “There was a really nice energy in the halls, and that was quickly followed up with galleries issuing positive sales reports.” Peggy Leboeuf, Partner at Perrotin New York, which sold over 25 works on day one, agrees. Mschf’s bronze Touch Me Sculpture One More Time sculpture, which has a counter at the base that increases each time it’s touched, proved popular, she says. “Mschf’s sculptures have been a big hit, it is fun to see everyone’s reaction to being able to touch the art, or comment on the rivalry between Coca Cola and Pepsi,” she says. (The collective’s Coke vs. Pepsi (Soda Spinner), which pours the two drinks between a bottle of each, is also on display.)
This year is an especially serious crowd, Finn says. Packer agrees. “It feels like it’s a little more serious art people than it has in the last couple of years,” she says.
Finn is confident that the fair’s promising start is a good indicator of the year to come. “My real hope is that the show will buoy the market through the winter; that this will be a really positive moment of setting everyone on a great trajectory,” she says.
Industry mash-up
For brands, showing up at Basel is a way to better align with the art world, as well as a method to advertise this relationship. At this stage, it’s a tried-and-true method — and brands are getting louder about it. Boss, for instance, has dabbled in the art world for the better part of 30 years, but the communications around its Art Basel Awards partnership are louder than its past work with the Guggenheim. Falcioni invited artists to walk in and contribute to Boss’s latest show, keen to revive the brand’s artistic engagement. With the Art Basel Awards, the brand is taking things one step further. “I was trying to tap into the conversation with art after going back to the archive.”
Throughout the week, brands including Marni, Ferragamo, Tag Heuer and Miu Miu were among those to host cocktail events, dinners and parties. Cartier debuted “Into the Wild”, an exhibition focused on the maison’s Panthère emblem. Pucci decorated the entrance to the fair with its Marmo print in turquoise. Zegna, which is an Art Basel partner, brought its Villa Zegna to Miami, and celebrated with a dinner during which attendees watched composer Giorgio Moroder demonstrate how he put together “I Feel Love”. Ray-Ban collaborated with Es Devlin’s Library of Us at Faena beach, placing Meta’s smart glasses by the artwork to translate the phrases in the books surrounding the sculpture as they’re read. (And hosted a party for its latest A$AP Rocky launch, where the music artist showed up in a fresh-off-the-runway, Superman-inspired Chanel sweater.)
LVMH returned with its annual pop-up, previously dubbed Culture House, this year called The Studio. At a talk on Thursday, North America CEO Anish Melwani spoke about the importance of LVMH brands creating moments of cultural relevance in a place like Miami during Art Basel. Here, the crowd was illustrative of the overlap between art and fashion. “Everybody knows who Bernard Arnault is, right? Do we need to explain that?” Corey Smith, LVMH head of diversity and inclusion, interjected while interviewing Melwani. Everybody did. “OK, good. Just making sure. Reading a room, reading a room,” he said. It was a fair question; Art Basel isn’t fashion week. But at Art Basel Miami, the collectors know fashion, and vice versa.
Aside from enabling luxury to tap the high-net-worth individuals in town to buy art, the proliferation of industries like fashion and sport provides an entry point for those less native to the art world, too, Finn says. “That fusion of all of these cultural moments allows people who are interested in learning about the art world interested in starting to collect it, it gives them an entry point that’s hard to find,” she says. Miami is suited to this, she adds. “Miami has it kind of built in.”
The deeper engagement is reflected in the attendees, both at the fair and at the events. Though there was plenty of fashion in town, Packer notes the absence of major houses like Chanel and YSL. “Because they’re not doing as much here, it feels like less influencers,” she says. “It feels like there are actually more people who are here for art.” The Zegna dinner, for instance, was a mix of gallerists, collectors and VICs.
The LatAm luxury boon
Miami is just a two-and-a-half hour flight from Mexico City. The presence of Latin American press throughout the week was notable — with editors on the ground from locales like Mexico City and Brazil — as brands seek to get in front of consumers in the growing market.
A large Latin American presence is typical of the fair, Finn says, in terms of both attendees and galleries. She notes an “incredible presence” from Brazil when it comes to collectors, which she says is always strong. It’s an opportune moment for the brands to reach these collectors, at a time when Latin America is proving itself a key focus for luxury executives as they look to future growth.
After a meeting with Gildo Zegna at the Villa Zegna pop-up, Oliver Chen, managing director of retail and luxury at investment banking firm TD Cowen, sent out an analyst’s note on the brand. In it, Chen said Zegna had told him that the Americas is a key market for clients who could afford the brand, but are not currently customers. TD Cowen believes that Mexico and Brazil are key contributors to Zegna’s Americas growth, adding that Latin American clients often show strong attendance at global events.
NFT buzz like it’s 2021
There was a time, not long ago, when Art Basel Miami Beach was a hub of Web3 activity, for the art world and for fashion brands. Over the last couple of years, though, fashion stepped back from Web3, and the tech’s presence at Art Basel became increasingly siloed.
Now, it’s an official part of the fair, where digital art is grouped under new initiative Zero 10, which debuted this week. It fast became one of the busiest areas of the fair, in part thanks to Beeple, who shot to fame for selling an NFT artwork for $69 million at Christie’s in 2021. He drew crowds from Wednesday morning onward with Regular Animals, robots with masks of famous figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Picasso and Andy Warhol. And it wasn’t just spectacle. Multiple editions sold on the first day, for $100,000 each, including those of the aforementioned. Another work, Coin Laundry, resulted in more than 46,000 claimed free NFTs.
“It’s refreshed that moment of discovery in the show — and it was clearly very much wanted by our audience base,” Finn says. “You really don’t need to have any knowledge of Web3 to enjoy it. You still show up and participate and see what it’s about. I think having it in the show makes that easier, too.”
Packer is less convinced, but decides that it’s a net positive. “I understand it as Art Basel is really trying to get in on the Miami scene [with Zero 10], but it really just attracts the [basic] white boy,” she laughs, before pausing. “Which is actually kind of nice because it funnels traffic to that direction — so the rest of the fair is a little more serious, because the normal humans are looking at the robots.”
New talent had space to shine
Ahead of the fair, Finn explained the reconfigurations Art Basel had made to make it friendlier to younger galleries and artists, placing sectors like Nova (work made within the last three years) and Positions (solo presentations by younger galleries) near the entrance, and removing the barrier to entry for Merridiens (large-scale works).
“When I walked through Nova and Positions, it feels like there’s a really concentrated energy there. It makes sense, if somebody is really interested in emerging art, to have those sectors in close proximity. It allows everyone to find their path,” Finn says. “It’s been a real plus for the show. And the young galleries deserve the visibility of an entrance; we’re really happy to provide that.”
Some of Packer’s gallerist friends who have booths in Nova have sold out. “I think if there was already interest in an artist, then that artist did really well,” she says. But this year, the appetite for risk is more tempered in a still-lukewarm market. “In the years before, it was very, everyone wanted to buy something that they never really heard of. People are taking less gambles now.”
After hours, the fair recognized established and emerging talent in the art world. The Boss Award for Outstanding Achievement recipient, Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani, will receive $100,000, half of which goes toward her practice; the other half to an organization of her choice. “She’s a young artist. This kind of support, it’s much more needed for young artists,” Falconi says. “And also her work is not very commercial. Even more important to support.”
Bennani accepted the award wearing Boss, with a Palestinian flag pinned to her lapel. “I’m really, truly feeling so lucky, mostly given the history of artists that you’ve supported in the past,” she said, nodding to Boss’s past award recipients via its Guggenheim partnership. “I was looking in the little gallery and a lot of them are some of my favorite artists, so I’m really honored.”
Packer is optimistic about the year ahead. “There’s a market contraction, which is necessary after an unnecessary market expansion where people were releasing a lot of trash everywhere. People don’t want trash,” she says. “It’s starting to be quality over quantity again, where, for a minute, it was quantity over quality.”
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