The Only Art Basel Miami Beach Guide You Need to Read

Among art-world insiders, there’s a sense that Art Basel Miami Beach—since its inception a must-attend event—is, how do I put it, showing its age. It started off in 2002 as an art-market expansion play, a new edition of a prestigious Swiss art fair, this time stateside, and right by the beach. But it immediately bloomed into something much more than a paint-on-canvas trade expo—it became a caravan for party-happy snowbird New Yorkers, a gigantic moneymaker for the city of Miami Beach. Thanks to Miami, the word Basel, whether or not it’s pronounced correctly, is a metonymy the world over for celebrating commodified culture, on the beach.

Opening a new art fair is no longer a novel idea. When it first began, Art Basel Miami Beach was the second Art Basel—and now there are five Art Basels, plus five Friezes, and a bunch of regional fairs that still draw visitors. This year’s Art Basel Miami Beach is now simply just another stop on the jet-set merry-go-round, slotted seven weeks after Art Basel Paris and two months before the inaugural Art Basel Qatar. For the European dealers and advisers, many told me they were skipping out this year, some in favor of making the New York sales their stateside trek for the month. For some galleries, the logistics and cost of doing so many fairs means one has to get the axe. A month ago, ARTnews noticed that Paris’s Chantal Crousel and New York’s Miguel Abreu opted out of their Miami booth plans. Cologne’s Galerie Buchholz and London’s Pilar Corrias backed out earlier this year. Sadie Coles did Art Basel in Switzerland and Art Basel in France, and will go to Hong Kong in March. But the gallery will not have a booth in Miami.

But there is something countervailing this narrative. The city of Miami Beach has a response. And the response is…brand collaborations.

The rumors of Basel’s rizzlessness will come as a total surprise to the faithful—those who, year in and year out, aim to capitalize on this “December in South Beach” moment in the name of marketing, brand awareness, and social media engagement. No other art fair will ever be able to match the ABMB miasma of art and commerce and B-list celebrity. It doesn’t matter if art galleries and art collectors decide that they can skip the land of stone crabs and cafecitos. According to my inbox, Basel Miami is still the beating heart of the art world. And it’s where the brands will be collaborating.

Let’s dive in, shall we? I think you’ll be very excited to hear about the Achille Salvagni x Manolo Blahnik cocktails at the Edition. This just in: IKEA will be in Miami offering, to quote the official language, “Beats, vibes, iconic IKEA foods, and several photo-worthy rooms.” Several? There’s a dinner for Cartier—wait, my mistake, it’s not a “dinner,” it’s an “immersive encounter with the Maison’s emblematic Panther.” There’s the Ferragamo cocktails at Andaz. There’s the Tom Ford Eyewear Pop-Up Opening Cocktail which is, checks notes, also at the Edition. Skechers x Romero Britto have launched what is deemed, in a groundbreaking feat of nomenclature, a “collab/partnership.”

“Ray-Ban creative director A$AP Rocky invites you to Ray-Ban Clubhouse during Art Basel where his newest visionary project will be on display,” said one dispatch.

Another tip from the transom, perhaps for those trying to maximalize brand partnerships to such an extent that the marketing stretches beyond the long arm of the law: LVMH The Studio Miami (not a typo) has a pro bono legal clinic.

Guess what? We’ve also got some boutique renovation happening, folks. Cartier, in addition to whipping up immersive encounters left and right, is also fixing up its store in such a way that guests will be, in Cartier-speak, “immersed in a supernatural oasis.” Miu Miu has “architecturally reimagined” its boutique in the design district, and thus we must convene, once again, the Miu Miu Vinyl Club.

Courtesy of Cartier.

It just keeps coming. Alfa Romeo x Fiat. Kickstarter x Art Basel. Lavazza x Art Basel. Jimmy Choo x Crosby Studios. Bradley Theodore x Sexy Fish Miami. Luli Fama is giving the people what they want: “a sun-drenched runway moment right on the water on a luxury yacht.” The founding team behind Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand is collaborating with “one of Japan’s oldest and most respected tea farming families” to host an “Art Basel Tea Ceremony.” Orlando Bloom is hosting that one, because we are not fucking around here. Something called “Moooi” was “delighted” to invite me to the launch of “The Introvert Chair by Pop Icon Robbie Williams at The Standard Spa in Miami!” (Exclamation Moooi’s.)

Things start to get a bit more dire when you search “blockchain innovation” in my inbox. NFT Miami and the Superchief NFT Gallery are unleashing “the creative voices redefining Web3’s visual language,” according to an “insider’s guide” that also mentions an event presented by Okayplayer bringing Shaggy, the “It Wasn’t Me” guy, back into pop-culture relevance, at long last. Something called “Ancora x Inscribing Atlantis” was described to me as—I think I’m legally obliged to say “trigger warning” here—“a Bitcoin art retrospective by Gamma.io and on-site Web3 integrations powered by MUFI.”

We haven’t even gotten into all the stuff at condos. Do the fanboys of French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten know they slapped his name on a new luxury condo in the Design District? This one didn’t, until I was invited to hear Marcel Dzama talk at the sales gallery at the Jean-Georges Miami Tropic—presented by Terra and the Lion Development Group, with sales by Douglas Elliman, of course.

Credit where credit’s due: Apple Music is doing one of those “collab/partnerships” with Superblue, the once-ballyhooed experiential art warehouse that started out with grand art-world ambitions and has mostly dwelled in “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” territory. But the show has good artists—Angel Otero, Calida Rawles, Devon Turnbull, Gabriel Moses, Henry Taylor, Jeremy Deller, Sara Sadik, and Tommy Malekoff—the style bible HighSnobiety is a partner, and the opening is DJ’d by Tim Sweeney, the Beats in Space impresario. Color me intrigued. Maybe the brand collaborations can work.

There is also dinner. Brands host dinners. Galleries host dinners. Art Basel is hosting a dinner on Thursday where they will give out the Art Basel Awards, in partnership with BOSS, with the statuettes designed by Swiss architect Jacques Herzog. What a flex. But maybe you just want to book a small private meal for yourself and the people who shall increase your net worth through cultural exchange. The discerning collectors, they all eat at Estiatorio Milos—with such alarming consistency that it has occurred to me that they perhaps don’t know other Miami restaurants exist. The dealers like Joe’s Stone Crab. I should probably gatekeep this one, but the secret best restaurant in Miami Beach is Macchialina.

But notably, there’s no pop-up Carbone presented by American Express at the Edition—I doubt you forgot this stunning fact, but in past years Carbone has opened a pop-up Carbone down the street from the permanent Carbone. What a time to be alive! But there are plenty of other Major Food Group establishments where one can sample the rigatoni—it used to just be Carbone, but now the restaurant group has nine restaurants in the city.

And if you really truly are going down to Miami to see art, you probably don’t need to stay the weekend, as by that time you would have seen all the good art on view in the city. Among the standouts would be the always lovely Rubell Museum, featuring highlights from the decades-long collecting history, along with five rooms dedicated to artists newer to the collections: Lorenzo Amos, Joseph Geagan, Rita Letendre, Yu Nishimura, and Ser Serpas. The big show at the ICA Miami is a survey of the late artist Joyce Pensato. At the Bass Museum is a good one: Jack Pierson: The Miami Years, a look at the incredible artist’s relationship with the Magic City. And get a load of this: Jack Pierson’s bringing a pop-up edition of his truly one-of-a-kind Lower East Side gallery, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, to the venue Tuxedo Park, steps from the fair.

Okay, fine, there’s a gigantic art fair with 287 galleries from 44 countries. Let’s talk art-fair booths. Connected art advisers have told me that, even if galleries complain about the churn of fairs and seem ready to throw Miami under the bus, this is still a city where rich Americans show up ready to spend money during Art Basel Miami Beach. The fact that the market was hot during auctions can only help.

Curzio Malaparte. Sofa, Tribute to “Le Mépris”, 1963/2024, (detail). Walnut, leather, linen, and blue cotton cover. 37 3/8 x 106 3/8 x 33 1/2 inches (95 x 270 x 85 cm).

Photograph by Mark Abegg de Boucherville. Courtesy of Malaparte and Gagosian.

We can’t list all the previews here. Gagosian is bringing a booth full of high-priced goodies, including new sculptures by Maurizio Cattelan and a new painting by Jadé Fadojutimi, and a choice Willem de Kooning canvas, Untitled X (1985), last seen in the blockbuster show that filled Larry Gagosian’s West 24th Street space earlier this year. But it’s also showing at Design Miami, with a booth of furniture editions by Curzio Malaparte, who made the items that populate his famous Casa Malaparte in Capri. If you’ve ever wanted that blue couch from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt—it can now be yours! Zwirner is bringing a secondary market joke painting by Richard Prince, and Hauser & Wirth has a few bangers. There’s a Pablo Picasso portrait of his daughter Paloma. There’s an Ambera Wellmann portrait of Tilda Swinton. What more do you need, people?

Ambera Wellmann. Tilde 4, 2025. Oil on linen. 92.1 x 96.5 x 2.2 cm / 36 1/4 x 38 x 7/8 inches.

Courtesy the artist, Company Gallery and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Sarah Muehlbauer.

And there will be a whole lot of expensive pictures that dealers hope could snag the interest of a visiting whale. Lévy Gorvy Dayan is bringing Andy Warhol’s Muhammad Ali, which they’ll offer in the booth for an eye-watering price of $18 million.

Andy Warhol. Muhammad Ali, 1977. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 40×40 inches (101.6×101.6 cm).

Andy Warhol. Photograph by Robert McKeever. Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

The fair landscape is vast. Beyond the Galleries sector, there’s also Nova, Positions, and Survey. Other fairs around town include NADA, Untitled, and Scope. Perhaps the most buzzed about, or at least the most puzzling, new part of the fair is Zero 10, a digital platform developed by Art Basel that will have both a physical presence at the fair and live digitally. It features what will certainly be one of the most talked-about artworks in the entire city. The artwork is by Beeple, the nom d’art of Mike Winkelmann, the man who became famous in 2021 when his NFT sold for $69.3 million. It’s a doozy.

“A pack of robot dogs with human heads will be unleashed inside the Miami Beach Convention Center next month,” reads the teaser for the work. “Modeled after public figures such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, the four-legged bots will snap photos of fairgoers at Art Basel Miami Beach, some of which will contain a code linked to a free NFT.”

And to think we ever considered not coming to Art Basel Miami Beach.

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