Miami Art Week: “The best Art Basel party is always the one you missed”

As many of you may have heard, the art biz hasn’t been doing so well. Ahead of Art Basel Miami Beach, very smart LA gallerist Hannah Hoffman explained to me that there was an “erosion of trust” in the market among collectors; they felt they had been duped into investing in over-hyped young artists whose work turned out to net negative returns. And since the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022, thus ending the ability of the uber-wealthy to borrow gigantic sums of money basically for free, cash just hasn’t been flowing like it used to. On top of all this, we’re also still reeling from crushing election results that we seem to take great pains to never talk about.

Now, who wants to hear about the parties?

In a nutshell: near-freezing weather with an art world at different stages of disillusionment. The optimists arrived with the belief that the market had bounced back since Art Basel Paris and the US presidential election, and that the parties with half-empty dancefloors would fill up as the week progressed. By the end, however, reality had set in: the crowds would remain small and not particularly in the mood to celebrate, and on Saturday at least one dealer was seen sobbing outside of NADA, not having sold a thing. I went to Miami with four writing assignments so I could take the commercial art world’s temperature in person, unhindered by the lenses of PR and toxic positivity. My biggest takeaway from the week is that disillusionment is a good thing; you have to shatter your delusions in order to see things as they really are.

Monday

The redeye from LAX to Miami International is an ungodly affair: you take off at 1 am and touch down in broad daylight after a four-hour night of no sleep. It was around 8 am when my partner (painter Joe Reihsen) and I were at baggage claim with LA gallerist Emma Fernberger, shooting the shit about Miami becoming a Republican stronghold. I said that the commercial art world seemed to have taken a 180 from 2016 and gone politically silent, and she said something I had been thinking about a lot lately – that this is simply a form of self preservation. We had three MAGA hat sightings before leaving the airport with our friend, artist Shinique Smith, in a car with a “SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT” sticker on the bumper. Blessed with an early check-in at the Ritz Carlton South Beach (shout out to our sponsors at Art Basel), Joe and I slept away our precious daylight hours, setting a poor precedent for the days to come.

That night, the first outing of the week was drinks in the lobby of The Edition hotel, hosted by the boys of the Nota Bene podcast, Nate Freeman and Benjamin Godsill. Among the lush plantlife and white-on-white furniture (an aesthetic I’d describe as tropical cocaine), serious art market professionals – gallery presidents and associate directors, reporters, Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz and Miami Beach fair director Bridget Finn – stood in tight clusters around the bar, buzzing with anticipation of the week’s possibilities. Art advisor to the stars Ralph DeLuca told me he expected good sales now that the election results had dispelled collectors’ uncertainty: “You can make money in heaven, you can make money in hell, but you cannot make money in purgatory.” I asked him what difference the election makes to people who would be filthy rich regardless, and he said, “That’s a different conversation.” Before heading to bed, a collector told me that LA gallerist Esther Kim Varet told him that she was planning to run for congress. “Yeah, it surprised me too,” he said, and I made a note to confirm in the morning.

Tuesday (with bits of Wednesday and Thursday)

We all come to Miami expecting to be thrilled. Over the next three days, Joe and I shuffled from party to party in search of some modicum of adrenaline and wondered where all our friends were hiding. The wind coming in over the water felt like ice, conjuring apocalyptic visions of snowfall in Miami, and the events have all since blurred together in my mind: a press cocktail at the Ritz, an Art Basel party at the W hotel, a lunch where I sat with wealth advisors from UBS. We found a few good friends at the Kasmin cocktail at the Standard Spa and then again at the parties hosted by Capital One. “Art basil clap your hands,” the emcee implored at the latter, where Kaytranada and Anderson Paak breathed a little life into our bones. The Rubell Museum party was also a pretty good one: James Blake DJ’d in a makeshift jungle nightclub while we ate chicken cutlets and mozzarella sticks from LA pizzeria Jon & Vinny’s. We missed the Harmony Korine party because somebody needed to go to bed, and partnership is all about compromise. For the most part, however, so many of the crowds felt small, unfamiliar and unwilling to dance. Shinique texted me “nothing is as fun as it purports to be,” and I asked her if she meant tonight or in general. Outside The Edition, we ran into ex-Art Basel CEO Marc Spiegler and artist Miles Greenberg before heading into the Silencio pop-up in the basement. It was extremely mid.

I wrote sometime between the hours of 5 and 10:30 am, and consequently slept through the entirety of the Art Basel preview day. As I lay in bed, I sorted out my intel. Young dealers at the dive bar Mac’s Club Deuce had blamed poor sales at Untitled and NADA on Art Basel’s opening taking place the day after theirs (which sounded like a bit of scapegoating to me). My friend Jeremy Maldonado, founder of LA gallery Giovanni’s Room, texted me pictures of Jared Leto approaching the convention centre, conspicuously being trailed by paparazzi. A collector told me that when the current Miami Beach director of Art Basel was a dealer, she was known as one of three Bridgets: Bridget Finn, Bridget Donahue and a third forgotten Bridget. Dealer Brigitte Mulholland thought it might be her: “I’ve made that joke a few times,” she said. A moment later Bridget Donahue DM’d me to say there were actually only two Bridgets. Recurring talking points included “the great wealth transfer,” in which more than $6 trillion USD are expected to be inherited over the next 20 years, plus divided reactions to Dean Kissick’s recent article in Harper’s magazine. No one, however, was talking about the collective celebration over the United Healthcare CEO’s murder. Art fairs typically insulate themselves from news of the real world, but this seems exactly like the kind of eat-the-rich energy the art world should know about.

Wednesday

“Twist,” according to Miles, “is the only reliable thing in Miami.” Truly the lifeblood of the art world’s sojourn into the city, it’s a gay labyrinth of a nightclub with multiple dance floors and an international smattering of everyone you know. I saw a gallerist friend in the courtyard who told me he sold two paintings despite not showing at any of the fairs. He said, “All I had to do was sleep with the collector.” At the bar, I was surprised to see an old friend from New York who works at [redacted rival art fair].

“I just came to liaise,” he said.
“What’s liaising?” I asked.
“We’re doing it right now.”

Joe was a little rattled by the drunk men making brazen passes at him, which as a woman, I thought was very cute. Squeezing through a packed hallway I spotted a former colleague from a previous life, a cis-heterosexual who looked very clearly overwhelmed. “This place is extra,” he said, and so I invited him for a drink in the quietest corner I could find. We went on a brief venting spree where he called the art world an industry in decline and said there’s no such thing as “the market,” just disparate events spun into a narrative designed to make us feel better. I think of it as astrology, I said, without which we’d have nothing to believe in. I added that both the art world and the Democratic party are now drifting with no sense of direction, having just realised their respective astrologers were only telling them what they wanted to hear rather than the truth. He said that he didn’t want to talk politics – “we lost” – that he felt jaded and exhausted, and that an artist who told him she’d be here tonight was nowhere to be found. Putting him out of his misery, I said that we’d definitely see him around over the next few days. He nodded appreciatively, picking up both his drink and his cue to go to bed. Afterwards Joe, Jeremy and I had a really beautiful walk home together, eating our Burger King Whoppers on the beach.

Thursday

I finally made it to Art Basel, where every time a gallerist told me things were going well, I got the distinct feeling I was being lied to. An older Miami collector couple with thick New York accents confirmed my suspicions: “Last year on day two, you could barely move, and now it’s so quiet!” I went to Ben Brown’s booth to see Gavin Turk’s Giraffe (2021), a bronze-cast version of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019). Turk’s blackened and shrivelled banana offered an apt metaphor for how the fair’s energy had shifted in the last five years; to me, it also underscored the phallic nature of the original piece. When a gallery director told me they took the piece down after they sold it, I said aw, that’s a shame. “Well that’s what happens,” he said, gesturing around the booth, very clearly annoyed. “We have lots more stuff we didn’t sell.”

Friday

When we woke up, the birds were singing outside our hotel room, and the sun sat low and gold in a perfectly cloudless sky. “This is the most beautiful morning I’ve ever seen,” I said, checking the time. It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

The night before included one last trip to Twist and a 5 am meal at Le Sandwicherie. While Joe recovered in bed, I sat on the beach alone, gathering my thoughts and checking the news. Pantone’s colour of the year was mocha mousse, to which someone on the Internet replied, “Making the colour of the year literal shit is a little too on the nose.” Last night a new collector friend had gone to a party co-hosted by international promoter Tolga and mega-collector’s daughter Sophia Cohen, which he described as “half empty.”

Jeremy told me he made out with an artist on the beach and sent me a picture of the sunrise over the ocean. I emailed Various Small Fires to ask about Esther’s bid for congress and received no response. A publicist invited me to a party hosted by A$AP Rocky and Rihanna that would take place after I leave, because as a rule, the best Art Basel party is always the one you missed.

A British editor and good friend texted me, “Fuck, I lost my phone last night,” apologising for not meeting me at Twist. After I told him to never feel like he has to lie to me, he admitted, “Ok, I left to have a threesome.” I told him I was proud of him and that he had done the right thing, this being his first trip to Miami. In the future, he would look back on this moment as a fond memory of his early days at the fair.