Beginning on Tuesday with invitation-only hours, and open to the public Thursday through Saturday, it will feature 253 galleries exhibiting work inside the city’s Convention Center, as well as a dizzying number of accompanying satellite art fairs, pop-up shows, and celebrity-studded private dinners.
Clare McAndrew found that nearly half of the 700 surveyed dealers saw a continued decline in sales during the first six months of 2021.
government said it would lift the Covid travel ban on most visitors from Europe and Asia in November, thus making the Miami fair the first truly international one in the U.S.
Spiegler’s phone immediately began burning up with messages from dealers who had previously passed on participating: “By the end of that week more than 30 galleries ‘uncancelled,’” he said, noting that despite all the grousing over “fair fatigue,” there was still no digital substitute for buying and selling art in the flesh.
Yet if the Miami fair’s return is reason for MCH to cheer, the future of its other two art fairs — Art Basel Hong Kong, scheduled for March 2022, and the flagship Art Basel in Switzerland, scheduled for June 2022 — remains uncertain.
Local officials have found themselves overruled on mask mandates by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who has tried to make himself the face of Republican opposition to Biden administration virus policies.
“When you bring together thousands of people from all over the world, wearing masks is the only thing that makes sense,” he said.
Not to be outdone, Fotografiska, the privately owned global string of photography museums, has announced that it is moving into the 42,000-square-foot warehouse right across the street, next door to the Rubell Museum, with its David Rockwell-designed building set to open in 2023.
He credits the established collectors who fled cities up north or out west, riding out the coronavirus in their new Miami residences, who began visiting the gallery for the first time.
“These are the problems of the wealthy.” Yet the fresh faces at the gallery didn’t emerge out of Miami’s newly arrived “tech bros,” from the aspiring new media mogul Bryan Goldberg to the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who have relocated here amid a wave of Silicon Valley cheerleading from the city’s mayor.
One of the many new NFT marketplaces, SuperRare, has even enlisted the engineers at SuperWorld to install 20 3-D sculptures throughout Art Basel’s Convention Center, viewable there only on their app — a novel way to get in front of influential eyeballs while sidestepping the fair’s curatorial committees and the roughly $60,000 booth fee.
The result, whose sale will benefit a local underwater sculpture park, is a pair of faux icebergs — one of which is 20 feet high and 30 feet wide, wrapped in collages of Sven-Olof Lindblad’s photos of actual icebergs, and set afloat in the oceanfront pool of Miami Beach’s Faena Hotel.
While room rates at the Faena — starting at $3,300 a night, $5,500 for an ocean view — may limit the audience for “What Lies Beneath,” it’ll still be hard to avoid seeing Betancourt’s artwork and its varied styles around Miami next week.
“People had an inferiority complex here for many years,” he continued, recalling his arrival from Puerto Rico as a teenager in 1980, discovering an art scene that too often looked elsewhere for direction.
This seriously minded artwork is being presented within the context of a tropical weeklong party.