But what did it all mean? And what might we stand to learn about the state of the market and art world at large? Below, six trends that could be gleaned by shuttling around Miami this week.
Pace Gallery said it sold an NFT by the artist duo DRIFT for $550,000, and Galerie Nagel Draxler, of Cologne, Berlin, and Munich, dedicated a portion of its booth to new NFT works by Kenny Schachter.
The sustainable NFT initiative Aorist, for example, sold a Refik Anadol work for a whopping $851,130 at an auction held at the Faena Hotel, with the proceeds headed toward ReefLine, which will help build environmental habitats off the coast of South Beach.
Art Basel, NADA, and Untitled all required visitors to show proof of vaccination, a recent negative Covid test, or documentation of recovery from the virus, and at Art Basel, attendees weren’t allowed in without a wristband to indicate that they had done as much.
But what many galleries brought to the fair looked different than in the past—there was a greater emphasis on work by young Black artists than ever before and strong showings of art by artists of all generations from Latin America.
Spiegler recalled texting with Abloh as late as Saturday about Rammellzee, the late street artist whose work, as it happens, is featured at the booth of Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which just started representing his estate.
One at Galerie Frank Elbaz’s booth by Mungo Thomson resembles a Time magazine cover bearing the words “Democracy Under Attack.” When viewers stand before it, they can see themselves reflected in place of an unseen cover star.
The craze for figurative painting seems to be here to stay for a while, but there also appears to be a new desire for a very specific kind of sculpture in which human bodies morph into furniture-like forms. The style is not entirely new—Sarah Lucas, who had one such work made in 2021 at Gladstone Gallery’s booth, has been crafting lumpy abstract female bodies that loll against chairs since the ’90s.