MIAMI — Even the most discerning art connoisseurs must occasionally ask themselves an honest question: “Is this work good, or is it just big?” Scale is the art market’s quintessential sleight of hand, and never is it on more flagrant display than at an art fair, where mammoth sculptures and paintings distract from the bleak trade show ambiance.
Monumentality is the guiding principle of the Meridians section at Art Basel Miami Beach, and on opening day, December 4, onlookers stood in strangely quiet reverence around Portia Munson’s “Bound Angel” (2021) — an installation that I can confirm is not only big but also good. A long, oval table reminiscent of an altar or the votive candle stands found at churches is crowded with hundreds of thrifted objects — ceramic angel figurines, kitschy lamps, a soap dispenser — all a ghostly alabaster white and tied up with cord or rope. Tangled cables pool on the floor near the trail of a tablecloth made of repurposed wedding dresses.
“I was thinking about the kinds of messages that are given to us through these seemingly innocent objects that are pervasive throughout the culture, but almost hidden in plain sight,” Munson, who was standing by her installation, told me.
“They’re actually somewhat instructional, in a negative way, about who you’re supposed to be as a woman — beautiful angels, young, white, saintly, but also sexy,” she added.
It’s an especially resonant message at a political moment when “we are stepping backward in time” with regard to women’s rights, Munson continued, and in a state where an amendment to protect abortion rights requiring a 60% majority failed to pass by a sliver of votes.
The work was an oasis on a day that brought few such reprieves. I felt a wave of dread wash over me from the moment I approached the Miami Beach Convention Center, remembering that Miami-Dade voted resoundingly for Donald Trump in last month’s elections, turning the county red for the first time since 1988. To access my ticket, I had to download the new AI-powered Art Basel app, which opens with a questionnaire that can’t be opted out of. It asks users to identify their “relationship with the art world” — dealer, artist, art enthusiast, “government” (?), etc. — as well as their “art style” and dining preferences. This is presumably meant to inform the app’s new Microsoft-backed chatbot, but it also struck me as a plain data-collection effort that made my entrance feel even more dystopian. (A spokesperson told me that the prompts in the app are “used to personalize visitors’ experience at the fair and are collected anonymously. The data collected is not traceable to specific users.”)
Inside the fair, the atmosphere was jarringly sanguine, with dealers reporting blue-chip sales galore. Half a million for a Carmen Herrera and $675,000 for a Sean Scully painting at Lisson’s booth. At the booth of Jenkins Johnson Gallery, a massive Mary Lovelace O’Neal canvas with an asking price of $1.8 million remained unsold as of Wednesday afternoon, but probably not for long, a gallery attendant intimated. Thaddeus Ropac Gallery sold a brand-new Anthony Gormley sculpture for £500,000 (~$637,200) and a painting by Tom Sachs, whose studio workplace culture was the subject of scrutiny just last year, for $190,000. (The gallery placed six pieces before the show even opened, including a $2 million Georg Baselitz painting). And at the Rosetta Bakery cafe inside the fair, a bottle of water, drip coffee, orange juice, and the world’s tiniest shortbread cookie set me back $30.59.
But are things as good as they seem? According to a press release, this year’s edition boasts 34 first-time exhibitors, perhaps a harbinger of shifts in Art Basel’s notoriously exclusive application process. On the other hand, I counted 50 galleries in the 2023 edition that were absent from this year’s lineup, including market-savvy spaces such as Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Clearing, and Simone Subal. A few of them shuttered or downsized in the last 12 months (Cheim & Read, Helena Anrather, Mitchell Innes & Nash), and others opted for smaller fairs like NADA instead (Mrs., 56 Henry). However, at least 10 galleries that were originally slated to participate this year, according to an exhibitor list issued this summer, disappeared from the lineup. In response to a request for comment, an Art Basel spokesperson referred to a “small number of changes” made to “ensure the best possible experience for exhibitors, artists, clients, and visitors,” and declined to comment further “as a courtesy to our exhibitors.”
Maybe the sheer cost of participating in Art Basel has something to do with it. Fees for the Miami Beach edition this year range from $26,850 for the smallest booth to $191,360 for the largest, typically reserved for blue-chip galleries that can break even with a single sale. That’s only the tip of the iceberg — it costs $600 just to apply for the fair, with no guarantee of acceptance, and then there’s airfare, hotels, and installation and production expenses. The message is clear: Art Basel might be worth it, if you can afford it.
Henrique Faria, whose namesake New York-based gallery focuses on Latin American avant-garde movements, acknowledged that costs factored into the equation when he decided to opt out of the Miami fair circuit this year (he has exhibited at Untitled Art and Art Basel in previous years). But it was also a calculation informed by current political events and the perpetual question of whether and how to address them in an art-fair context.
“The art world is full of -isms, as is any other field. And we need to avoid at all costs opportunism, the biggest -ism of all,” Faria told me. “Even though we are in agreement with a lot of the topics that are being treated within the art world, I think we need to treat them seriously.”
“In order to stage a proper comeback, we need to rethink our presentations and choose our battles properly,” Faria added.
Jochan Meyer of Meyer Riegger gallery in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Basel, which showed at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, said they passed on the fair this year because of prices and an uncertain cost-benefit analysis, particularly given their highly conceptual program. Part of the problem, he noted, is the lack of reliable information about sales from non-blue-chip exhibitors. “Everyone hears about the big-ticket sales, but it’s impossible to know how the other galleries are doing,” Meyer told me in a phone call.
The last six months have brought reports of varying veracity attesting to a period of market “correction,” a euphemistic term that implies that economic downturns are the universe’s way of showing us the true value of things. Perhaps as a result of this instability, Steve Henry, a senior partner at Paula Cooper Gallery, told me that he’s observed an uptick in interest in what he called the “classics”: Sol LeWitt and Claes Oldenburg, for instance, and Mark di Suvero, whose sculpture “Untitled (Swing)” (2008–2022) towered above us at the fair booth. “They smile like they’re five years old,” Henry noted of visitors’ reactions to the genuinely unexpected artwork, which is both big and good. It was under consideration, he said, for “just around a million dollars.”
There are much less subtle takes to be found if you seek them out. Roger Leifer, a Miami- and Connecticut-based collector wearing a t-shirt that read “ART BSL” who had just come from a one-hour tequila tasting in the VIP Lounge, told me candidly that the art market is directly tied to the stock market, and by that measure, art should be selling like hotcakes. “The stock market is doing amazing. I mean, people made so much money — including me,” Leifer said, adding that he prefers Art Miami to Art Basel but that the people-watching is unquestionably superior at the latter — just before speaking to me, he caught a glimpse of disgraced casino magnate Steve Wynn.
I’m writing this from the bar at Sweet Liberty on 20th Street in Miami Beach. It’s a beloved local watering hole that the elegant woman with slicked-back hair sitting next to me calls a “Miami institution” and whose number-one house rule, “no name-dropping, no star fucking,” will likely be tough to enforce during Art Week. A baseball cap with the phrase “Art is Dangerous” catches my eye; the kind-eyed man wearing it is Bruce Allen Carter, an arts educator who serves on the National Council on the Arts and made the hat himself. He wears it to events where he’s expected to be in formal wear, and it always starts a conversation.
Encountering the message at the end of the day felt foreboding. Can art still be dangerous? I hope so, but likely not within the bubble of an art fair. The “Basel-is-back-baby” energy feels disconcertingly at odds with the tsunami of neo-fascism cresting around us — or maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.