A Miami Basel art party. Photo: Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
via NYTimes:
Miami Basel: An Art Costco for Billionaires {excerpt}
By GUY TREBAY
Published: December 10, 2006
MIAMI BEACH [...] For people locally referred to as V.V.V.I.P.'s that might include, say, a business breakfast with Steven A. Cohen, the multibillionaire collector; a lunch given by the art dealer Larry Gagosian; a stop at a Yoko Ono installation in a hotel lobby; a cocktail party at a $14 million trophy apartment, which happens to be on the market; a dinner with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones given by a billionaire Turkish developer; and an after-party given by Colette Dance Class from Paris at a club called Mansion. After that, well in Miami Beach the night is always young.
All of these things, of course, are auxiliary to the main event, which is the art fair or fairs.
"Now you have Pulse, Flow, Aqua, Nada, Scope and the Design Miami fair downtown," said Mary Hoeveler, who runs Citigroup's art advisory, a sort of personal shopping service for aesthetically enlightened plutocrats. Ms. Hoeveler was referring to the satellite fairs that have sprung up like camp followers to the main art fair, each organized to accommodate a market segment and each held in one of the city’s seemingly limitless supply of disused warehouses or boutique hotels.
"Miami stakes it all on Miami Basel now," she said, and it is certainly true that where the beach once seemed wreathed in a fog bank of Hawaiian Tropic tanning lotion, the sweet aroma of wealth now floats in the air. "The money is burning a hole in people's pockets, and they’re here to spend," Ms. Hoeveler said.
Just to thumb-tap all the pertinent social data of a day into a BlackBerry might induce torment, seizure or at least repetitive stress injury. But it would be good pain for the roughly 38,000 people who descended on this beach town and is easily cured by opening one's wallet and watching bills fly.
"They're getting so rich so fast now it's hard to keep up," said someone in the crowd that formed early on Wednesday, "Supermarket Sweep"-style, outside the Convention Center, awaiting a signal for the noontime V.I.P. preview to begin.
When the doors opened, the throng rushed forward, racing toward favorite dealers' booths. These were not housewives wearing kerchiefs and rollers but socialites and hedge fund billionaires and Silicon Valley tyros and Palm Beach matrons with faces as taut and expressionless as the ones on inflatable love dolls.
"Art Basel essentially invented Miami Basel to cater to North American and South American capital," said Nadja Swarovski, of the famous crystal manufacturing company, who sponsors one of the week's big events. Ms. Swarovski was referring to Miami Basel's parent entity, a respected traditional art fair in Switzerland. "The world is flat now," Ms. Swarovski said. "The borders are breaking down. Cultures are merging." [more...]
