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  • Jeff Bezos, Leonardo DiCaprio, and More Collabos Than You Can Shake a Stick At: Welcome to Art Basel Miami Beach 2023

    Jeff Bezos, Leonardo DiCaprio, and More Collabos Than You Can Shake a Stick At: Welcome to Art Basel Miami Beach 2023

    On the day before the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach, architect and artist Peter Marino was sitting in a room that he designed, looking out at the ocean, wearing what for him passes for swimwear: black leather pants, black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, black leather cap, black aviator sunglasses, a necklace featuring two small meat cleavers, and brass knuckles with rats on them. Nearby was a bowl full of M&Ms. Those were all black too.

    “I like to adopt damaged cats—I mean, I like damaged buildings,” Marino said, in his trademark English-adjacent lilt. “I think in architecture, quite seriously, a lot is wasteful in America. People are always busy knocking everything down and building new shit. And I’m very respectful of architecture that was very good and old.”

    Marino was talking about the Raleigh Hotel, the classic art deco crash pad that opened in 1940, was made famous by swimming Hollywood starlets, was nearly demolished as Collins Avenue went abandoned during the Miami Vice decade, spearheaded the Miami Beach revival in the ’90s, got bought by André Balazs in 2002 shortly after the arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach, was sold again, and then again, and has been shuttered since Hurricane Irma in 2017.

    The Raleigh, though, will soon return. Developer Michael Shvo, who, along with his backers, has spent billions on real estate since the beginning of the pandemic, has acquired the property and its adjoining real estate to create a three-acre beachfront parcel. Shvo hired Marino—best known for designing storefronts for Chanel and homes for the Qatari billionaire HBJ, Larry Gagosian, and Steven Schwarzman—to design the sprawling hotel cluster and residential high-rise that will go up next door. It was a big get. Apart from some boutiques and private homes, Marino is not big on Miami projects.

    “Peter’s moving into the buildings, so finally he’s going to have a home in Miami,” Shvo said. “The level of Miami is just now getting elevated. There was nowhere to go, right?”

    “Well, there was some place to go—you could buy a house in Coconut Grove, which is an hour away, which is like living in northern Westchester and saying, ‘I live in New York,’” Marino said. “They’re very nice communities, I think. But they’re far away. And with traffic, it’s not conducive to a weekender such as myself.”

    We were speaking in a temporary structure built to evoke Marino’s plans for the Raleigh, with the stately deco look shaking hands with his more brash style. There was a precise replica of the original bar downstairs, serving VIPs gratis martinis and dishes from Langosteria, the Milan seafood spot popular among the mega-yacht set. We moved over to the model of the Raleigh, Shvo looming over his yet-to-be-built empire with its pool to be viewed from the high-rise condo building. The 40 units start at $10 million.

    “Yes, a lot of these buyers here are second, third, fourth home buyers, but they’re spending a lot more time here,” Shvo told me. “They’ll spend six months out of the year, four months out of the year.”

    I asked him what pushed Miami toward its transformation into a city where such people live and work. He responded immediately.

    “Covid was an accelerant,” he said. “Miami was transitioning from being a weekend city, a resort city, to being what I call an urban resort. So the idea is that: you can live here, you can vacation here, you can eat here, you can play here. The restaurant scene has obviously evolved. The culture has evolved, the museums have evolved. Those are things that you didn’t have five years ago.”

    Art Basel Miami Beach is not the best art fair in the world. It’s not the coolest. It’s not the most fun, or the chicest, or the most lucrative. Then why, year after year, does it only get bigger? It’s just the nature of Miami, a perpetual boomtown. About this time last year, we were talking about how no other city in America had tethered its fortunes closer to the crypto boom than Miami. The mayor took his salary in Bitcoin, and a large portion of the sector seemed to operate out of bay-adjacent office clusters. Until recently, the Miami Heat’s arena bore the name for the now infamous Sam Bankman-Fried–run crypto exchange, FTX.

    Surely such a place might see some of its enthusiasm dampened in the last nine months. And yet after the crypto crash, Miami was doing just fine as far as I could tell. Now the real banks have moved in, most recently Ken Griffin’s Citadel, following Carl Icahn’s shop and Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.

    “We’ll see how big Wall Street South becomes,” Griffin said in an interview with

    Bloomberg News at the Citadel Securities Global Macro Conference in Miami. “We’re on Brickell Bay, and maybe in 50 years it will be Brickell Bay North how we refer to New York in finance.”

    As Shvo says, people are indeed moving here, and staying here. Jeff Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, have purchased two neighboring properties on a beachside island called Indian Creek, the so-called billionaire’s bunker that counts Julio Iglesias and Tom Brady as residents. Also on the bunker are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who have been soft-launching their return to polite society on the local dining scene. Last week, Ivanka went to see The Black Keys with the actor Rachel Korine, who lives nearby with her husband, the artist and filmmaker Harmony Korine. A source said that Harmony has been coming over to the Kushner-Trump house to study the Torah with Jared. (A rep for Kushner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    Nate Freeman

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  • A Mischievous Art Basel Installation Turns Personal Wealth Into Video Game

    A Mischievous Art Basel Installation Turns Personal Wealth Into Video Game

    Few people like to point out the paradoxes between art and commerce quite as much as artists themselves. At Art Basel in Miami Beach this week, a piece from the appropriately named Brooklyn group MSCHF found a new and amusing way to investigate this conflict.

    A functional ATM puts the cash balance of each user up on a video screen display. It then maintains a ranking, such that the person with the most dough gets the top perch. It’s a lot like playing coin-operated video games, but instead of awarding kudos for blasting asteroids, it’s based on how quickly your wealth management team got you out of crypto.

    Here you can see DJ Diplo joining in the fun. After an appearance from Rich Uncle Moneybags a/k/a Mr. Monopoly—surely that falls under “fair use”—you’ll see that he’s got over three mil in his checking account and became the high scorer.

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    Daniel Greenberg, a co-founder of MSCHF, told NPR that the work, called ATM Leaderboard, has sold for $75,000. Where and if the object appears in the future is up to the new owner (the name of whom was not disclosed), but the top scorers on the leaderboard will remain after each showing “to encourage people to top previous users.”

    Greenberg also called the piece “an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses,” and said that “from its conception, we had mentally earmarked this work for a location like Miami Basel, a place where there is a dense concentration of people renting Lamborghinis and wearing Rolexes.”

    Previous notable MSCHF pieces include Spot’s Rampage, in which a Boston Dynamics robotic dog was fitted with a paintball gun, the unlicensed Nike footwear called Satan Shoes made in collaboration with Lil Nas X, and large-scale paintings based off ludicrous hospital bills, which were then sold to pay off the debts of those who donated them. 

    ATM Leaderboard (which, again, is a functional ATM) was created in partnership with Perrotin, a gallery with outposts in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Las Vegas. In 2019 Perrotin brought Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian to Art Basel, which consisted of a banana duct taped to a wall. Two of the three editions sold for $120,000, but another was yanked down and eaten by Georgian artist David Datuna in an unannounced site-specific performance piece called Hungry Artist. 

    In an interview, Datuna said that he does not really like bananas, but he felt connected with “part of [Maurizio] Cattelan” when the piece eventually exited his body. God bless the world of contemporary art. 

    Jordan Hoffman

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  • Art Basel Miami Beach: What Does the Future Hold for the Most Raucous Week in American Arts?

    Art Basel Miami Beach: What Does the Future Hold for the Most Raucous Week in American Arts?

    On Tuesday morning, Dan Gelber, the mayor of Miami Beach, stepped out of City Hall and walked the half block lined by botanical gardens to the city’s convention center, flanked by a small crew of staffers. A press conference was set to start, and Gelber took a seat onstage next to the people who run the Swiss-based global mega-fair empire that is Art Basel. Gelber was in his wide tie and big slacks, a far cry from the Speedos of South Beach, and the crowd included several Swiss politicians, journalists from Asia and South America, billionaire art collectors who live in town, and at least five armed policemen. 

    By the time his life had led him to this press conference, Gelber had been entangled with Basel for 25 years—in the late 1990s, his father was the mayor of Miami Beach, and the forces were colluding to bring the first-ever expansion of Art Basel to America. Director Lorenzo Rudolf had turned a regional trade fair in the Rhineland into a global power with a wait list of nearly a thousand galleries. After securing a partnership with UBS, Rudolf thirsted for expansion into America. His director of communication, Sam Keller, found that a number of the fair’s most vigorous collectors were advocating for Miami. Miamians weren’t sure why. 

    “When Sam Keller came to Miami, he came to dinner at our house, and he said they were thinking about coming to Miami—not New York, not Los Angeles, but Miami,” said Rosa de la Cruz, the longtime Miami mega-collector, while on a panel. 

    “Miami had really gone downhill in the ’80s, and in the ’90s South Beach turned it into a party town, which upset me,” said the collector and real estate developer Craig Robins. 

    “We went through our Miami Vice phase, which was something we really don’t want to remember a whole lot,” said Gelber, who was living in DC when his dad was mayor, working as a federal prosecutor. 

    Still there were advocates. The mega-dealer Jeffrey Deitch, perhaps the biggest buyer at the Basel fair, came down to see his clients Norman and Irma Braman and was taken by the Art Deco architecture of South Beach, with the historic buildings ripe for reinvention. Deitch linked Norman with Rudolf and Keller, who then invited a delegation from the Magic City to the lovely Swiss city to see their decades-old fair in a centuries-old city, and they were still unconvinced. 

    But the Miami advocates persisted and eventually, Art Basel Miami Beach first opened its doors in 2002. The fair brings in an estimated $500 million to region each year, with the week of the fair long since mutating into a bonanza of attendant happenings—museum galas, pop-up galleries, fashion shows, boutique openings, brand activations, NFT nonsense, film premieres, high-profile concerts, and DJ appearances, a pop-up Saint Laurent gallery on the beach displaying Steven Meisel’s photos of Madonna for her book Sex—unmatched anywhere in the American cultural calendar. 

    So the story has been for at least the last decade or so. But a recent (and somewhat abrupt) changing of the guard at the top of the Basel leadership, coupled with the new vision of the media scion James Murdoch, who bought the largest stake in the fair group’s parent company, MCH Group, in 2020, means that the 20th-anniversary edition comes at a time of upheaval for the fair. Both the outgoing global director, Marc Spiegler, and the incoming global CEO, Noah Horowitz, were onstage Tuesday, sitting next to each other as if a baton was set to be passed between them. Many in the convention center’s grand ballroom were waiting for some spark of drama to emerge, something akin to the shock announcement of Spiegler’s departure a month earlier. 

    For those ready to pounce on Basel, Spiegler reminded them about those initial doubts surrounding Miami 20 years ago, and even took a veiled shot at rival Frieze, which operates its US fairs in the nation’s two biggest cities.

    “Rarely have so many people been so wrong—because the moment this show opened, it established itself as the most important fair in the most important art market in the world,” Spiegler said, staring down the attendees of the press conference from the podium. “And Art Basel in Miami Beach has held that position firmly for 20 years, truly uncontested, despite challenges from New York and from Los Angeles.”

    It should be said, even though we should by now be used to this, that even in 2022 the sheer amount of personal wealth on view in Miami during Basel is staggering. Each year hundreds of private jets are chartered down to South Florida, arriving a day early to diligently take in the dozens of private museums and collections and gallery shows and mega-dealer pop-ups. The de la Cruz family opened its Key Biscayne mansion to invited guests Monday morning, and more spoken Spanish than English wafted through the seaside mansion as women in extravagantly high heels walked past a room-sized Ugo Rondinone installation and paintings by Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. 

    Onto the Rubell Museum, the giant Allapattah space run by the mega-collectors Don and Mera Rubell, which houses the collection they’ve built over 50 years—gigantic works by Sterling Ruby and Keith Haring and a whole room full of Pictures Generation masterpieces. Then to the offices of DACRA, the real estate company built by Craig Robins, the man responsible for the Design District. For hours he offered Champagne and caviar while those on the list—hello, Jorge Pérez!—gawked at the works of art his employees get to hack out emails next to: a quite frank Jenny Saville painting of multilove in bed, a suite of Marlene Dumas paintings that rivaled anything at François Pinault’s museum show of the artist in Venice, and Urs Fischer’s larger-than-life wax statue of Julian Schnabel, intended to be lit and melted down. 

    Speaking of Schnabel, his son Vito was a floor down in the Buick Building, admiring a painting by Jamian Juliano-Villani at 100 Years, a joint show put on by Deitch and Larry Gagosian. A few blocks away at the ICA Miami was the first Stateside museum show for Michel Majerus, swarmed with advisers who rep the lenders to the show. And then White Cube took over the private beachfront offered to members of Soho Beach House and erected a giant white tent so the likes of actor Eric André, singer Joe Jonas, and collectors Sandretto and Agostino Re Rebaudengo could eat grilled lobster while listening to the legendary Roy Ayers elegantly whack out melodies on the vibraphone. 

    And the fair hadn’t even opened yet. As guests awoke Tuesday, many rolled through their lobbies to see the works of art installed in various Miami Beach hotels as part of No Vacancy, which awards one of the featured artists a prize of $10,000. One such hotel is the Loews, the preferred local inn of many an art dealer—the place is so lousy with gallery folk it was like a niche reality show waiting to happen. Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong was at one table, Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art director Tom Eccles was at another, and surrounding them were dealers from David Zwirner, Skarstedt, Pace, Karma, Hauser & Wirth. The French dealer slash-TV-star Kamel Mennour was at one table, and New York’s Marianne Boesky was at another, and Sean Kelly was at another. (Gagosian stays at the swanky 1 Hotel, but sources said this year he booked a double suite and then decided not to come.)

    Nate Freeman

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  • Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: An Occasionally Rational Guide to the Hypest Week in America

    Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: An Occasionally Rational Guide to the Hypest Week in America

    An exceedingly calm, pleasant, and old-school thing to do during Art Basel Miami Beach is to go to Joe’s Stone Crab, put your name down with the maître d’, and quaff stiff cold drinks while you wait in the tropical weather for your table. When you get there, you order stone crabs, hash browns, creamed spinach, maybe the famous fried chicken, and then key lime pie for dessert. At last count, the spot was doing 1,500 covers over the course of a night, and each day was serving 5,000 pounds of the maritime delicacy meant to be dipped in mustard sauce—but that’s a normal week, not a week in which a cultural phenomenon brings an estimated $400 million to $500 million to the city annually. It’s deeply comforting to know that the menu, and the unfailingly snappy service, have remained unchanged from the day the place opened in 1913. 

    Other things in Miami have changed quite rapidly, even in just the last few years. When Art Basel Miami Beach opens to VIPs on Tuesday, November 29, the fair will once again present a head-spinning clusterfuck of asset-holders and exchange-makers, of luxury corporations and sleaze factories, of high art and low tides. What began as a trade fair so long ago exploded into such an annual boondoggle for the bigwigs in fashion, music, film, cosmetics, legal weed, media, restaurants, and hospitality that to point out the mutation is by now a cliché itself. And that means, as usual, there will be an endless stream of events that have nothing to do with a Swiss art fair—and have only the most tenuous connection to art or Miami or possibly anything at all. Should one go to the PIN–UP magazine x Swiss Institute’s Club Glam New Americana, or the Bagatelle x SMT NFT wallet activation? Tough call. Should we check out the launch of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label x VANDYTHEPINK NFT? Maybe. Actually, you know what seems chill? The Rock the Bells x Cheetos event in an AR-powered art gallery aboard the SeaFair megayacht with a performance by Flo Milli. Let’s do that. An Everyrealm x Future Galerie x Mona Web3 metaverse architecture project designed by Daniel Arsham? You don’t have to tell me twice.

    Once upon a time, it was the art that brought people to Art Basel Miami Beach the week after Thanksgiving. In the 1990s, after decades operating out of a pharma hub in the Swiss Rhineland, Art Basel wanted to expand to America and become the first multicity art fair network, bringing the world’s best galleries to the newly globalized patrons of the international contemporary art market. Basel director Lorenzo Rudolf and his communications director Sam Keller looked at Chicago and New York, but the OG Miami collectors—the Bramans, the Rubells, the Robinses—connected the duo with local Sunshine State authorities and talent, and pulled off a major upset. 

    At that time, the November-December gray zone was well before the holiday rush, and it was crickets in Magic City, with most of the hotel rooms on the beach unoccupied. That changed immediately. When the fair opened in 2002, it was right off the bat a must-stop for every European, North American, South American, and Asia-based collector. And the fair itself has expanded too—for its 20th anniversary edition it is stacked with 283 galleries participating, approaching double the 160 that showed at the first edition. It’s also the first Basel since the fair announced that Noah Horowitz will be taking over as CEO—starting to clarify the vision of one James Murdoch, the media scion and Lupa Systems founder who took a controlling interest in the fair last year. 

    The big guns will all be present. David Zwirner is bringing a suite of new works by Nate Lowman and a grand Joan Mitchell diptych, Trees (1990-1991), while Hauser & Wirth is bringing a large new painting by Mark Bradford and Henry Taylor’s epic portrait of Michelle Obama (her husband is a fan of the artist.) And Jeff Koons will offer for sale work from his new Apollo series, first seen earlier this year at Dakis Joannou’s project space on the Greek island of Hydra. The work is Nike Sneakers (N110 D/MS/X) (2020-22), and it is a polychrome bronze statue of a pair of kicks. Peak Koons. 

    Those who spend more time downtown than in Chelsea will no doubt beeline to the themed sectors, such as Meridians, which features large-scale work, or the solo booths in Survey and Positions—some highlights will include Samara Golden at the Night Gallery booth, and displays of work by Julia Wachtel will be at New York’s Helena Anrather and Brussels’s Super Dakota.

    But some galleries have even more up their sleeves. Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch both have booths at the fair, and they’ve got some pretty heavy-duty presentations. Gagosian will have big new paintings by Harold Ancart, Rick Lowe, Stanley Whitney, and other artists, while Deitch is staging a group show in the booth called “Goddesses” featuring work by more than a dozen female artists. But the two megadealers will also team up to take over the Buick Building in the Design District and stage a gigantic show called “100 Years”—it’s Deitch and Gagosian’s seventh Miami collaboration, and perhaps their biggest yet. 

    It’s far from the only show in the Design District, the area that, with surge pricing, is easily an $150 Uber in traffic from the beach. At the ICA Miami will be the first US museum show of work by Michel Majerus, who was killed at the age of 35 in the deadly Luxair flight from Berlin to Luxembourg in 2002. The de la Cruz Collection will have a show of collection highlights, and Chicago cultural force Abby Pucker once again teams up with curator Zoe Lukov to put together a show of more than 40 artists. 

    Nate Freeman

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