It’s a magnet for magnates
Last night in Miami, I found myself at a party.
Rich and glamorous and beautiful people sipped top-shelf liquor by the swimming
pool, expertly ignoring the black-tied waiters passing meticulously-assembled
canapés.
In that respect, the party was not unlike many,
many other parties in Miami this week. But there was one thing that made this
party different: it didn’t even pretend to be about art. It wasn’t put on by a
gallerist, or a private bank, or a luxury brand seeking to hijack some of the
glamor of Art Basel Miami Beach. Instead, the party took place in Coconut
Grove, far from the South Beach and Design District craziness, and it was
connected not to any art fair but rather to the World Economic Forum.
Was this an Art Basel party, all the same? Yes, it
was. Art Basel Miami is an orgy of luxurious excess, and it always has been —
that’s its raison d’être. The main fair itself, of course, is wildly
profitable: galleries from around the world pay tens or even hundreds of
thousands of dollars for the privilege of being able to stake out a few square
meters of exhibition-hall space and hawk their wares to a crowd of
ultra-wealthy art collectors, all of whom are pumped and primed to buy buy buy,
lest someone else buy the piece in question first. But the main fair is merely the eye of a
much, much larger storm. And it’s the storm, not the eye, that people talk
about when they talk about Art Basel.
The storm that is Art Basel takes place all across
Miami, wherever excessive sums of money are to be found. And to understand what
propels it forwards, it’s important to understand that the art, and the
parties, aren’t the point. Artists, when they come to Miami for Art Basel, are
invariably confused and/or angry. Sometimes, indeed, they get so angry that
they’llhead-butt 700 water balloons while explaining that they’re “making a
statement” because in their art space, “nothing’s for sale.”
Doing this kind of thing makes artists feel better,
because they find the shiny billionaire-friendly art with six and seven-figure
price tags at the convention center to be boring. Art Basel looks just the same
as the Armory Show; this year’s fair looks just the same as last year’s fair;
what’s fresh? What’s new? What hasn’t even been made yet? (The most-read
article at this year’s fair was DT Max’s profile of Hans Ulrich Obrist, the
curator who is “obsessed with the not-yet-done” and who is criticized as being
“fast-moving and superficial”.)
These art-world kvetchers, however, are making a
category error. They think that Art Basel is about art, when in fact it’s about
money, and — even more — about the people who have lots of it. At an art fair,
paintings and sculptures stop being art — a fair is pretty much the worst
possible environment in which to appreciate art — and instead become objects
with a dollar value and an asking price and a future value trajectory. If
you’re smart, you buy now, before the piece in question soars in value. If
you’re stupid, you buy at the top, and find yourself saddled with an expensive
work that no one wants.
That’s the game, and in order for that game to be
played the pieces have to have a certain sameness to them, from one fair to the
next and one year to the next. When the name of the game is brand recognition and
speculation, the excitement comes from seeing artists rise and fall in value.
This Anish Kapoor might look exactly the same as all the other Anish Kapoors
you’ve seen at various art shows over the past few years, but when you know how
much the asking price was, for each piece, at each show; when you can kick
yourself for not buying when he was cheaper, or congratulate yourself on not
buying when he was more expensive — then you can start to understand what makes
an art fair so exciting to the monied classes.
That’s why an art fair is the perfect thing to have
at the center of the Art Basel storm. It’s an orgy of capitalist excess, a
place where objects with no intrinsic value sell for millions of dollars. Most
crucially, it’s a place where sums which would be enormous in other contexts
become commonplace, or even risibly small. When Art Basel started, its main
backers were the real-estate developers throwing up identical
white-steel-and-glass condominium towers in South Beach. The condo game, back
then, was similar to the art game: buy now, for a million bucks or so; flip
tomorrow for a healthy profit. And the best way to sell a condo in Miami Beach
is to sell to a group of people who are surrounded by sun and sex and sand and
who are simultaneously inured to eye-popping price tags.
Miami real estate is much like high-end art in
another important respect, too: it appeals to an international crowd of people
who don’t necessarily like having their assets tracked and taxed by their
domestic governments. You don’t hear the term “money laundering” very much
inside the art fair, but there are obvious attractions to any asset which is
both extremely valuable and highly portable. Then look at the sheer number of
nationalities buying high-end Miami condos, invariably through shell companies,
and remember that Florida has no state income tax. Let’s just say there’s a
natural overlap there. And while the wattage of Miami does dim a little bit
during the 51 weeks of the year that Art Basel is notgoing on, it’s also worth
remembering that if you’re the kind of person who has eight different
residences around the world, you might well only spend a week or two per year
in Miami anyway.
Which brings me back to that party in Coconut
Grove. The attendees were not Davos delegates: they weren’t billionaire
industrialists, or heads of state, or economic policymakers. Instead, they were
all in town for something called the World Economic Forum Family Business
Community Next Generation Annual Meeting. Essentially, the WEF has realized
that a rapidly increasing degree of economic power is being held in the hands
of ultra-rich families, and so it has started catering directly to those
families. Not just the men at the top who made the money in the first place,
but to their children, too, and even, in some cases, their grandchildren.
They’re the stateless rich, and it’s no coincidence that their annual meeting,
this year, took place at the same time — and even in the same convention
center! — as Art Basel.
Because the storm that is Art Basel Miami Beach is,
at heart, about creating a reason for the free-spending private-jet crowd to
descend upon Miami for a week. The art attracts them, and so do the parties,
and so do the celebrities, and so does the December sun. But mostly, Art Basel
Miami Beach, and the orgiastic clusterfuck of conspicuous oneupmanship at which
it excels, acts as a bat-signal for the obscenely wealthy. In a stateless world
where everybody is always on the move, Art Basel is one of the few rocks in the
stream — it’s the one week per year that you can put in your calendar, safe in
the knowledge that all your gazillionaire peers are going to be there as well.
That alone makes it almost worthwhile to buy a condo.
ABAB UPDATES
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LUXURY BRANDS CAPATALIZE ON ART BASEL
$5,000 REWARD OFFERED FOR RETURN OF PICASSO ART PIECE
PICASSO ARTWORK STOLEN FROM MIAMI ART FAIR
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014: THE 25 EVENTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
Art Basel Miami Beach 2014 Dates, Events & Exhibitors
IN PICS: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014 VIP PREVIEW
LUXURY BRANDS CAPATALIZE ON ART BASEL
$5,000 REWARD OFFERED FOR RETURN OF PICASSO ART PIECE
PICASSO ARTWORK STOLEN FROM MIAMI ART FAIR
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014: THE 25 EVENTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
Art Basel Miami Beach 2014 Dates, Events & Exhibitors
IN PICS: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2014 VIP PREVIEW
