Art Basel Miami Beach Is Back—With Billionaires, Yachts, Smoothies, and an Artist Cutting Up a Private Jet

“Vibe check?” the text message read.

The query from an art adviser on a group chat came across my phone as my Uber was stuck in horrendous Collins Avenue traffic. Ah yes, the question everyone wants answered: What is the vibe in Miami Beach during Art Basel? The art fairs in London and Paris were big hits, and November auctions did well. The art market, by all indications, is on an uptick…but Miami Beach, which opened for VIPs Wednesday, is feeling squeezed by the ever-expanding art fair circuit. Galleries dropped out. Collectors opted out of making the trek.

What was the vibe exactly? There were a few ways to answer the question. The vibe was traffic so horrible that the fair had to organize water taxis to get VIP collectors from the beach to the mainland—“with bay breezes as an added bonus,” as Time Out Miami added cheerfully. The vibe was the David Grutman smoothie at Joe & the Juice, packed with Irish sea moss and algae powder. The vibe was multiple people sending me this bonkers video of Alec Monopoly, an old friend of True Colors, taking a metal cutter to the nose of a plane, saying, “We got a Gulfstream G4 over here. We’re cutting up jets…. I’m the first artist ever to cut up private jets and make them into art.”

And the vibe was certainly the radio announcer on Easy 93.1, while my car was stalled on Collins, who said, “Art Bay-sel, every year it seems like, every year it gets more expensive, with more people spending more money. It’s just way too expensive—but there’s some outdoor art too!”

And then the easy listening radio DJ put on “Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Collins.

Things appeared to be more expensive than usual at NADA, the satellite fair that often acts as a springboard into the young-gallery sectors at the main fair. It’s a place to find work by younger artists at attractive prices. Several advisers told me price points had ticked up slightly in recent years due to the usual culprits: inflation, shipping costs, tariffs—all that.

As a nonbuyer the fair looked pretty great to me. I liked the new painting by Tamo Jugeli at Polina Berlin, new works by Ben Werther at Amanita, the Balthus-y small paintings by Max Xeno Karnig at Castle, the photographs by Jackson Markovic at Atlanta gallery Hawkins Headquarters, Seth Cameron’s colorful but deceptively macabre paintings at Entrance.

The closest thing I got to sticker shock was when I pulled up to the café to order a single small bottle of sparkling water. What could a bottle of water possibly set you back, right? $7.62.

“Ah, art fair prices!” the woman working the register said.

Then it was on to the Rubell Museum. I ran into Mera Rubell, who walked me arm in arm to the Jon & Vinny’s that opened in the museum last year. She wanted to introduce me to Thomas Houseago, the artist who has a large survey that fills a chunk of the museum. Houseago was finishing a late lunch with the artist Alexandre Diop, who has work in the show at the Historic Hampton House.

“Would you like a tour?” Houseago asked.

“You get him an espresso and he’s ready to go,” Rubell said.

Houseago led me past MoMA PS1 director Connie Butler and into the show, which juxtaposes his iconic giant-scale statue works from the middle of his career with newer works that have come out of his experiences in deep, immersive therapy. He’s emerged with a new understanding of his sexual abuse as a child, and a suite of big-departure new paintings, related to his therapeutic breakthrough, are totally different for Houseago.

“They all come from the frontal cortex,” he said, walking around the show, locking eyes with me, an intensity pouring out of him.

Houseago arrived Monday and was totally taken aback that the new paintings were all displayed in the first room. The Rubells and the museum’s director handled the curation, and he ceded all control, but when he saw the hang he had a minor freak-out. Then Houseago went into the second room, and things started to make more sense. There was Untitled (Red Man), a work the Rubells acquired in 2009, a towering 14-foot-tall bronze that made Houseago famous. Then he led me over to two newer giant sculptures, Madness Devouring Our Children and Disassociation Demon Birth. They’re giant wooden sculptures that he made with a chainsaw in debilitating California heat in a burst of feverish energy. One is a demon with a gigantic male member eating an infant, the other giving birth quite violently, and they are not for the faint of heart.

“No one wanted to show this, but Don and Mera Rubell, they homed in on it. They said, ‘It has to be here,’” he said.

Mera Rubell shrugged.

“Art isn’t some pretty object,” she said. “Art is difficult, and this is real art.”

Then it was on to the ICA Miami, which is wedged between a Supreme store and a Tesla dealership. It has a great show of the late Joyce Pensato, with loans from a pretty diverse cast of collectors: KAWS, Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Hollywood producer David Hoberman, Sotheby’s dealer Ralph DeLuca, Chicago collectors David and Nancy Frej, Lisson Gallery founder Nicholas Logsdail, Hudson Valley MOCA founders Marc and Livia Straus. At the Bass Museum of Art, I walked in while Jack Pierson was giving a personal tour of his show to Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach. Called “The Miami Years,” it tracks Pierson’s history of living and staying in Miami as a young artist, and includes many of the works made at the time.

“I was living at First and Washington at the time and when I told people my address they said, ‘What, you can’t live there, it’s dangerous,’” Pierson recalled.

Then it was off to cocktails at the Sunset Islands home of George Lindemann, the billionaire collector who’s long been the board president of The Bass. The party was thrown by Marianne Boesky on behalf of her artists, the Haas Brothers (twins Nikolai and Simon Haas), who made much of the furniture at the house. Plenty of great art at Lindemann’s pad (Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Alex Katz), but I was most intrigued by work—is that what it is?—in the men’s room. Instead of an actual mirror, there’s a rectangle with the word mirror in scare quotes, à la the designer and artist Virgil Abloh, who died days before his collection for Louis Vuitton was set to be unveiled at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2021. “RIP Virgil” was written in the bottom corner.

Who made this mysterious artwork? It kind of looked like Tom Sachs. Nope. It’s a Beeple.

“I just hadn’t found a mirror yet and Beeple was at the house and he said, ‘How about I make you a mirror?’” Lindemann told me. “So I asked one of my kids for a Sharpie and I made sure that it had ink in it. It was the same day that Virgil Abloh had died, and Beeple made it as an homage to Virgil on the wall. And so I framed it.”

On to the Gagosian dinner at Mr. Chow, the only Florida outpost of Michael Chow’s masterpiece, perhaps the only Gotham–gone–South Beach restaurant to hold its own. In the house: Larry Gagosian, who was very present for the dinner and the fair the next day. Also definitely present were major American collectors, all of whom dutifully waited in line for all the Chow classics: Chicken Satay, Mr. Chow Noodles, Ma Mignon, Crispy Beef—all incredible.

The next morning, the Serpentine brunch at Casa Tua seemed more packed than usual as New York collector Glenn Fuhrman, standing next to Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist, announced that over the next decade, his FLAG Art Foundation would team up with the institution to launch a biennial art prize of 1 million British pounds, to be divided among five artists, with 200,000 British pounds given out to each artist. It was just one of the half dozen events at the art clubhouse, which started in Miami but has since followed the collector trail to Aspen and New York. Milling around were artists Marco Brambilla and Sam Falls, as Hank Willis Thomas snapped a pic with collector Beth Rudin DeWoody and MoMA board chair Sarah Arison walked by.

The singer Jewel was there, wearing some pretty incredible shoes: platform boots that had sets of gold toes sticking out on top.

“They’re Schiaparelli,” she said.

Then Jewel revealed to me that, in her new career as a visual artist, she has a show in Venice during the Biennale, presented by Crystal Bridges.

“It’s right near the Prada Foundation,” she said.

Next up was the Art Basel preopening breakfast, which is called, in Basel-speak, the “Prelude.” It’s in the collectors lounge, which is its own kind of ecosystem. A string quartet played a languid orchestral version of “Mas Que Nada” as some Florida socialites schmoozed with on-duty Miami Beach cops. The Casa Dragones booth wasn’t open yet, but the Ruinart was flowing. The vibes? They were good.

Jorge Pérez, the billionaire developer who opened his own museum across the causeway in 2013, was lounging on a couch in white linen reading the Financial Times, looking incredibly relaxed, chatting with an adviser, declining a canapé of a mini eggs Benedict with yuzu hollandaise. The private NetJets bar inside the invite-only collectors lounge was getting ready to start serving cocktails before noon.

The fair opened at 11 a.m. and it became immediately clear that galleries had brought ambitious stuff, both in terms of price points and quality. The mega-dealers were not phoning anything in: Larry Gagosian was seated at the table directly next to his booth, Iwan Wirth was standing between sculptures by Paul McCarthy and Rashid Johnson. Jay Jopling was at the White Cube booth chatting with Fuhrman, and David Zwirner spent most of the morning near the Richard Prince joke painting he brought to the fair and hung on the front of his booth.

There were a lot of Prince jokes: a big diptych at Gladstone, a small triptych at Skarstedt, another at Acquavella. And plenty of Jeff Koons too. Was any of it selling? Evidently sales were happening. Not as many as Paris, but not a disaster either. And definitely better than Miami in 2024. Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said that in the first few hours of the fair, sales were up 40%—compared to not just the early hours of 2024, but to what Hauser sold in the entire week last year. A George Condo painting sold for just under $4 million, while two Louise Bourgeois paintings sold for $3.2 million and $2.5 million.

Almine Rech sold a Picasso for between $2.8 million and $3 million. Sprüth Magers sold a newer Condo for $1.2 million. Pace sold a Sam Gilliam for $1.1 million. Lisson sold a Kapoor for 500,000 British pounds. Matthew Brown sold a Carroll Dunham for $350,000.

Larry Gagosian wasn’t offering up prices, but the gallery did say it sold Tom Wesselmann’s Bedroom Blonde With T.V. and a Lichtenstein, plus new works by Jonas Wood, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Rudolf Stingel.

Who bought it all? I don’t know, but I can tell you who could have bought it all. That would be the man who waltzed into the Gagosian booth with an eight-piece entourage around noon and parked himself in front of Maurizio Cattelan’s Carrara marble sculpture Bones. The same man whose yacht Dragonfly, reportedly valued at an estimated $450 million, is currently moored in downtown Miami. The same man who recently bumped down Mark Zuckerberg to become the fifth richest man in the world, according to Forbes’s “Real-Time Billionaires List.”