The answer is mayhem.
It's gotten an early start this year. While the official Art Basel Miami Beach preview day is Wednesday, December 4, a separate public art exhibition called "The Great Elephant Migration" landed on the sands of Miami Beach last week. (Your Instagram feeds have probably been inundated with the wooden pachyderms.) The sprawling installation includes 100 life-sized elephant sculptures and raises awareness and donations for real-life animal conservation. In true Miami fashion, however, three days after the exhibition's arrival, Page Six reported that a couple was discovered having "loud sex" on top of one of the elephants on Thanksgiving night, days before Miami Art Week is officially underway.
This is why we can't have nice things.
It isn't just the horny masses who bring their vices to the city, though. Gallerists and artists are also known to blow off more than a little steam at the afterparties following closing hours at the convention center and satellite fairs. Local artist Bhakti Baxter, who is skipping Art Week this year, told me that it's all part of the "obvious inclinations of jaded, coked-up art world people at the end of the year making a final buck and busting a nut."
It makes sense. Art Basel, the official art fair that inspired the spinoff of countless satellite fairs and started the frenzy that we now know as Miami Art Week, is the biggest contemporary art show in North America. More private planes land in South Florida for this event than for the Super Bowl. I can recite these facts as if they were my own name and birthday because, for nearly a decade, I worked for Art Basel's official magazine.
It's massive, over the top, and the art itself has almost — if not absolutely — become secondary to the parties, the posturing, and the peacocking.
I spoke to a high-end events planner who orchestrates many of the impossible-to-get-on guest lists for the week. He told me that the art world considers this time in Miami their "spring break."
"A lot of people are making money during Basel, and then they party. But I really think the biggest thing people forget is everyone is here to social climb," he says. "I mean, the amount of people trying to fuck each other and kiss ass, and people going out of their way to get people drugs because someone wants it — it's crazy."
In the hierarchy of attendees who are out and about during Art Week, the events planner says there are the serious collectors, the gallerists and artists, and then all the hangers-on. "Everyone thinks they're cool," he says, "but when you work in the back of it, you see everything."
Back of the house or not, few of us are immune to having our own crazy Art Week story. If you've attended enough of them, chances are you have a sordid tale to tell. There's just something in the air — other than all the ubiquitous white powder.
A publicist who works in the design space laughed with a bit of nostalgia when he told me about an Art Week dinner where he met a prominent Parisian artist.
"He was a narcissist, so obviously my type," he says.
The two hit it off so well that they continued on together to an afterparty, where the publicist surprised himself by giving the artist a blow job in the entranceway to the club. A passerby reminded the pair that they were in public, so the two migrated to the DJ booth, where he finished the deed with a hand job.
"Everyone just gets away with everything during Basel," he adds.
Another art world insider recounted a party thrown a few years back by a prominent real-estate developer. At the private event, guests were greeted with a scene straight out of Scarface: a young woman wearing nothing but body paint holding a welcome tray with lines of cocaine.
If this all sounds a little excessive, let me remind you we are talking about a world where a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in 2019 and was resold at auction for $6.2 million this year. How did we really expect people to behave?
Ready or not, Miami, here it is again. As we used to say back in my days at the magazine, "Let the games begin."
