Art Basel Miami Beach is a trade show, a Cannes festival, and a Super Bowl all rolled into one. It’s the biggest art fair in the US and one of a handful of truly global destination cultural events. The first week of December — when art dealers, collectors, curators and creators descend on Vice City — also marks the unofficial start of Florida’s snowbird season. And since its launch in 2002, ABMB has emerged as a year-end, pre-holiday retreat for corporate leaders of all stripes.
Every year the art fair draws thousands of investors to South Beach (some art lovers, too). But over the last two years, the market for high-end contemporary art has cratered. That’s not something that really happens for, say, a Formula 1 race. So what does the collapse of the art market mean for the host city of the mega-spectacle where the art world convenes?
Art Basel is big business for Miami. The fair generated an estimated $547 million in economic activity in 2024, according to the city, with 75,000 attendees parading through South Beach hotels, bistros and night clubs. This year’s edition could generate $565 million, per an estimate from John Boyd Jr., principal of the corporate consultancy The Boyd Company.
“It’s Miami getting blitzed by the global 0.1 percent,” Boyd says. “Wealthy influencers, wealthy investors, from New York, Chicago, Dubai, Sao Paolo, Paris, all on a mission to spend money.”
Yes, the images transmitted out of Miami are often mind-breakingly silly. In 2019 it was Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the notorious banana duct-taped to the wall, still resonant today as a prop in a television spot for AI glasses starring two of the Chrises. This year the piece to make you question your commitment to Western values is an installation by Beeple featuring robot dogs — outfitted with bobblehead caricatures of the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — that poop out pictures.
Despite the exuberance of the ideas on view at ABMB and all the satellite fairs that make up Miami Art Week, the state of the art market is despairing. Critical galleries across the country closed shop this year, from Blum, Sean Kelly and Tanya Bonakdar in Los Angeles to Clearing, Sperone Westwater and Venus Over Manhattan in New York, with dozens more in between. There’s plenty of data to back up these anecdotal stories of distress: Earlier this year, Art Basel and its primary sponsor UBS produced a market report indicating that global art sales declined 12 percent in 2024.
Hotel revenues for Miami Beach do reflect a downturn, according to hospitality data provided by CoStar Group. Last year, average hotel revpar (revenue per available room) for Miami Beach dipped 4.2 percent year-over-year for the Thursday VIP preview (which fell on Dec. 5 last year). Revenues declined 8.0 percent for the Friday opening (Dec. 6). For luxury hotels, the story was similar, with a 2024 revpar decline of 2.2 percent on Thursday and 7.5 percent on Friday.
The findings are striking, says Chantal Wu, senior director of hospitality market analytics for CoStar Group. Across the hospitality sector, luxury hotels have been propping up a hospitality industry that is seeing declines on the lower end of the market. That isn’t the case during Art Basel. The numbers also show that people with means are still making the trip — hotel bookings for Miami Beach are up this year, peaking on Thursday — but they’re not sticking around.
“For the people who have to go there to get business done, or for VIP collectors who want to see everything, they go early,” Wu says. “They don’t necessarily linger.”
Art Basel is still a boon for Miami even if collectors are staying fewer nights and paying less for high-end art — even if, in hotel industry terms, the fair isn’t leading to compression. For the city, the critical factor isn’t so much demand outpacing supply; it’s that the people who attend art fairs are coming from out of town.
For international buyers, Miami is the gateway to the US art market, but also a watering hole for business leaders. The period after Thanksgiving and before Christmas would otherwise be a lull for Miami; instead American investors spend some of their year-end bonuses on Miami hotels, restaurants, services and retailers. Art dealers may not break even, but the house always wins.
“Miami always has been the gateway to Latin America but there’s increasingly relationships to the Gulf nations. It benefits from being the sixth borough of Manhattan,” Boyd says.
What distinguishes Art Basel from so many other mega-spectacles that drain local resources — think publicly financed sports stadiums — is that there’s no substitution effect at work locally. When cities use future taxes to finance arenas, for example, they’re diverting local spending from area restaurants and retailers into the stadium: a wash.
Local leaders recognise the benefit: This week Miami Beach and Miami-Dade County officials renamed a stretch of 17th Street on South Beach after Norman Braman, the billionaire art collector and businessman who helped to bring Art Basel to the beach. Local residents, meanwhile, aren’t the audience for the fair. While that leads some residents including local artists to grouse about “Basel bloat,” something like the grassroots Littlest Art Fair in Little Havana has a much better shot at putting some shine on local talent while the Biggest Art Fair is in town.
Whether Art Basel is still a good deal for participating artists and dealers is a much thornier question. Art dealers always cite escalating booth fees at one fair after another as a significant hit to their bottom line, and it’s changing the way that they think about their own galleries. After all, dealers who open brick-and-mortar shops in LA’s Melrose Hill or NY’s Lower East Side yet also follow the international trail of art fairs are in a very real sense paying rent for multiple spaces.
For its part, Art Basel Miami Beach is pledging to bring down booth fees, according to CEO Noah Horowitz, with bigger discounts for smaller galleries that are new to the system, starting with next year’s edition. This year the fair invested in the lighting system at the convention centre (a hidden cost often born by galleries), made space for digital art and hired new global executives for collectors and for audience.
Whatever it still means for the art world, Art Basel Miami Beach long ago reached escape velocity: Even an art fair during a market drought is still a bonanza for Miami.
“For many people, it’s great they’re coming to Miami to see each other and socialise,” Horowitz says. “We want to make sure we’re converting them to coming into the halls. Little by little that transfers to business with our galleries and our audiences.”
By Kriston Capps