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<\/p>\n\n\tIt\u2019s been two years since I last made the trek to Miami Beach in December. Despite the Miami edition of Art Basel being the only art fair to carry a scarlet letter for being \u201cas much about the parties as the art,\u201d it remains the most important fair in the US. And, if we\u2019re being honest, every fair week\u2014from Paris to Los Angeles to Hong Kong\u2014is packed with events and openings, dinners, parties, and after-parties. You can\u2019t make it to everything, especially in Miami. But for you, dear reader, I tried.<\/p>\n
\n\tMy week kicked off\u00a0Monday\u00a0night, when I touched down at Miami International at 9:30pm\u2014just a half hour delayed. Untitled Art was throwing its party for exhibitors at The Moore, a private social club and boutique hotel in the Design District. Like any sane person in town for Art Week, I booked a hotel on Miami Beach. With the party scheduled to end at 10pm, my only choice was to take a cab directly to the party and hope The Moore had a very generous coat check. Just after I arrived, I spotted art dealer\u00a0Lindsey Jarvis\u00a0at the bar chatting with a charming Canadian collector. Perhaps predictably, our conversation turned to apocryphal stories about the ethics\u2014or is it tactics?\u2014of shipping art across state and international borders.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n
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\n\tBut the bar was not the venue for Untitled\u2019s party. That was up a sweeping stairway that appeared ripped from\u00a0Gone With the Wind. At the top, salsa and merengue blasted through the speakers.\u00a0Danny Baez, cofounder of nonprofit ArtNoir, hyped the crowd, while\u00a0Jonny Tanna, founder and director of London\u2019s Harlesden High Street and curator of the fair\u2019s Nest section this year, held court in the back. It was impossible not to dance, and, channeling my Cuban roots, I did.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tThe exterior of Joe\u2019s Stone Crab in Miami Beach. Photo\u00a0Getty Images<\/p>\n
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\n\tThe night before Art Basel\u2019s VIP preview is always the most packed, no matter the city, and\u00a0Tuesday
night in Miami was no different. The only rational way to approach such an evening is to pick your itinerary and stick to your guns. I\u2019m confident I chose wisely. Tribeca art dealer Rob Dimin\u00a0held a sparkling dinner at\u2014where else?\u2014Joe\u2019s Stone Crab, in a private room in honor of his first-ever participation in Art Basel\u2019s Miami edition, as well as a stunning monumental work by the gallery\u2019s Justine Hill in the fair\u2019s Meridians sector. Joe\u2019s is where the real action happens in Miami. Every year, more million-dollar deals are sealed over crab legs and coconut shrimp than at Basel proper. If you are lucky enough to snag a table, order the fried chicken. It\u2019s miles above anything in New York, and there wasn\u2019t a person within arms reach who didn\u2019t ask for a bite.<\/p>\n
\n\tMy next stop of the evening was Gagosian\u2019s party at Mr. Chow, which was as chic and star-studded as one might expect. Among the attendees I spotted: actor\u00a0Olivier Widmaier Picasso, painter\u00a0Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, Top 200 collector\u00a0Beth DeWoody, Art Production Fund cofounder\u00a0Yvonne Force, Christie\u2019s\u00a0Colette Thiebaud, billionaire investor\u00a0Nicolas Berggruen, and dealer\u00a0Carlye Packer\u00a0, among others. Unlike most Miami parties, the music was fantastic, thanks to Lovie, who was behind the decks spinning soul and R&B all evening. (The world needs more Roberta Flack, don\u2019t you think?) Around 11pm I met a powerful group of dealers for a martini and an off-the-record conversation at Casa Tua before wrapping up the night at Mac\u2019s Club Deuce.<\/p>\n
\n\tSide note: at least four people I know were relieved of their phones that evening, so keep your valuables close.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tThe scene at the Deuce on Tuesday night, where sticky fingers and seedy characters mingled with the recently arrived art world. Photo Daniel Cassady\/ARTnews<\/p>\n
\n\tArt fair weeks don\u2019t obey the natural laws of the universe. Time moves both slowly and quickly at the same time. After a long day of sales reporting on\u00a0Wednesday\u00a0, I met Tribeca\u2019s\u00a0Cristin Tierney\u00a0for a gallery dinner at Mediterranean restaurant Amalia. The crowd included artists\u00a0Dred Scott, Julian V.L. Gaines, and\u00a0Tim Youd, as well as\u00a0Amy Gilman, director of Wisconsin\u2019s Chazen Museum of Art, and collectors\u00a0Sandra and David Joy. The food was excellent\u2014hanger steak, salmon, beef rag\u00f9\u2014and the conversation graciously sidestepped the usual sales talk. Everyone left full of good food, new ideas, and just a few nuggets of gossip.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe night ended at an off-the-grid dive bar disguised as a brewery called the Abbey with some artists and curators, including\u00a0Ren\u00e9 Morales, who is now with Bakehouse and spent time at both the P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami and MCA Chicago; ICA Miami\u2019s\u00a0Gean Moreno; Spanish art fair impresarios\u00a0Sergio Sancho\u00a0and\u00a0Sara Coriat; and artists\u00a0Peter Gronquist, Malia Jensen, and\u00a0Margaux Ogden. Sometimes the best place to relax is the one with grimy floors and \u201990s music blaring through the speakers.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile I didn\u2019t make it to that night\u2019s headline soir\u00e9e\u2014the Hauser & Wirth \u00d7 David Zwirner party at Casa Tua\u2014I wasn\u2019t the only one. A certain high-powered dealer and his new girlfriend were, according to my sources, turned away at the door. (If you desperately need to know who Mr. Wrong was, we can trade tip-for-tip. My DMs are, as they say, open.)<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tCynthia Daignault embraces destruction on Miami Beach. Photo Daniel Cassady\/ARTnews<\/p>\n
\n\tThursday\u00a0night started on a meditative note. With an impossibly bright supermoon hanging over the beach, Night Gallery and Olney Gleason brought together a group of fifty to watch artist\u00a0Cynthia Daignault\u00a0destroy the second painting in a series of five works. The first one was set on fire a decade ago in what sounded like a raucous event on a boat during that year\u2019s Miami Art Week.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis time Daignault, kneeling on the sand, read the poem \u201cNot Dying\u201d by Mark Strand and peacefully cut the painting to shreds with a pair of shears. The five pictures, each a still life with a decreasing number of flowers in a vase, were made to be destroyed\u2014one every decade. The first one had five flowers, this one had four, and so on. The destruction is as much a part of the work as the paint, both figuratively and legally: every collector who owns one has signed a contract guaranteeing that, when that painting\u2019s number is up, it will leave this world in whatever way Daignault sees fit. But where there is death, there is always life. Daignault placed the remaining bits of canvas in a bowl and let the assembled crowd take home fragments as a memento of the occasion. \u201cI\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t burn this one,\u201d she said after the destruction was over. \u201cI can use the frame for a new painting.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDrinks at the Esm\u00e9 Hotel\u2019s Bamboo Room followed and, by the relatively reasonable 11pm, everyone was on their way to wherever the moon would lead them. It led me back to my hotel on Collins Avenue and straight to my keyboard.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd as I type this, bleary-eyed, mildly frazzled, and only slightly exhausted from the business of reporting on art fairs, my phone is vibrating. Twist? Medium Good? Back to the Deuce? Silencio? They were all options. But maybe a quick nap first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s been two years since I last made the trek to Miami Beach in December. Despite the Miami…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13359,123,125,124],"class_list":["post-72982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-art-basel-miami-beach-2025","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}