Anyone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing is a cynic or a fool: Marc Spiegler, the outgoing global director of the Art Basel art fair, ends his opening speech at this year’s event in Miami Beach with a variant of Oscar Wilde’s famous bon mot – and refers to the power of art to transform people and a city.

So it can be a bit contemplative to say goodbye, which is also a welcome for the new CEO Noah Horowitz, at the largest commercial hub for art in the United States.

There, of course, it's about prices and sales, the first of which are already announced a few hours later, like the results of a sports competition.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The international mega gallery Hauser & Wirth has sold a late work by the abstract expressionist Philip Guston for seven million dollars;

roughly the same amount was paid by the buyer of a painting by Agnes Martin at Boston's Pace Gallery;

Andy Warhol's "Flowers" brought the New York gallery owner Edward Tyler Nahem 3.8 million, and the Austrian Thaddaeus Ropac was able to sell a Georg Baselitz from 2020 for 1.38 million.

This is how business is supposed to run at the twentieth and, with 282 exhibitors from 38 countries, the most extensive Art Basel Miami Beach.

Here, in 2002, the trade fair company based in Switzerland ventured into the globalized world;

it went on to Hong Kong and in 2022, to the culmination of fifteen years of Spiegler's aegis, to Paris.

With Noah Horowitz, the steadily growing whole is now being taken over by the man who, apart from an interlude at Sotheby's, for a long time managed Art Basel's business in America.

To the greatest satisfaction on site: For the Mayor of Miami Beach, Dan Gelber, the fair is the "life partner" with whom his community grew up after a difficult "Miami Vice" adolescence.

In fact, about a hundred years after it was founded, the city has rid itself of its sexy and dangerous image and is also associated with more than party-loving "spring break" youth or pensioners looking for warmth: with art, in which the city and local top collectors come along Private museums such as the de la Cruz or Rubell couples invest heavily.

A whole art week has established itself around the fair as the “Superbowl of Art”, with plenty of parties and exhibitions.

A highlight this time is the South African artist William Kentridge with a performance in the Adrienne Arsht Center.

At the sales events, celebrities mingle with the well-heeled crowd - such as Pharrell Williams, who poses in front of one of the trendy flowery portraits of the African American Kehinde Wiley at the Art Basel booth of Sean Kelly from New York.

The gallery owner says the picture has already been reserved for an American museum.


Art Basel is accompanied by a dozen satellite fairs, including Art Miami, Design Miami, Untitled Art for up-and-coming artists, the New Art Dealers Alliance event and the experimental Scope, which starts with beach yoga in the morning.

Madonna, on the other hand, wants to provoke excitement instead of enlightenment.

Hardly her old self visually in recent Instagram posts, she is presenting a show all about the new edition of her scandalous illustrated book “Sex” from 1992 at Saint Laurent in a pavilion on the beach. Exhibitions such as the appearance of the photographer Anastasia seem less outdated Samoylova at the Dot Fiftyone Gallery, showcasing the glamorous and unglamorous sides of Florida.

Even in the holiday paradise of Miami Beach, the latter cannot be overlooked.

People who are looking for social and economic connections are waiting at bus stops, and on the washed-up edge of the beach in front of the luxury hotels, where sand was artificially filled in after the last storm, waves are pushing all kinds of plastic waste back and forth.

Even an art fair like Art Basel Miami Beach in the fully air-conditioned American Convention Center does not take place in a vacuum.

Despite all the crises, the number of extremely wealthy people interested in art may have increased, but in times of threatening recession, even in the USA, this is no guarantee for growth.

If in Miami Beach the city and the fair have grown up together, the often less euphoric, responsible middle years could now be approaching.

Art Basel wants to become more sustainable through the use of renewable energies, recycling and plant-based catering.

But you still can't really call such an event environmentally friendly.

On the fact that the art business must become climate-conscious,

point out two meek activists with “The Carbon Almanach” on the preview day.

Protest vandals would also have no chance if not even a muesli bar passed the bag check.

Behind the, the fair immediately demonstrates socio-political awareness and is recommended as a bridgehead to South America.