The Evolution of Art Basel Miami Beach and Miami’s Art Scene

Miami’s dramatic transformation since the arrival of Art Basel in 2002 is so unique that it might never be reproducible. At the same time, the evolution of Art Basel from a high-end trade fair to a global cultural leader would not have happened without Miami’s ingrained love for contemporary art.

Everyone from the art handlers and the guys selling bottled water on the street, to the hoteliers and mega-celebrities, rides the euphoric art wave—and economic stimulus—that erupts during Miami Art Week. Everybody gets in on the game. Even my Cuban grandmother (who is 94!) has been going regularly since I first took her in 2011 to see contemporary art.

How did the Magic City become host to the so-called “Superbowl of the art world”?

Lorie Mertes, the director of Locust projects, Miami’s oldest alternative project space, founded in 1998, was working at Jason Rubell’s gallery when they left Palm Beach for Lincoln Road in the 1980s. “Back then Lincoln Road was dead,” she remembers. “All those deco buildings hadn’t happened yet, and Miami Beach was still in the aftermath of the Mariel Boatlift, where Cuban refugees were living 8 together in a 1-bedroom apartment”.

As the city’s largely immigrant population grew, so did industry and real estate, which opened the gates for the amassment of wealth in the city and for art collectors such as the Bremens, Rubells, de la Cruz, and Scholls. However, Miami had no major contemporary art galleries or art museums when these collectors started amping up their game by going to Art Basel regularly. Dennis Scholl, one of the main art collectors and philanthropists involved in the 3-year-long courtship with Art Basel’s then director Sam Keller, says he had gone to Art Basel for 12 consecutive years by the time the fair arrived. “We knew what a fair of that magnitude could do for a city,” he says.

Upon arrival, Keller asked collectors to open their homes to the VIPs. The potency of this move instantly became evident. When Art Basel Miami Beach was postponed due to the 911 attacks, around 100 collectors still visited Miami. The Berlin-dealer Matthias Arndt was among the few “daring visitors” who came and visited “the breath-taking collections” in Miami and Palm Beach. “The warmth of these encounters and depth of the collections was impressive and helped to make Art Basel in Miami Beach what it is today,” he says.

Scholl, who had opened his home to 100 collectors that year, and since then has received over 1500 people in his home each December, agrees. “Miami had a very good art scene before 2001, but Art Basel shined a bright light on the city and gave it a sense of itself as a cultural place—it made us feel like our community had value.” By 2002, Miami’s premier collectors had started pushing the two main Kunsthalles to become collecting institutions, which eventually yielded Miami’s world-class institutions such as PAMM and the ICA. “Those things came about because our community went gaga for contemporary art,” says Scholl.

Part of the success has been Art Basel’s constant innovation of its program. From the get go, in 2002, Basel launched Positions, a sector where young artists were presented in converted shipping containers right near the beach. Since then Art Basel has exploited Miami’s assets such as beachfront areas, the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the New World Symphony, and the Bass Museum, while bringing in major international and New York-based collaborators like Creative Time and Performa to develop additional projects. The most unique element of Art Basel Miami Beach, however, has been the presence of Latin American artists and collectors, which has single-handedly boosted the region’s art market from emerging artists to Modern Masters. The dealer Luisa Strina saw Brazilian galleries participation grow from 4 to 14 over the course of the 18 editions of the fair.

Within a year or two Miami saw major shifts, Locus projects’ Lorie Mertes says. There was a major philanthropic push towards the arts initiated by the Knight Foundation, which became a key player in shaping the arts community, investing $165 million in the arts since 2005. “The city really transformed. Art became a social and lifestyle thing, rather than just an elite thing, and that’s why it’s so madly successful.”

By the 15th anniversary edition there were several new independent and alternative spaces and a wealth of well-organized arts projects supported by the Knight Foundation. “I think that is what is so beautiful and fascinating about this trajectory,” Mertes says. “Art Basel morphed into something beyond the visual arts, where multiple cultural players came together to totally transform regular people's experience with art.”

The overall economic impact of Art Basel Miami Beach is perhaps unmeasurable given that Art Basel’s effect on the local economy includes jobs, hotels, restaurants, and a more lucrative city image as a top cultural destination. But a few numbers may provide an impressionist picture. A recent report from Miami Beach City, which has around 90,000 residents, says that Art Basel “generates about $16m in revenue” each time, which excludes the impact on Miami-Dade County’s 3.5m residents, plus Airbnb and Uber. A National report on Arts & Economic Prosperity by Americans for the Arts from 2015 says that the economic impact of Nonprofit Arts and Cultural Organizations in Miami-Dade County reached $1.4 billion in total industry expenditures, including the generation of 41,000 full-time jobs. In an article from July 2021, Miami Beach City Manager Alina Hudak stated that “Economists have estimated $400 million to $500 million annually in related economic impact as a result of Art Basel Miami Beach.”

In the last decade Art Basel Miami Beach has continued to innovate its program, adding Meridians, a new sector dedicated to large scale, museum-quality works that do not fit within the traditional art fair layout. In the course of 18 editions, Art Basel Miami Beach visitors grew from 30,000, to over 81,000, making ABMB even bigger than the Superbowl, given that number would not fit in Miami Orange Bowl’s stadium. 

The unique combination of Miami’s location, the appeal of Latin American joie de vivre, the robust collector base that emerged in the 90s, the synergy between private and public institutions that was happening alongside it, plus the marriage of Swiss precision with American entrepreneurial drive is what has made Art Basel Miami Beach the most significant art event in the Americas for two decades. The magic ingredient, however, seems to have been an ever-growing appetite for experiencing and collecting contemporary art - in Florida and beyond.

By Laurie Rojas