ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH

Art Basel Miami Beach is the American edition of the Basel fair, held at the Miami Beach Convention Center in the first week of December: two VIP Days from the Wednesday afternoon, then three days open to the public, with some two hundred and eighty galleries from more than forty countries showing modern and contemporary art. Around it some two dozen other fairs make up Miami Art Week. It calls itself “the premier market and discovery platform for Modern and contemporary art in the Western Hemisphere”.

In 2019 a banana taped to a wall, by Maurizio Cattelan, sold there twice, for $120,000 each. A performance artist ate it while it was still on show.

The Postponement

Art Basel was founded in 1970 by three gallerists of the city, Trudl Bruckner, Balz Hilt and Ernst Beyeler. The first fair had ninety galleries and thirty publishers from ten countries, and more than sixteen thousand visitors.

Miami was urged on it by collectors there, among them Don and Mera Rubell, who in 1993 had bought a warehouse of forty thousand square feet in Wynwood for their collection; they and others worked to persuade Art Basel and the officials of Florida that Miami was a logical stop. The first edition was set for 13 to 16 December 2001, with more than a hundred and fifty galleries and some fifty journals and institutions confirmed.

Six weeks before it, the fair was put off for a year. The organisers gave as reasons “the unpredictable prolongation of the unsafe circumstances in the U.S. since the September 11 terrorist attacks, warnings of potential attacks in the future, the anthrax incidents, and the state of war”, and The Art Newspaper added the difficulty of flying and insuring works of art. Only five galleries had withdrawn. The museums had planned exhibitions, and collectors were to open their houses; the organisers expected to lose about four million dollars, and one dealer proposed a show of his own in forty-five rooms of the Nash Hotel on Collins Avenue instead.

The first Art Basel Miami Beach opened on 5 December 2002, the first edition of Art Basel outside Switzerland, with UBS as its lead partner, as it has been since. In 2020 every edition of Art Basel, Miami Beach among them, was cancelled.

The banana of 2019 was Cattelan’s Comedian, shown by Emmanuel Perrotin in an edition of three. After the sale the performance artist David Datuna ate it on the stand and called the act Hungry Artist; on the morning of 8 December the work was taken out of the fair.

Art Week

The fair is the cornerstone of Miami Art Week, and has drawn some two dozen others to the city in the same week; in 2026 the week runs from 1 to 7 December. Design Miami stands next to it, partly managed by the same owners. Untitled, founded in 2012, is in a tent on the beach by Ocean Drive; NADA, SCOPE and PRIZM, for Africa and its diaspora, are among the rest. Art Miami, which used to be held in January, moved to December to be with them.

Not everyone has admired it; Simon Doonan, in Slate, called the fair a “promo-party cheese-fest”.

In December 2025 the first Art Basel Awards were given on an evening at Frank Gehry’s New World Center, hosted by Swizz Beatz, with Ibrahim Mahama, Nairy Baghramian and Cecilia Vicuña among the gold awardees.

The Five Days

The VIP Days are the Wednesday, from four in the afternoon, and the Thursday. The public days are the Friday, the Saturday and the Sunday.

The galleries show in sectors: the main Galleries, Nova, Positions and Survey; Meridians, for works too large for a booth, in 2025 nineteen of them chosen by Yasmil Raymond under the title “The Shape of Time”; and Zero 10, for digital art, new in 2025. A booth in the main sector cost a gallery about $60,000 to $80,000 in 2024, and in the sectors for smaller galleries $11,000 to $26,000. Talks are held in the auditorium, free to all, and each year the City of Miami Beach buys a work for its public collection, chosen by public vote; 2025 was its seventh year.

In 2025, the second edition under its director, Bridget Finn, there were 283 galleries from forty-three countries and territories, forty-eight of them there for the first time; more than eighty thousand visitors, and people from more than two hundred and forty museums. In the digital section Beeple showed robots with heads made to look like Zuckerberg, Musk and Picasso.

In 2026 the VIP Days are on 2 and 3 December and the public days from 4 to 6 December.

What to Know

It runs from the Wednesday to the Sunday of the first week of December: in 2026, VIP Days on 2 and 3 December and public days from 4 to 6 December. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

Tickets are sold only through the fair’s own shop, as general tickets or Premium Passes, and the fair warns that availability is limited. Guided tours are given by ArtNexus, for groups of no more than six on the VIP Days and twelve on the public days.

A lounge suit, without a tie by day. Nothing is published, and it is Miami in December.

The Convention Center is at 1901 Convention Center Drive, in Miami Beach. Within walking distance are the Loews Miami Beach, the Royal Palm, the Ritz-Carlton South Beach and the Miami Beach EDITION; further up the beach, the Faena, Soho Beach House and the Eden Roc. Rooms in Art Week are taken six months ahead or more.

The mistake is to buy a ticket at the door. On the busy days the queue for one runs from half an hour to an hour.

The Court

Art Basel Miami Beach is not the Court’s own. Passes for the VIP Days are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay on the beach, and the table afterward. The Formula One season ends in Abu Dhabi on the same Sunday.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.