Best of Basel 2022: 15 Highlights from a Raucous Miami Art Week

Miami under normal circumstances is a lot of city to handle. Everything is extra—the fashion, the lifestyle, the traffic. During Art Basel week, it's a Michelle Yeoh movie, with everything everywhere happening all at once. The title fair that touched down in South Florida 20 years ago as an insular playground for the professional art elite and the billionaires they cater to has since mushroomed into a mind-bending, cacophonous vortex of branding, celebrity and decadence. Beyond the main fair at the Miami Beach Convention Center—a vast ocean of some 280 galleries from 38 countries all competing to hook the same school of big fish collectors—there's satellite fairs, brand activations, A-list fundraisers, store and hotel openings, blockchain launches (even as crypto crashes) and parties, parties, parties popping off, furiously courting high-spenders and thirsty for everyone else's eyeballs. During the day, White Cube gallery might titillate with blue-chip artists—Michael Armitage, Günther Förg, and Georg Baselitz works sold for over $1 million each, according to Artnews—but at night it stages a raucous annual party at Soho House (Kelis performed this year). One day Leonardo DiCaprio helped raise $1 million for CORE, a crisis relief non-profit, and then raged with every Italian in town at Stone Island's 40th anniversary rave in Wynwood. Madonna, no stranger to these parts, tore through like a one-day hurricane with an exhibit of some of the most provocative images of her career and a swanky beachfront soiree that recalled the wild days when she was queen bee at Liquid. Did the rubberneckers upstage the serious machers? That's always the perennial question here, but it does not seem to have been the case if sales reports are to be believed, from the selection of new Nate Lowman works that sold out of David Zwirner (pictured) between $100,000 and $350,000 to the Agnes Martin that went for $7 million at Pace. Art, the conventional wisdom goes, is one hard asset that's recession-proof. Ahead, a highly subjective suite of highlights from a very hectic Miami Art Week, four art fairs, and one extremely good Cuban cult cafe.