OLD NEWS

THESE GALLERIES DROPPED OUT OF ART BASEL MB. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT by Katya Kazakina
<https://tinyurl.com/4sv8vw24>
But this past week, as 283 exhibitors congregated in Miami to take part in this year’s edition, the respected San Francisco dealer was staring at a $22,000 bill from a collection agency. She had pulled out of the event after deciding to close her gallery, Altman Siegel, amid rising costs and falling sales. But she was still on the hook to pay half of her booth’s cost since the deadline to cancel for free had passed.
Why would a Goliath of a company like Art Basel go after someone like Altman-Siegel?
One answer is obvious: It’s Swiss, and it expects the rules to be followed. Exhibitors agree to payments terms and timelines.
“Everyone pays,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz said, speaking broadly about participants in all sectors of the fair.
There’s also pressure on MCH Group, Art Basel’s parent company, to improve its profit margin, which was just 0.7 percent in 2024 (on operating income of 435.7 million CHF, or about $542 million), after being negative 3.2 percent in 2023. Every little bit counts.
After a three-year contraction in the market, many Art Basel participants are struggling. Some have closed, a few (like Blum and Clearing) in spectacular fashion. A bad week at the Miami Beach Convention Center could lead to more closures. Dealers are trying to reduce their overheads, and art fairs are among their biggest costs.
In July, when Art Basel published its gallery list for Miami Beach, notable absences from its usual lineup included London’s Sadie Coles HQ. Following the brutal summer in the art industry, some exhibitors decided to drop off the list. (Galleries had to withdraw by August 1 to get back 100 percent of their booth fee, and by October 1 to get 50 percent back.)
Some, like Tilton, Alison Jacques, and Edward Tyler Nahem, withdrew after the August deadline, according to an early floor plan I viewed. It’s safe to assume they had to pay cancellation fees.
A couple of stalwarts—Michael Werner and Sperone Westwater—are going through bitter business divorces while proceeding with the fair.
But the market may finally be improving. Miami Basel had good energy and a bevy of encouraging transactions, especially at big galleries. More than a dozen sales above $1 million were made, led by a magnificent Joan Mitchell from 1979, priced at $18.5 million at the New York and Chicago gallery Gray.
Every dealer not doing Miami this year had his or her reasons.
Miguel Abreu pulled out before the August deadline, so he was in the clear with Art Basel. “We negotiated,” he said in a phone interview. Instead of Miami, he did two fairs in October: Art Basel Paris and Frieze Masters in London, where he participated in a by-invitation section organized by the esteemed curator Sheena Wagstaff. He plans to return to Art Basel in Switzerland next year.
Abreu conceded that sitting out Miami may have been a mistake, given that sales have been more robust than expected. Then again, he said, “we can’t do three fairs in the fall.”
Tilton Gallery, which is closing at end of the year, pulled out after the deadline. Asked if the gallery paid the cancellation fee, Connie Tilton, who took over after her husband Jack Tilton died eight years ago, would only say that she “followed the rules.” Instead of doing the fair, she chose to honor her husband’s legacy with two final gallery exhibitions in New York, a solo of sculptor Ruth Vollmer (1903–82) and a group show of abstract art.
“I didn’t want to siphon that amount of time from concentrating on my artists and the two shows that I have up right now,” she said by phone.
Angela Westwater decided to do Art Basel Miami Beach, despite preparing to close Sperone Westwater after a half-century run. Her partner in the business, Gian Enzo Sperone, filed a petition to dissolve the gallery and sell its assets back in August, after the deadline to withdraw from Miami. Westwater’s booth was densely hung with works by stars like Bruce Nauman and Guillermo Kuitca.
Asked how she felt doing her last Miami Basel at the helm of the gallery, Westwater had a curt answer: “Maybe I come back as something else.” She was happier reminiscing about introducing Nauman to his late wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg, whose estate recently moved from Sperone Westwater to Hauser and Wirth. The two married a year or so after they met, she said. “He went over to her loft and never left.”
A Rothenberg work on paper of a horse, her trademark subject, was priced at about $750,000 in the booth, and on reserve when I visited. “It’s a beautiful study for a painting that MoMA owns,” Westwater said.
I asked Bridget Finn, the director of Art Basel Miami Beach, about the current edition’s 48 first-time participants in the context of the cancellations. The total number of exhibitors is about the same as last year, and there were no empty stands, so the fair may have actually earned additional revenue as a result of the tumult, with cancellation fees supplementing payments from late arrivals.
“I’m not stepping back from the fact that we’ve had some attrition,” Finn said. “Given what the galleries have gone through in the past two years market wise, I am not surprised. When I talk to galleries, we are so conscious of the cost.”
For some dealers, sharing booths was an attractive option this year. Andrew Kreps cohabitated with Anton Kern, while Bortolami partnered with Thomas Dane. There was also the option to do a section where booth fees are fixed. The new Zero 10 sector for digital art was $25,000. The Nova section, for works made in the past three years, cost $24,500. The best deal was Positions: a flat fee of $11,000 for a small booth featuring work by a single emerging artist. (Overlooked older artists are also now eligible, expanding the definition of “what it means to be emerging,” Finn said.) The Survey section was $31,000, and Meridians, which is devoted to monumental works and installations, was $25,000.
“I would not advise a gallery to rush into taking a large booth before assessing its financial planning,” Finn said.
She emphasized that Art Basel has long had a “very organized” process for ensuring that the quality of the show isn’t impacted if galleries pull out at the last minute.
When the selection committee for Miami Beach votes on the line-up each spring, it also waitlists projects in each section. So, there are multiple waitlists from which to draw replacements. (Of the 285 galleries announced in July, 14 pulled out, and 12 new ones jumped in, according to a rep for Art Basel.)
“I’ve been waitlisted myself,” said Finn, who ran the now-closed Reyes Finn gallery in Detroit before coming to Art Basel.
The booth slated for Altman Siegel ended up being occupied by Magenta Plains, a New York outfit, which was initially in another booth in the main Galleries section.
But Claudia Altman-Siegel’s story has a happy ending. After I asked the fair about her case this week, the dealer received an email saying that her bill was void. (As a journalist, I always strive to stay out of the story, but I may have played a part in the outcome.)
A representative for the fair declined to comment on Altman-Siegel’s situation because details of “withdrawals, related fees, and internal business processes are considered confidential as a matter of policy.”
It’s worth remembering that this is not the first time that many exhibitors have changed plans, as Art Basel’s former global director, Marc Spiegler, told me. I ran into him on the beach during my morning walk. Looking fresh and buff after a swim, he recalled that the 2008–09 financial crisis affected dozens of galleries, and that there had been other instances when smaller groups of galleries had struggled because of regional economic woes.
“We always tried to work collegially with exhibitors who were having cash-flow issues, by offering reasonable payment plans,” Spiegler said. “If an exhibitor had open debts with us, they would need to pay them or do a payment plan before they would get their badges for the next Art Basel fair.” _artnet

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I HIT THE ART BASEL SUPERFECTA by Jason Farago
<https://tinyurl.com/2stwvx6p>
For a long time, when the world of contemporary art commanded greater cultural cachet, Art Basel Miami Beach was the country’s premier appointment for buying new art, meeting colleagues from around the world, and drinking as much brand-sponsored tequila as early December allowed.
It was a delightful oxymoron: a wild-child American stepsister to a staid Swiss trade fair, a warm-weather winter complement to Basel’s summer offering. By day, you could see art of higher quality — and buy it at higher prices — than at homegrown fairs in New York or Chicago. By night you could attend (or crash) a carnivalesqu _BBCe offering of dinners and parties, if you could reach them through the Collins Avenue gridlock.
But this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach opened under what you might call, following the yellow flags on the beach, a medium hazard. The softening market for modern and contemporary art, which saw the closure in 2025 of significant galleries in New York and Los Angeles, was only the half of it (although auctions in November suggested an incipient recovery at the highest end). There’s also been a supersaturation of the cultural calendar, and there’s only so much good art to go around.
Art Basel, founded by three Swiss art dealers in 1970, now presents four full-scale fairs each year, spanning Asia, Europe and the United States. The rival Frieze Art Fair has five, and both have Middle Eastern editions on the way (Art Basel’s will be in Doha, Qatar). These days you pick your poison, and my chosen strain comes from Europe’s pharmaceutical capital; I go every year to Switzerland for what we sometimes repetitiously call “Art Basel in Basel.” But Miami had fallen off my radar since 2020 — galleries I admired had been pulling out, and a post-pandemic influx of tax-avoidant cryptocollectors left me a little wary of South Florida in December.
It was time, I felt, for a Basel brush up. This year, for the first time, I completed the superfecta, attending all four editions of Switzerland’s little exposition that could: Hong Kong in March, Basel in June, Paris in October and now Miami Beach, which closes Sunday. Even for me, a critic who treats jet lag as a Zen state, this was a lot. Add them all up and I scrutinized over 1,000 fair booths, hung with multimillion-dollar masterpieces of 20th-century art or modest scribbles by young artists for a thousandth the price. My notebook is stained with $8 convention center espressos, and my phone’s pedometer records an average of 20,000 steps on each of the four opening days. (Miami Beach scored highest.)
What did I conclude?
That Art Basel remains the world’s most reliable venue to watch where painting, sculpture, photography and the rest are headed — for good or ill.
That a culture that seemed to be homogenizing across the globe, with difference sanded down by finance and technology, is fragmenting and re-regionalizing — for good or ill.
That the international art market, even with recent floods of corporate capital, retains pockets of cultural independence — certainly more than Hollywood has.
That money can’t buy you taste. But an art adviser can help.
And that the gallery system from which Art Basel arose has changed beyond recognition, and needs to be nurtured for both to survive.
Some critics, wary of the big bad market, refuse to enter the doors of an art fair. Artists, who see their work turn from an act of creativity into a commodity for sale, often don’t like going inside either. But the fairs, for a nonparticipant in the market like me, offer a priceless speed run past countless new or not-so-new works of art, as well as an X-ray of trends — goodbye, 2010s paint-by-numbers portraiture! We will not miss you! — and a crash course in high-net-worth sociology.
The original fair in Switzerland remains the most blue-chip, and the audience skews to industry professionals and discreet collectors from western Europe. The young Paris fair, held beneath the vaulted-glass ceiling of the 125-year-old Grand Palais, has quickly become the glamour child — drawing many of the world’s richest and most ravenous collectors (who would rather eat and shop in the French capital than a mid-sized Swiss city), and therefore encouraging dealers to bring finer works.
Miami Beach now feels, like Hong Kong, to be a regional edition, directly targeted to American collectors as Hong Kong targets Asia’s, with a mix of good-but-not-life-changing historical work (you could go home this year with a two-inch-tall Frida Kahlo self-portrait, beneath glass, at the booth of San Francisco’s Weinstein Gallery) and South Beach-validated vulgar pop. In both Hong Kong and Miami Beach I saw the same 8-foot, busty, gold-plated “sexy robot,” sculpted by the Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and floating in a mirrored box. I can’t tell you the repeat encounter merited the carbon emissions.
To each his chosen Basel, to each her chosen vibe. At all four editions you will encounter promotions from private jet furnishers and manufacturers of seven-figure watches (Hopp Schwiiz!); all have pushcarts selling official sponsor champagne, though only the Swiss venue has a fondue station. Wearing a tie helps in Paris; in Basel some Germanophones wear gentleman-farmer felt jackets; Hong Kong requires layering, as you move from humid megacity to air-conditioned show; Miami Beach welcomes both big logos and little lap dogs. But in all four the most prevalent footwear is springy On tennis shoes — favored also by Roger Federer, the most famous Basel resident since Erasmus.
I mock because I love; I also wore On tennis shoes throughout my Basel world tour, even if my net worth is a rounding error to the similarly shod, and needed them this year as I loped from convention center to convention center. This year Paris’s first days were the rowdiest, while Miami Beach was pleasantly manageable during opening hours: Nothing like the running of the bulls I remember from my early years.
I was impressed, in Miami this year, by showcases of the painters Wifredo Lam (at the booth of the Italian gallery Mazzoleni) and surprising portraits of athletes by Emma Amos that integrate painting and weaving (at Ryan Lee). But of risk, throughout, there was little sign; those halcyon 2000s days, when punkier dealers like Michele Maccarone or Gavin Brown would provoke with near-empty booths or even let an artist trash the joint, are long gone. And it was hard not to feel the absence of many ambitious midsize dealers who’ve stopped participating (it just costs too much, with shipping and insurance), and their replacement by newcomers who aren’t exactly varsity grade. Art Basel has tried to celebrate this year’s “largest cohort of new exhibitors in over a decade,” which is a bit of a weird flex. They used to celebrate how many exhibitors were returning.
Even the future looks different from one fair to the other. Only Miami Beach has a sector devoted to digital art, regrettably full of algorithmically produced slop, enticing a Florida-first tech crowd with low intellectual demands at low prices. The digital section is lorded over by the NFT class clown Beeple. “Regular Animals” is a dogpen of yipping, twitching canine robots, each affixed with chimerical heads — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Andy Warhol. They skitter and stutter and defecate QR codes allowing phone-wielding admirers to buy dematerialized shares. Alchemists since King Midas have tried to turn excrement into gold, though at least they knew which one was which.
When it opened in 2002 (dealers postponed the first by a year after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001), Art Basel Miami Beach was scrappy enough that young galleries were showing in shipping containers plopped on the beach. A young Mark Bradford, who would go on to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, converted one into a replica of his mother’s beauty salon and styled fairgoers’ hair. The whole thing matured quickly into a beachside bacchanal for the art-adjacent and the general public, who could attend a dozen satellite fairs (or none at all) as they caroused in seaside hotels. By 2013, Jay-Z would be rapping that he parked “twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel”: sensibly enough, given the appalling traffic.
I first came in 2005, and appreciated Miami Basel especially for my first introductions to the leading galleries of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. In the convention center aisles you could see A-list celebrities, B-tier Real Housewives, and, 10 years ago, an attempted murder that some flabbergasted fairgoers mistook for a performance.
A few of the parties were great (if I saw you on the dance floor of Le Baron circa 2009, I miss you and I miss our youth), though many more were just seaside sponcon. What mattered were the dealers inside the convention center, who collectively upheld the quality of painting, sculpture and new media that came to market. Art Basel Miami Beach offered me my first exposure to Brazil’s Letícia Parente, the Mexican artist and tattooist Dr. Lakra, and many more Latin American names I would not encounter in museums in the United States until years later. Art Basel Miami Beach was where the conceptual harlequin Maurizio Cattelan first deployed “Comedian,” comprising a banana and a piece of duct tape, which — on my honor — I believe to be a significant work of contemporary sculpture. The art came first, even when the spectacle seemed to consume it.
But on my 2025 fair pilgrimage I felt a risk that Art Basel and Frieze may be achieving some sort of escape velocity from the galleries they rely upon. The fairs’ original business model, in which visitors bought tickets and galleries paid for wall space, has become just one of so many revenue streams: A.I.-powered apps, dubious blockchain initiatives, and, this year, the offer of a limited-edition Art Basel Labubu figurine. Galleries, especially those far from the biggest capitals, need fairs to meet audiences they cannot reach alone. But fairs need galleries just as much, to fill their cavernous spaces with the new and the overlooked.
For where else can art get on equal footing with the behemoths of mass entertainment? By assembling hundreds of galleries under one roof for one week, or one week times four, these fairs still do what no other institutions can: They permit the world’s most significant artists to hold our attention in a cultural economy now structured around events, experiences, influencers, spectacles.
The commercial gallery remains, still, our culture’s principal discovery mechanism for the art we do not know yet, putting in front of us what’s meaningful or beautiful — and the fair, when the party’s over, is key to their survival. The commercial sector is not the whole picture of art, and never will be, but someone has to put their money where their mouth is. _NYTimes

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THE BASEL COMEDOWN AND WHAT THE CRITICS WEREN’T HAVING THIS YEAR by The art daddy
This was the year the critics finally said the quiet part out loud. The art fair machine is spinning faster than ever expanding outward thinning itself out and leaving everyone involved a little delirious. Farago and Berardini did not coordinate their dispatches yet both ended up writing about the same thing. Fatigue. Repetition. Spectacle. And the creeping suspicion that the entire system has become too big to yield wonder and too exhausted to yield meaning.
Art Basel’s global quad is no longer a fair circuit. It is a prestige obstacle course for the culturally overcaffeinated. Farago’s superfecta reads like a confession from someone who has stared directly into the VIP lounge and lived to tell it. Each city reveals a different kink of the market. Basel proper gives Protestant restraint. Hong Kong gives jet lag in a tailored suit. Paris gives fresh power grab energy. Miami gives the annual return of the feral art bros. The fairs pretend to be about art but the real performance is watching the money rearrange itself in real time. Which naturally begs the question. Why do we need all these fairs?
Daddy also clocked the fatigue in his voice. Four fairs in one year turns anyone into a sociological field recorder. The booths begin to blur into one long corridor of blue chip sameness. The collectors repeat the same questions. The artists wonder if the system wants their ideas or just wants inventory. The whole thing feels like a traveling court where everyone bows differently depending on the continent. The glamour is real but so is the creeping sense that the machine is starting to eat its own tail.
There is still a quiet longing in his observations. Under the glossy lighting and the endless VIP pontification sits the ghost of what art fairs used to offer. Surprise. Risk. A chance encounter not optimized for a price index. Farago’s marathon across Basel’s empire shows how rare that has become. The superfecta reads less like a triumph and more like an existential audit of the entire enterprise. Daddy sees it as proof that the art world keeps expanding outward while shrinking its sense of wonder and that maybe the endless carousel of fairs has replaced meaning with momentum.
Then there was Berardini’s Artforum diary which reads like a love letter to Miami that no longer pretends to be anything but its own fever dream. He walks straight off the plane into a museum of snarling dogs perched on cocks and radioactive erotica and you realize this is not excess anymore. This is the baseline. Miami has become the art world’s annual exorcism where everyone gathers to sweat out their illusions and call it culture. The tackiness is not ironic. It is structural. It is the city’s thesis statement. What used to feel like a carnival orbiting a serious fair now feels like a carnival orbiting an even bigger carnival. The fatigue humming beneath every anecdote suggests a deeper truth. Miami is no longer a taste barometer. It is a metabolism. And it is running hot.
By the time Berardini reaches the ICA opening you can feel the exhaustion radiating off the crowd. This is an art world that knows the choreography too well and is a little embarrassed to still be performing it. The V.I.Pleebs moment speaks for itself. The escalator buckling under the weight of entitlement feels symbolic. The booths blur into a warehouse of good and expensive stuff that looks impressively the same every year. Even Beeple’s robotic sheep feel tired like a punchline Miami already beat into the ground half a decade ago. His diary keeps circling a quiet fact. The art fair model is showing its seams. Everyone is here. Everyone is hustling. Everyone is repeating a ritual that increasingly refuses to mean anything.
Then come the moments that almost redeem the week and make the exhaustion sharper. The queer wrestling. The go go dancers. The flash of sincerity at Brothers’ Keeper. The cosmic tenderness of Cecilia Vicuña. These are the signs of life that reveal how thin the art fair membrane has become. The fair does not produce meaning. It drains it. Meaning appears only at the edges. In the off sites. In the late nights. In the things that were not designed for collectors. Berardini feels this even if he never names it. Miami has become a spectacle too bloated to hold its own center and yet too addictive for the art world to quit. The future of the art fair model looks like this. Bigger. Busier. More fairs. More fatigue. More frantic attempts to prove relevance through scale. And after twenty years Berardini slips into a party under an assumed name and realizes what everyone eventually realizes in Miami. He has gone beyond Basel and somehow still ended up in the same place.
Together Farago mapped the exhaustion from above and Berardini traced it on the ground. Their dispatches form the same conclusion. The art fair era is still expanding but its meaning is rapidly shrinking. _TheArtDaddy