I Hit The Art Basel Superfecta

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) But what was the payout? A critic survives the four-season journey to the premium art fair in Hong Kong, Basel, Paris and now Miami Beach. Here are his takeaways. This content was published on December 10, 2025 - 10:00 11 minutes Jason Farago, The New York Times

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 carnivalesque 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 included 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 postpandemic influx of tax-avoidant cryptocollectors left me a little wary of South Florida in December.

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