Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual December excuse to leave freezing New York and eat Joe’s Stone Crab on somebody else’s dime, started in 2002 as an offshoot of a Swiss art expo. Before long, it became an indelibly American sun-dappled pleasure dome. No longer is it just an event dedicated to contemporary art—it’s a mainstream wintertime cultural boondoggle set to an EDM beat, its mascots more Paris Hilton and Diplo than Jeff Koons and Picasso. According to the Miami-Dade Aviation Department, each day during the fair, as many as 100 private jets touched down at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport in the Magic City. By 2019, Basel Miami was generating an estimated $16 million each year for the state of Florida.
But the pandemic has punished art fairs. Many have been canceled since March 2020. In the meantime, gallery owners, once tethered to the global circuit, have found they can sell in-demand work by their artists without shipping expenses and exorbitant booth fees.
This summer brought more bad news for fairs. Noah Horowitz, the Basel head honcho who for years has overseen the Miami fair, announced he would be leaving his post just ahead of the brand’s marquee shindig, the most prestigious art fair on earth, was set to open in Switzerland. Horowitz was seen as an heir apparent to Art Basel global director Marc Spiegler, and the news shocked the gallery-lined nabes of Mayfair and West Chelsea. The mystery of “Who poached Noah” dominated the cocktail-party talk out East this summer.
Now, True Colors can exclusively reveal that Horowitz will be leaving the fair world entirely to work at Sotheby’s as the worldwide head of gallery and private dealer services. He’ll still have the ear of the galleries who begged him for good placement in the Miami Beach Convention Center. But now he’ll be telling them to consign new works by their artists not to an art fair, but to the 277-year-old auction house with locations from New York to Palm Beach to Monaco. It’s a seismic shift in the whole art-market firmament.
“Dealers already do a lot of business…buying and selling at auction,” Horowitz said on a Zoom call earlier this month. “The Basel framework is somewhat finite, and there’s a large community beyond that.”
Sotheby’s—which was bought and taken private by the French telecom macher Patrick Drahi in 2019—is not coy about its ambitions to funnel gallery sales through the auction house balance sheet.
“We’re not a singular art event—we’re a 365-day-a-year business,” said Brooke Lampley, chairman and worldwide head of sales for global fine art at Sotheby’s. “Our positioning is at the complete opposite end of an art fair, which revolves around being a singular in-person attraction.”
The departure comes at a precarious time for Basel. The scaled-back Art Basel Hong Kong in May was the first fair they held since December 2019. It was not like the Before Time. Many dealers used fair-appointed stand-ins to avoid weeks of quarantine on the island. And while its marquee expo in Basel, Switzerland, is set to open next month, many collectors and advisers have decided to sit it out, citing travel bans, the delta variant, and the quick turnaround for the next edition of the fair in June 2022.
“Based upon our extensive discussions with dealers and collectors throughout the last couple of months, we are convinced there is a huge demand to experience art in person and connect with each other again,” Spiegler said in a statement provided to Vanity Fair which Art Basel reps asked we run in full. “While the past year has been a time of digital innovation, it has not been a time of enormous discovery and the rejuvenation essential to our market. Our Basel fair is taking place, despite the extraordinary circumstances, with 272 leading exhibitors from 33 countries, and full-scale programming—onsite and online. And while the current situation may impede some collectors from attending, especially those from overseas, we’re encouraged by the confirmations we’re receiving from European collectors and a younger generation of patrons in particular, many of which have already communicated their firm intention to join us in Basel.”
Add it all to the to-do list for Art Basel’s new part-owner, former News Corp. scion James Murdoch, who invested $80 million into its parent company, MCH Group, in August 2020, notching his Lupa Systems a 49% share of the enterprise. Rupert Murdoch’s less Fox News-y son swept in to resuscitate the contemporary art concern; despite Murdoch’s wealth and profile, he wasn’t known to be a major figure in the art world prior, apart from his spot on the board of Dia Art Foundation. (He hasn’t publicly made any high-profile donations to the legendary patrons of minimalism, but as previously reported by yours truly, James Murdoch denied HBO hit’s Succession, which depicts a very Murdochian family drama, the right to film at its Chelsea headquarters. At the time, a spokesperson said the foundation had a policy against commercial filming at its facilities.)
The headaches extend beyond Basel. Frieze, the other global mega-fair that will have four outposts around the globe when its Seoul edition opens in September 2022, has also suffered a few slings and arrows in the years since Endeavor and its CEO, Ari Emanuel, orchestrated a majority takeover in 2016. Since snapping up the events company, Emanuel has seemingly struggled to make it a profitable appendage to Endeavor’s package of entertainment assets (one that he took public in April after delaying the initial offering). Frieze’s Americas director Rebecca Ann Siegel left in August, and no successor has been named.
Sources from within Frieze said that Emanuel’s hands-on approach has not done the fair any favors. The decision to go full speed ahead with the New York fair in May (for those with proof of vaccination or negative COVID test) seemed vindicated once the $265 first preview tickets became the hottest commodity in Manhattan. But those heady spring days of post-vax New York Is Back bliss seem far removed from the delta variant-plagued present. A former Frieze fair staffer, who asked to speak anonymously, said that Endeavor’s expectations of profits go well beyond what’s possible, and may have driven staffers out of the fair arena.
(Departures from Frieze aren’t Emanuel’s only P.R. problem. Recently, Page Six reported that Emanuel, a forerunner in the HBO-fictionalized-a-character-off-me space, was witnessed launching a “hissy fit” and swearing at staff members during a dinner at Eleven Madison Park, the newly meat-less restaurant that should have warmed Emanuel’s vegan heart. His rep declined to comment to the column.)
“It has a lot to do with Endeavor, and the monetary expectations of Endeavor,” the former staffer said. “Your primary income is the sponsorship and booth rentals, and there’s a ceiling of how much a fair can make, or the quality will drop if you let in a ton of galleries.” (Endeavor did not immediately respond for comment.)
Those $265 VIP preview tickets might also not represent vast revenue potential either.
“Could you charge people for access at certain levels? Yes, but that won’t work because the collectors need to come in for free or they won’t come at all,” the source said.
“As is the practice at all art fairs, Frieze invite VIP guests—these are generally collectors and industry professionals—to our events ahead of the public opening. All public tickets to Frieze New York 2021 sold out,” a spokesperson for Frieze said. “Endeavor have been very supportive of Frieze throughout the pandemic, as demonstrated by the decision to refund all galleries for any stand fees they had paid ahead of events that were then canceled.”
Another issue? The galleries are fed up with dealing with the fairs. One executive director of a gallery with spaces on multiple continents went numbers on me and spelled out the whole price of doing Art Basel’s Swiss edition. The booth fee can be nearly $100,000 for a large primo spot, and that’s before the cost of shipping heavy-ass works, flying and housing staff, renting out at Chez Donati for mediocre pricey pasta dishes, and spending 40 CHF a piece on cocktails at the Grand Hotel Trois Rois.
During COVID times without those costs, dealers spent the fair-less months establishing beachheads in collector-heavy territory like Aspen, Palm Beach, and the Hamptons—or, just for fun, a chic European city.
“For the cost of Art Basel in Switzerland, I could open a space in, say, Rome and pay for it to be staffed for years,” the gallery director said, estimating that doing the days-long fair on the Rhine costs half a million dollars all in.
And here’s where one should mention that the fair circuit is also, um, catastrophically bad for the environment. The BBC recently looked at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s airborne gallivanting and found that one of their one-hour-and-40-minute flights on the couple’s Cessna emitted 4.7 tonnes of CO2, and 9.4 tonnes of CO2 on the way back. Let’s assume the average flight time on the private jet from wherever to Miami is around one hour and 40 minutes as well. If you port that math over, if 100 PJs are landing per day during the five-day Art Basel Miami Beach bacchanalia, you get a grand total of 4,700 tonnes of CO2 released into the ecosystem in order for humanity to have a Koons work at the Pace booth and a Diplo DJ set at Lenny Kravitz’s house.
And even though many New York galleries have agreed to do September’s local fairs—the Armory Show at the Javits Center and Independent at Cipriani South Street—one adviser said that they’re skipping the Basel festivities mostly due to the fact that every decent gallery has pre-sold the booth to top collectors who don’t need to look at the work to buy new paintings by in-demand artists whose work they’re already familiar with.
The adviser was more optimistic about their clients who attend yacht fairs.
“You don’t buy a yacht off the internet,” they said.
What you see here is True Colors, a new column at Vanity Fair by me, art columnist Nate Freeman, that will be a weekly dispatch from the glamorous but opaque circus that is the world of contemporary art. No longer solely an enclave for the rich and clued-in, contemporary art has become a part of our mainstream. Art Basel Miami Beach or Frieze New York have become must-attend events for anyone in the cultural firmament, record-breaking auction results make global headlines, and the likes of Kendall Jenner to LeBron James to Barack Obama need access to buy the hottest artists at the most respected galleries.
But even as it’s grown in reach, art has remained an often shadowy, largely unregulated business where Old World mores and handshake deals still rule the day. Here at True Colors, we’ll aim to dissect how that network is being disrupted by a new generation of dealers, collectors, and artists. And we’ll do it from around the world—New York, London, Hong Kong, Venice, Seoul—as the fair and biennial circuit kicks back into gear after a year and a half of slumber. We’ll also, as you’ll see below in The Rundown, aim to keep you up to date with various comings and goings on the beat.
And a note on our column’s name: It does indeed reference Anthony Haden-Guest’s True Colors, the rip-roaring book about how this whole topsy-turvy market was birthed in the ’70s. We asked Haden-Guest, himself a longtime Vanity Fair contributor, for his blessing, and he gave it readily. True Colors the column was born. Enjoy.
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
… Jeffrey Deitch is renting out the Chateau Marmont next month to celebrate Ariana Papademetropoulos and her new show at the Los Angeles gallery, it’s gearing up to be the party of the fall out West.
… Brooklyn-based artist Mariam Ghani, who last year had a show at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, is the daughter of Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghanistan president who has found refuge in Abu Dhabi following the Taliban’s resurgence in the country. Her documentary feature, What We Left Unfinished, about filmmaking in the country’s Soviet-occupation era is now playing in limited release.
… Freds at Barneys, the legendary fashion-world canteen that’s been closed along with the department store since February 2020, will be reactivated this fall as an art-world salon, with galleries taking over the space for programming related to the fall’s packed schedule of gallery and museum openings.
… Artist Mathieu Malouf included a number of paintings by the Instagram artist Cumwizard69420 in a group show at the Chinatown gallery Jenny’s. The otherwise anonymous artist sells work for a few hundred dollars on the social media platform but the gallery offered them for several times that price to prominent art advisers.
… Mina Stone, author of the ubiquitous Cooking for Artists, has a new book on the way in September called Lemon, Love & Olive Oil, with illustrations by Urs Fischer.
… Pace vice president Adam Sheffer has left the gallery after three years, including the last year spent holding it down at the small Pace outpost at the Royal Poinciana Plaza mall in Palm Beach.
… The New Yorker writer Hilton Als curated the latest show at Karma, featuring work by Reggie Burrows Hodges, Somaya Critchlow, Louise Fishman, and more.
… Kendall Jenner quite enjoyed monkeying around on Jeff Koons’s sculpture Gorilla out in the Hamptons.
“I’m worried that there might not be enough money here,” said one guest at the Parrish Art Museum gala in Southampton Saturday—a guest who has a job that requires them to know how much money is in a room. Such is the anxiety as big-ticket charity balls have come back after a year and a half of Zoom benefits, which is to say: no benefits. Even with vaccinations required, perhaps the older collectors and benefactors would not want to show up with their at-risk status just to party at the Parrish.
Spoiler alert: They showed up, and there was money. Dorothy Lichtenstein—wife of Roy, giver of six-figure sums to the Parrish—popped up looking half her age (we didn’t get an exact number, probably never will) and considered bumming a cigarette from a reporter. (Don’t worry, she got talked down from the ledge.) All fears truly abated when Christie’s deputy chairman Sara Friedlander took the stage and asked for bids of $10,000.
One bidder at our table was initially confused. What artists donated works to the charity auction, as nothing was listed in the program? It became clear that the “auction” was merely a paddle raise, where monied patrons at the Parrish could pledge money to the museum with nothing in return but a tax break. Seated guests could barely get a word in edgewise, as there were too many offers for Friedlander to single out one by one, just wave after wave of donations crashing onto this beachy wonderland of millionaires that is the Hamptons.
There was apparently still plenty of money left to spend on art and plenty of art to buy. The new Hamptons outposts of Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, Pace, Kurimanzutto, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s were just a quick drive away.
“Everybody knows that people who collect are out here, but now the larger field of art is here too,” said Kelly Taxter, the new director of the Parrish who just started in March. “And the collectors are finally coming out of their houses.”
And that’s a wrap for True Colors No. 1. Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
— Cover Story: From Puff Daddy to Diddy to Love
— Behind-the-Scenes Details About Working With Meghan and Harry
— The Doris Duke Cold Case Reopens
— A Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton TV Project?
— Monica Lewinsky on the Love of Her Life and Her Greatest Regret
— Jennifer Lopez Unfollows Alex Rodriguez on Instagram
— Love Is a Crime: Inside One of Hollywood’s Wildest Scandals
— “That Woman Was Made of Steel”: Aaliyah’s Life and Legacy
— 19 Black-Owned Beauty and Wellness Brands With Something for Everyone
— From the Archive: The Code of Silence at Brett Kavanaugh’s Alma Mater
— Sign up for “The Buyline” to receive a curated list of fashion, books, and beauty buys in one weekly newsletter.