What Sold at Art Basel in Miami Beach

Toward the end of Art Basel in Miami Beach’s VIP preview on Wednesday, as the French dealer Emmanuel Perrotin was making his way back to his bustling booth, he saw a man testing the ripeness of the fair’s viral sensation:

Maurizio Cattelan

’s Comedian (2019), a work consisting of a banana duct-taped to the wall. Contrary to the work’s title, Perrotin was in no mood for comedy.

“Sir, you cannot touch the art unless you are planning to buy it—this piece costs $120,000,” he said sternly. When the banana-groper feigned surprise at the price, Perrotin snapped back: “Yes, you heard me correctly.”

Three days later, another grabby fairgoer went further still: On Saturday afternoon, performance artist David Datuna removed Comedian from the wall, peeled the banana, and ate it. He called the performance Hungry Artist. By then, the work had appeared on the cover of the New York Post, sparked the trending hashtag #cattelan—where people posted images of various objects taped to walls—and completely sold out. Perrotin sold the three editions of the work for prices between $120,000 and $150,000.

Perrotin explained that even though his gallery doesn’t typically disclose prices publicly, in the case of Cattelan’s banana, doing so was crucial to the work’s success. “You’re buying a story,” he explained. “From the moment you buy it, you’re part of the story.”

Beyond the hunger for Cattelan’s Comedian, dealers were doing serious business at this year’s edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach. In addition to the whopping 269 galleries occupying booths on its main floor, the fair debuted a new sector on the upper level of the convention center, Meridians, featuring really big works by 34 artists.

“Launching Meridians was several years in the making,” said Art Basel’s director for the Americas, Noah Horowitz. “We wanted to get artists excited about the opportunity to work at that scale, and to get a deeper level of engagement with major collectors and institutions.”

Large-scale installations by and José Antonio Suárez Londoño found new homes right out of the gate. Munson’s piece The Garden (1996)—a domestic space stuffed with plastic flowers, decorative floral motifs, and other conventional signifiers of femininity—was being presented by New York’s P.P.O.W. It was snapped up during Meridians’s preview on Tuesday night by the collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, founders of the art museum and hotel chain 21c, for $225,000. Subsequent sales from the new sector included an enormous painting by , Stetson (2019), which Almine Rech sold for an undisclosed price, and all three editions of

Woody De Othello

’s giant yellow sculpture of a box fan, Cool Composition (2019), which Jessica Silverman Gallery and Karma sold for $175,000 apiece.

Most dealers I spoke with agreed that even though they hadn’t experienced the same sustained buying frenzy as last year’s edition of the fair, business had been very good during the VIP preview. David Castillo, whose namesake gallery is based just a couple blocks away from the Miami Beach Convention Center, sold out his booth during the preview and, by Friday, had switched out many of the works to showcase available inventory.

“Usually there’s a bit of consultation, but this year, collectors came and made decisions on the spot,” Castillo said. “Some people have already paid me, which has never happened before.”

Collectors were paying big sums early and often, with many of the fair’s biggest galleries reporting sales in the seven- and six-figure range. The fair’s biggest sales included:

“Miami continues to grow in importance when it comes to institutional presence,” said Marc Glimcher, the president and CEO of Pace Gallery. “The new Rubell Museum was an awesome example of how private collectors are making art accessible to everyone.”

The opening of Don and Mera Rubell’s new 100,000-square-foot museum in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood was last week’s marquee event—taped banana notwithstanding. The complex’s inaugural installation showcases prized and imposing works from the collectors’ holdings of some 7,200 works. It underlined to what extent Miami’s community of collectors has grown in its aspirations and its numbers.

“The Rubells opening their massive new space has really inspired younger or newer collectors to be more ambitious and strategic, to collect artists in depth and early on in their careers when they really need the support,” said dealer Jasmin Tsou, whose gallery JTT had sold out its booth by Friday afternoon.

In the decades since they left New York for South Florida, and the nearly 20 years since Art Basel arrived in Miami Beach, the Rubells—along with a handful of other mega-collectors like Jorge Pérez and Norman Braman—have helped build a local community of arts supporters.

“I’ve been to several collectors’ homes this week for the first time, visiting private collections I’d never seen before that are really ambitious,” Horowitz said. “That’s been a nice counterpoint to the narrative that just a few prominent collectors have been driving the Miami scene. It’s a community that sees itself as culturally progressive, and that’s certainly not something anyone would have said about Miami 20 years ago.”

Miami collectors were making significant purchases at the fair. Pérez Art Museum Miami board president Gregory C. Ferrero bought one of the collographs in David Castillo Gallery’s booth for $50,000, and the gallery also placed a new painting, Messiah (2019), with a major local collector for $45,000. Local collectors bought a composition by the German artist made of cut-up vinyl for $43,000 and

Sophie von Hellermann

’s large painting Bank Holiday Monday (2019) for $28,000, both from Berlin gallery Wentrup.

Many more sales for under $100,000 or in the lower six digits were reported throughout the fair:

“Dealers are showing works that play to American tastes,” gallerist Nathalie Obadia observed. While there was certainly no shortage of cheerful, bright, and shiny works, even some of the fair’s most poignant and thematically challenging works took a maximalist approach.

Jenny Holzer

’s enormous new painting Call me (2019) incorporated text from House Democrats’ impeachment investigation of U.S. president Donald Trump, as well as four different types of gold and gold leaf. Hauser & Wirth sold that work for $400,000 during the VIP preview.

While there were overtly political works by Holzer, Hammons, , , , and others, it didn’t seem that the current political crises in the U.S. and elsewhere had any palpable impact on business at the fair. Horowitz had a theory about why that might be.

“Despite the political turmoil here and abroad, the recent U.S. tax reforms have actually made the U.S. in general and Florida in particular very attractive to move to, especially for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” he said. “Amid the trade wars and uprisings and impeachment scandals, sometimes people just want a break—and Miami is a great place to get that.”

Now Art Basel’s attentions turn toward Hong Kong, the site of its next fair in March 2020, where it may be harder to convince high-net-worth individuals to go for a break, given the ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations.