As the snow turned to sleet in New York, many of the city’s creative class took refuge in sunny Miami for Miami Art Week, joining attendees from across the globe. Between Art Basel and the 20-plus other fairs, gallery and museum exhibitions, and events spanning fashion, music and everything in between, attendees squeezed plenty of culture out of the week — and undoubtedly missed some, thanks to the traffic — with more to come this weekend.
This year, there was more industry overlap than ever — between fashion, sport, music and food — perhaps, even more than expected. Fashion, in particular, has fully embraced the week, not just with dinners and parties, which is now par for the course, but by taking direct cues from the art world and hosting their own exhibitions, or getting involved with those already going on. Each year ups the ante, says Art Basel director Bridget Finn of the cross-industry descent into Basel.
Many brands intersected not just with the art, but with one another. Inside the walls of the Convention Center, the fair was somewhat of a microcosm of this industry overlap. By the show’s exit, lines snaked as attendees queued up to buy T-shirts and bags in collaboration with Marc Jacobs, and soccer jerseys in partnership with Inter Miami CF. Upstairs, artists were in conversation with sports industry players. The collector’s lounge was designed by Lissoni & Partners, featuring 20 ‘Made in Italy’ brands, under the fair’s partnership with Salone. Musician and actor Kid Cudi premiered a documentary by Joshua Charow about his artistic practice.
“It’s very pop,” Marco Falcioni, creative director of Boss, tells me of the fair at the inaugural Art Basel Awards on Thursday evening. (Boss is the awards partner.) Showing up in this way in Miami makes the most sense of all Art Basel fairs because of how unbuttoned it is relative to its contemporaries, Falcioni adds. “It’s the last Basel of the year. This is the fair where people are a bit more relaxed; it’s Miami, you know?”
