MIAMI, FLA.- When Art Basel Miami Beach debuted in 2002, a year after its planned first edition was delayed after 9/11, it featured 200 galleries, including Gagosian.

But Larry Gagosian, one of the art world’s most powerful dealers, was not present in person.

“I didn’t go to the fair for the first few times,” said Gagosian, who founded his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980 and now has 19 exhibition spaces around the world. “What changed my mind was some good feedback.”

He added, “Now I stay for a couple of days.”

A regular presence at the Miami Beach fair, Gagosian plans to be back again this year, for the fair’s 20th anniversary. His booth will show new work by painter and sculptor Harold Ancart; Rick Lowe, known for his collaborative and community-based art; and mixed-media artist Alexandria Smith, among others.

The fair, running at the Miami Beach Convention Center from Thursday to Saturday, will have its biggest edition ever, with 282 galleries, evidence of its success over time.

Gagosian’s conversion reflects the transformative growth of the event itself, art fairs in general and the Miami cultural scene writ large.

Over the past two decades, the fair became the anchor of a whole creative ecosystem. Satellite fairs were created, helping to establish the informal constellation of events known as Miami Art Week, which takes place amid a dizzying array of brand partnerships, pop-up exhibitions and Champagne-fueled parties.

In 2019, a work by artist Maurizio Cattelan — “Comedian,” a banana duct taped to a wall — became a symbol of the meeting place of Conceptual Art and attention-getting high jinks when a performance artist ate it as a stunt. The limited edition work sold three times during the fair for $120,000 to $150,000, and the work’s notoriety forced Perrotin, the gallery showing “Comedian,” to remove it because of the crowds gathering around it.

But around the fair, the institutional landscape also grew and matured, with new museums appearing, some of them established by the area’s top private collectors, and older ones expanding.

“That’s the miracle of Miami,” said collector Mera Rubell. “Sun and fun became a cultural destination. That’s a big victory.”

With her husband, Donald Rubell, Mera Rubell founded the Rubell Family Collection in Miami’s Wynwood area in 1993, which became the Rubell Museum in 2019 in a new neighborhood, Allapattah; the family recently opened a branch in Washington.

She also personally lobbied Art Basel to bring the fair to Miami Beach when it had its original edition only in Basel, Switzerland, founded in 1970.

“We did everything in our power to get them to come here,” said Rubell, a former New Yorker who became a fierce booster of her adopted hometown.

She and her husband have taken full advantage of the fair’s offerings, collecting vigorously at the Miami Beach fair. Last year, they bought the Tschabalala Self sculpture “Red Legs on Red Milk Crate” (2017-2021) from Galerie Eva Presenhuber; it is on view at their Washington museum.

The Rubells were not the only ones streaming through. The fair attracted 60,000 visitors in 2021, compared with half that in its inaugural edition.

“The big change is the explosion in the audience — everything stems from that,” said Marc Glimcher, president and CEO of Pace Gallery, which has participated in every edition of the Miami Beach fair.

This week fairgoers can feast on the usual superabundance of art, including 20 large-scale projects in the Meridians section, curated by Magalí Arriola, director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. They include Devan Shimoyama’s “The Grove” (2021), a massive work made of “DIY” utility poles, shoes, crystals and silk flowers, presented by Kavi Gupta gallery. The piece, conceived in response to the upheavals of 2020 and the idea of spontaneous memorials, draws on the urban tradition of hanging shoes from telephone wires and the many different ways it can be perceived.

As organizers and participants reflect on how far they have come, Art Basel, which is owned by the Swiss company MCH Group, is also undergoing a leadership transition that will affect what fair visitors and collectors see in 2023.

Marc Spiegler, the fair’s global director, is leaving the company. Noah Horowitz, who formerly served as director of Americas and the day-to-day chief of the Miami Beach fair, has become CEO, a new position. Spiegler will spend six months as an adviser as part of the transition.




“We’ve grown tremendously,” said Spiegler, a former journalist who shared the job running Art Basel for several years before taking it over solo in 2013. He noted that when he started, there were some 25 employees, which has grown to around 120 today.

“Marc’s years were the expansion and maturity phase,” said Silvia Cubiñá, executive director and chief curator of the Bass, a contemporary art museum in Miami Beach.

The Bass has also grown in that time, completing in 2017 a renovation and expansion that added nearly 50% more exhibition space. It recently announced that it will get $20.1 million from the city to build a new wing.

Perhaps most significantly on Spiegler’s watch, Art Basel created two new fairs: a Hong Kong edition was added in 2013, and Paris+ by Art Basel debuted in October.

They arrived in an era of fair proliferation, notably by Frieze, a magazine publisher that created an art fair in London, then added versions in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea.

Spiegler cited the Paris and Hong Kong fairs as the main achievements of his tenure and also pointed to the way Art Basel has weathered the coronavirus pandemic. For a time, the events went virtual and did not take place in person, with editions such as the 2020 Miami Beach fair becoming online viewing rooms.

“It was a huge adjustment,” said New York dealer Jack Shainman, whose Miami Beach booth will feature works by photographer Tyler Mitchell, sculptor and installation artist Nick Cave, painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and others.

Although no one thought the virtual move was an ideal situation, it seemed to work, with dealers selling enough art to get them through to the return of in-person events, and in some cases exceeding expectations. The online viewing rooms became a standard part of all Art Basel fairs.

Spiegler described his overall role in showman’s terms. “Being a fair director is being an impresario,” he said. The galleries are the clients because they pay to exhibit at the fair, but he put that dynamic in a larger context.

“When it works, it’s this virtuous circle,” Spiegler said. “Galleries bring great work because the collectors are there, and collectors come for the great work.”

Gagosian praised how Spiegler handled the impresario role.

“He’s had a lot of mouths to feed and egos to soothe, and he managed it well,” Gagosian said.

Now Horowitz takes on the lead role after a stint at Sotheby’s, serving as worldwide head of gallery and private dealer services.

“The weight of what I am stepping into is not lost on me,” Horowitz said.

He got to experience his highly engaged clientele the moment his hiring was announced, even before he had officially started the job. His email inbox filled with congratulations, he said — as well as dealers jockeying for better positions at 2023’s fairs.

The big-picture focus of Horowitz’s new title of CEO will be enabled partly by a staff addition that Spiegler made this year. He hired Vincenzo de Bellis as director of fairs and exhibition platforms, leading the teams in charge of all four fairs.

Although he was not ready to say what changes he might make in his new job, Horowitz struck a note of caution about what he called the “highly competitive landscape” of the art market as a whole at a time when economic indicators are mixed.

“Inflation is rampant, and if you look at economic cycles, art tends to lag the financial market,” he said. “There’s a possible pullback looming.”

For this week, at least, signs of a pullback are scarce in the Miami area. The list of satellite fairs and events looks as long as ever, and for VIPs who have established reputations as actual buyers of art, the only question is how many positive RSVPs are possible in one evening.

To Spiegler, who is heading into his last official fair of a long tenure, that activity level illustrates the success of the Miami Beach experiment, but he also encouraged a focus on the art.

“I have to remind people that they don’t have to accept every invitation they get,” he said. “If you don’t pay attention, you can miss the quality of the Miami show.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.