On Tuesday in Miami, a single event turned into a collision of influence,celebrity, and money not seen in Florida since before the pandemic—or maybe ever. James Murdoch chatted with Moda Operandi founder Lauren Santo Domingo as Serena Williams and her husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, walked by. Kanye West posed for pictures alongside his daughter North and estranged wife, Kim Kardashian West, as Bernard Arnault, third richest person in the world, caught up with fellow billionaire and recently named Barbadian national hero Rihanna and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist chatted with Snap founder Evan Spiegel, who is 31 years old and worth more than $9 billion. And making their first public appearance since leaving the White House were deposed princelings Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who wore pink.
And yes, the first edition of Art Basel Miami Beach held since 2019 had gotten underway that day, but this event was not the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach. It was the Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2022 men’s show, which served as the final artistic statement of late Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Virgil Abloh, an influential cross-cultural force whose death at age 41 on Sunday shocked many a jet-setter on their way down to Magic City. The tragedy didn’t put a damper on the proceedings. Abloh’s wife and family reportedly asked that the show go on as tribute. In doing so, with a 30-foot statue of Abloh at its entrance and a synchronized-drone tribute, it ramped up the energy and delivered the brand’s most devoted customers ready to spend even more than before.
It was, in other words, a quintessential Miami 2021 moment. The city is right now experiencing a perfect storm of profligate check-signing. There’s been two years of wealth creation at the tippy top of the economic mountain, and at the same time the remote-working finance bros and metaverse-inhabiting tech tycoons have stampeded to tax-break-happy Florida, making this year’s Miami edition of Basel the Super Bowl of branding and the Oscars of luxury sales. The seemingly overnight creation of a $10 billion NFT market is already rivaling the art market as a whole.
And so the over-the-top debut of the new collection from Louis Vuitton—part of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, which has reported 44.2 billion euros in revenue in the first nine months of 2021—served as the climax of a 36-hour caviar-topped carnival of excess where America’s .1% parachuted in on private jets to part ways with hundreds of millions in return for art and luxury goods.
Monday began with dealers and advisers taking their perches around the indoor pool at the Setai to finalize purchases, deals that would be sealed once the buyers completed the technicality of laying actual eyes on the work in the booth at the fair. Across the causeway in the design district, the Vuitton madness had already begun at its new men’s flagship, where LV superfans in head-to-toe Virgil were snapping up $3,500 leather jackets. A number of cocktail parties and gallery openings were popping off throughout the design district, but missing was the neighborhood’s mastermind, Craig Robins, who was hosting a bash at his Sunset Island mega-mansion with his wife, Jackie Soffer, whom Robins met when she sued him over a shared private jet—marriage, Miami-style. Attendees had to tiptoe past Solange Knowles and Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti in order to not fall into the pool, and then it was off to a slew of dinners—for Louis Vuitton at Carbone, for Saint Laurent in a gallery built on the beach, for the ICA Miami at Red Rooster—before the entire art world beelined to Soho Beach House, where London’s White Cube had set up on the sands with gallery founder Jay Jopling standing in the center linking and building with Diplo.
“Isn’t it just great to have this party back again?” Jopling yelled over Sister Sledge playing a surprise live set behind.
And this was all before Tuesday, when the 9:30 a.m. Champagne breakfast at the Miami Beach convention center officially christened another edition of the Floridian Art Basel. In order to encourage social distancing, the fair allowed access to opening hours to only the V-est of VIPs, but by noon the crowds started to fill into the booths. Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine and his wife, supermodel Behati Prinsloo, snapped up the gigantic James Turrell that served as the centerpiece of the Pace Gallery booth. The asking price was $950,000, and the deal was brokered by L.A.’s adviser to the stars, Meredith Darrow. Elsewhere in the fair, David Zwirner sold Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting, Blue (1953) for over $7 million, and Hauser & Wirth sold straight-from-the-studio paintings by George Condo and Rashid Johnson for $1.4 million and around $1 million respectively. Rubell Museum founders Don and Mera Rubell walked through hand in hand, and local real estate baron Jorge Perez barked Spanish into a cell phone while walking under a Calder at the Helly Nahmad booth. Disgraced former hotelier Steve Wynn chatted with Larry Gagosian at the latter’s booth; later, Gagosian caught up with Barry Diller.
Also spotted making the rounds at the fair were Monsieur Arnault and his family, including Alexandre Arnault, who masterminded the Tiffany’s ad campaign with a Basquiat that was supposedly “Tiffany blue.” But by the early afternoon the French luxury billionaires bolted from the fair to a marina on Jungle Island, where gigantic five-story vessels were set to ferry hundreds of guests over to the Miami Marine Stadium, a historic structure built to host boat races on Virginia Key. As the large boats disembarked, a fleet of smaller speedboats plastered in LV insignia shuttled celebrities from one island to another.
Upon arrival at the stadium, the invited masses—most of them Palm Beach– and Miami-based God-tier clients of the brand, wearing various looks from Louis Vuitton shows gone by—hopped onto a barge brought in by the brand to float alongside the stadium. Magnolia trees were potted through the premises to recall the Tuileries Garden, the iconic Paris spot where Abloh staged his first show, making him the first Black designer to debut a menswear line for the then 164-year-old brand, infusing the snooty Parisian luggage company with elements of conceptual art, SoundCloud rap, and streetwear—an approach that proved both lucrative and widely copied.
“He literally changed the world—how many people can you say that about?” said Lucien Smith, the artist who collaborated with Abloh, a close friend, on a number of projects, including a 2018 show at the designer’s pop-up gallery in New York.
“Being able to work on your final art, to see a project through until the day you pass—you can’t beat that,” Smith said. “So we have to just celebrate. That’s what he would have wanted.”
Smith said that Abloh’s artistic practice, the way that he toyed with the idea of the quotidian object as artwork, put him in line with Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. And indeed, Abloh had begun to show his practice in a contemporary art context—in the last few years, he had several shows in collaboration with Takashi Murakami at branches of Gagosian Gallery, and in 2019, his first museum retrospective, “Figures of Speech,” was staged at the MCA Chicago. All week, various members of the art world—including Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Alex Israel, and Art Basel director Marc Spiegler—told me that they were close enough to Abloh to have spoken to him just days before he died. Critics were a bit baffled by the MCA show, which featured an installation of Abloh-designed shoes and racks of clothes alongside sculpture, installation work, and video, but curator Michael Darling told me at the time that the show was by far its best-attended exhibition of his tenure, and that African American kids from all parts of Chicago were coming to the museum in droves.
“This is the hardest speech I’ve ever had to make,” Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke said, standing in front of a crowd that included 21 Savage, Gunna, and Lil Baby on the celebrity and media side, with Kushner and Trump placed on the client side, among the Palm Beach clientele who perhaps aren’t too averse to hobnobbing around Mar-a-Lago.
Burke said Abloh was like a son to him. He first met Abloh through A Bathing Ape founder Nigo and West, who was sitting next to Pharrell, with his daughter North sitting between West and his wife, who filed for divorce in February. Upon hearing Burke’s mention of him, West started weeping into his hands.
Burke made it clear that Abloh had planned every element of the show and, before his death, reiterated that he wanted the show to go on. The show was no somber affair—it began with the soaring orchestral swells of “In God’s Childlike Hands” by 22-year-old musician Lauren Auder as fire lit up a gigantic red, branded balloon installed beside the stage. The looks came out, one exuberant ensemble after another, with Kid Cudi, Quavo, and Offset serving as models. The tunes hopscotched genres like a Virgil DJ set—I saw him DJ many times, as recently as late October—and as the Clipse classic “Momma I’m So Sorry” came on, Ye’s mood brightened as he rapped every syllable of the Pusha T verse alongside Pharrell. It ended with a fireworks display that lit up the bay beside Virginia Key, and then an unplanned moment of silence, punctuated only by sounds of hushed crying.
The attendees walked to a custom-built stage where Erykah Badu and Cudi performed. The Arnault family held court in a VIP section where the artist JR dapped J Balvin and Joe Jonas downed caviar on potato chips. Throughout the crowd were various dealers who had left Art Basel’s hundreds of booths early to take in a fashion show instead, including Vito Schnabel and Emmanuel Perrotin.
“This sure beats an art fair!” said Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher, who sold millions of dollars of art out of the booth before hopping over to the show.
There were still a dozen gallery dinners happening up and down Miami Beach, including one for the Serpentine Galleries at YoungArts and one for David Zwirner at Soho Beach House. Eventually, many dealers ended up at a gigantic Star Island mansion for Nahmad’s party, where bartenders poured 1942 by the glassful and models spilled out through the deck and by the pool. Suddenly, having avoided the hundred or so NFT-related shindigs that went down in Miami, I was introduced to the man who’s arguably the face of the entire movement: Mike Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, whose non-fungible tokens have sold for $69 million and $29 million.
Turns out Beeple’s a pretty chill guy—nursing a Peroni, Winkelmann bummed a smoke and told me that he’s started to get used to this whole art world thing, even if he’s still living in Charleston, South Carolina. He mentioned that he might come out to Frieze Los Angeles in February.
“Well, Ari Emanuel is trying to get me to come,” Winkelmann said.
He pointed to Loic Gouzer, the former Christie’s rainmaker who was sitting on a couch next to us, and mentioned that Gouzer was giving him an art market crash course. Sitting next to Gouzer was his good friend, the collector and Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio.
I asked Beeple if DiCaprio’s bought any of his work.
“No, Leo doesn’t own any,” Beeple said, downing his Peroni. “Not yet.”
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Alleged forger and most wanted man in the art world Christian Rosa has been arrested in Portugal, and multiple sources confirmed that he’s in the process of being extradited back to the U.S. Additionally, a German paper is reporting that the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that an Austrian citizen has also been detained. True Colors reported in October that Rosa’s wife, the model Helena Severin, had posted to her Instagram an image in which she sat in a car next to a water bottle with the label “Mil Fontes”—Vila Nova de Milfontes is a beach town on Portugal’s Alentejo coast. Since the fraud case against Rosa was brought by the Southern District of New York, Rosa is presumably en route to Manhattan to face charges.
…Pop star Olivia Rodrigo was in Miami Monday night for a dinner hosted by Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello. Afterward she swung by iconic South Beach gay bar Twist—though she had to get snuck in, as Rodrigo is still only 18. You’d think the artist behind “Drivers License” would have the foresight to procure a fake ID. (A rep for Rodrigo didn’t immediately respond when we reached out.)
…Speaking of Twist, Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson threw quite a legendary Twist bash Wednesday to celebrate a new book by the red-hot German painter Florian Krewer. We won’t detail all the debauchery but it was…maybe the most raucous book party ever? The line swelled up the entire block, and Krewer had to kick open the exit door to get friends in.
…Simone Leigh’s defection from Hauser & Wirth to Matthew Marks was something of an open secret over the last few weeks. Marks had been sending out a preview of the works he planned to bring to Art Basel to dozens of collectors and advisers, and the first work in the preview was a new sculpture by Leigh—not exactly subtle. Come Tuesday, lo and behold, there was the sculpture in the booth, and the gallery confirmed that it now represents Leigh, who will take over the American pavilion in the Venice Biennale come April.
…Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump shocked society by showing up at the Louis Vuitton men’s show in Miami this week, but they aren’t the only Kushners in town. Jared’s brother, Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner, was spotted getting a tour of Alex Israel’s fabulous show at the Bass Museum alongside his wife, supermodel Karlie Kloss.
…On the other side of the world from Miami, mega-collector Dasha Zhukova was in Moscow this week to oversee a gala last week for the Garage Museum, which she cofounded over a decade ago with her ex-husband, billionaire Chelsea F.C. owner Roman Abramovich. Despite the divorce, Abramovich was on hand at the bash, as was Harmony Korine, who high-tailed it back to his Miami home in time for the festivities.
…Pamela Joyner, the collector and patron who served on President Obama’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities, is opening an art space in Chelsea next year.
…One of the bigger-budget Basel happenings has to be all the hubbub surrounding the American Express extravaganza set up on the beach behind the Edition. There’s a full stage, cabanas, and galleries erected in the sand displaying works available on Artsy. On Wednesday, they unveiled new AmEx cards designed by two of the most fiercely sought-after artists around, Kehinde Wiley and Julie Mehretu, now available to be put in wallets. “I tend to be a bit resistant to too much in the way of collabos,” Wiley told me at a dinner catered by the New York Korean steakhouse Cote. “But this made a lot of sense—that aspirational, transformative magic was possible, and I was able to take the DNA of the paintings and boil it down.” Mehretu credited the persistence of the card’s head of marketing, Rafael Mason, and noted that the card company got involved in supporting Denniston Hill, the residency program Mehretu cofounded in the Catskills, as well as the Studio Museum in Harlem.
…Rest in peace to the great artist Lawrence Weiner, who passed away at the age of 79 on Thursday.
A Rothko at the David Zwirner booth that a true baller snapped up on day three of the fair: $20 million
A basic room at the Ritz-Carlton South Beach, for a single night: More than $2,500
The Louis Vuitton Foosball table at the new men’s store in the design district: $87,000
An Uber XL from South Beach to the Design District—a four-mile journey—at 5 p.m. Thursday: $114.15
The Star Island house where the Nahmads threw their Tuesday-night rager, per month: An estimated $400,000
An 85-foot yacht that hosted, according to a publicist, 35 billionaires for a party Wednesday night: An estimated 100 million euros, but the buyer has to pay in crypto
A bottle of Dom Perignon, for sale at the Walgreens on Collins: $259.99
A glass of Don Julio 1942 at the bar of the Loews hotel: $51
A glass of Don Julio at the house that where the Nahmads threw their party: $0
An NFT developed by Pierce Brosnan, according to a publicist: Priceless
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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