‘Art Basel’s Come a Long Way Since the Banana’: Nightmares and Dreams at Miami Art Week
Art history is being made in real time but that won’t stop you from being ghosted for someone higher up the food chain. Just don’t take it personally, advises Janelle Zara in a new diary from Miami’s biggest fair.
On Wednesday afternoon, a few hours into First Choice at Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), a woman introduces herself to Mike Winkelmann, the American artist better known as Beeple, as ‘Blockchain Ben’s mom’. Standing in the plexiglass pen of Regular Animals (2025), Beeple’s group of fleshtone robodogs with the hyperrealistic faces of artists and tech billionaires, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Blockchain Ben 13 years old or 35?
This is my third day in Miami, on what is maybe my eighth or tenth time attending ABMB since 2010. What’s different this year is Zero 10, a new sector at Art Basel for ‘art of the digital age’, another way of bringing some speculative energy back into the mix. When Beeple turns to me to ask how I interpret the piece, I tell him, ‘This is my worst nightmare’: a future in which tech oligarchs control our military weapons and surveillance technologies. The robodog next to us poops out an AI-generated photo; a woman points to it and asks, ‘Who’s that?’ Beeple replies, ‘That’s Picasso. Shame! You guys need to learn your art history.’
FAQs ABOUT ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2025
What do you think of the Beeple piece?
This is the art you get in the absence of art history, but everyone deserves to experience the art that moves them. What we’re witnessing now is the tech industry making their own art history in real time, using AI to trace their handprints onto the cave walls. Despite not being to my taste, I think Beeple is not only a legitimate artist but an artist of his time—a period shaped by the end stages of capitalism and a dwindling aesthetic sensibility. Real People is also a less-good version of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old People’s Home (2007).
What should I wear to Art Basel?
Reach for the most expensive-looking version of you. I also like to put on a pair of sunglasses light enough to wear indoors or at night to prevent overstimulation. It’s like lowering the display contrast on your phone. I don’t care if it makes me look like an asshole.
How’s the rest of the fair?
On the ground, you can feel that the economic conditions of ABMB’s halcyon days no longer exist; the seated dinners and all-night open bars we once enjoyed have been replaced by light bites and two-hour cocktails. The challenge ahead for young artists whose markets have collapsed is developing their practice until it matches its price tag. But otherwise, things are great. There’s a lot less filler art, and ‘the volume of peripheral people has gone away,’ says Tury Sandoval, one half of the L.A. artist duo FriendsWithYou. ‘What remains is the people that can’t help it.’ Tensions among dealers are consequently high. When I run into a Gagosian director in the bathroom, we hug, scream ‘Hiiiiiii!’ and diligently keep it moving. As I leave, a publicist bestie who’s here for the first time (throughout this story, we’ll pseudonymously call her ‘Veronica’) texts me:
i just told someone that this whole week is sinister hahahaha am i actually having fun or overcompensating
Should I take it personally?
You mean when someone abruptly abandons your conversation for someone with more money or prestige? No, you shouldn’t. Almost everyone is here just to make money, and a lot of them are on cocaine. All of us have been ghosted for someone higher up on the food chain, and eventually, you’ll do it to someone else too.
Would you go back?
In a heartbeat. I’m one of the people who can’t help it.
At the Pace dinner (Mediterranean, standing) my boyfriend Joe Reihsen and I make small talk with a collector couple, and we like none of the same things. The next night Veronica and I arrive so late to the dinner co-hosted by Malta International Contemporary Arts Space and galleries Xavier Hufkens and Karma (seated, featuring special guest ambassador of Malta) that we’re shuffled to an empty overflow table. Remarks go into overtime just as we stand to leave, so I sit back down while she takes off running. She mouths ‘sorry, girl’ from the exit, but honestly I’m not even mad.
Once your eyes adjust, the silver light of a full moon can feel like the sun. The one time I go to the beach is Thursday night to watch American artist and musician Cynthia Daignault destroy one of her paintings, a performance she began a decade ago by assigning each canvas a date of destruction. As she cuts the unstretched canvas with scissors, she speaks of the beauty of art outside ‘the church of commodity’. The moon intermittently disappears behind the clouds, shrouding the scene in darkness until the clouds pass, an apparent metaphor for the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Nothing on this earth is meant to last, and not even change is permanent.
Did I mention that before leaving for Miami, I bricked Instagram on my phone? Suddenly my brain feels the most energised it has in a long time. In lieu of doomscrolling, brain rotting, thirst trapping, or FOMO, I’ve simply taken up smoking. Outside of Mac’s Club Deuce, I’m going through scrolling withdrawal with cigarette in hand, asking to see photos of the best things people saw. L.A. critic Andrew Berardini shows me a Japanese wrestler in a vinyl costume taking a boot to the face. Then I finally head to Twist, a gay labyrinth of multiple dancefloors and the one place in Miami I feel fully actualised. On the way a man yells ‘FASHIONABLE!’ at a woman crossing the street, the best catcall I’ve ever heard.
At the bar I order the trifecta: a club soda for hydration, a Coke Zero for caffeine, and a tequila soda to keep the party going. Suddenly its 5am, Friday morning, and my bestie for the night (a handsome art media guy I met a few hours ago) asks, ‘Do you have a lot of work tomorrow?’ This is gay for ‘Can you leave so I can hook up?’ and so I happily oblige; my man is actually at the hotel waiting for me. He’s asleep when I get in at 6am, and I unbrick my phone, releasing a deluge of internet slop into my brain. Wow, I think. I’ve missed so much yet nothing at all. At 8:40am I start getting ready for my 9am interview with Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, desperately hoping that washing my face is enough to make me look normal. I arrive at 9:01am with sunglasses over my eyes, and the artist is standing in line for coffee with bare feet on the linoleum floor. We have a great interview, I think. He says, ‘People don't need to buy art’—the last thing Art Basel would like to see in print. Hans Ulrich Obrist walks out of the elevator and we pretend not to smirk.
For five people at Joe’s Stone Crab on Friday night, I order for the table: two portions of the large claws, lobster mac and cheese, broccolini, crab cakes, fried chicken, and creamed spinach. A nearly perfect amount of food. The waiter asks us if we’ve seen ‘that library on the beach’—English celebrity stage designer Es Devlin’s Library of Us, a rotating sundial of books. ‘Art Basel’s come a long way since the banana.’
Swimming through the Silencio crowd in the basement of EDITION, I hear a Gen Z voice say, ‘I heard Miami is kinda Millennial.’ A chorus of young women reply, ‘OMG it issssssss!’ I feel the elation of basking in the glow of the stage and a mix I’ll call ‘Millennial Nostalgia (Electronic)’: Metronomy, Feist, et cetera, with a club beat. The music switches to techno so I go upstairs to recharge in the safest of safe spaces: the patio of EDITION’s restaurant, Matador Room, where my boyfriend, his best friend Tony Lewis, Tony’s wife Emily, and gallerist Eric Gleason are drinking a bottle of something very expensive. I put on my sunglasses and recline to rest my eyes, and Ray Bulman, senior director of The Hole, asks me if I’m having a stroke. Veronica arrives and says that she felt euphoria on the dancefloor. She says the thing I’d been hoping she’d say: ‘I’m having a great night.’ —[O]
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