If you want to be immediately ushered into the back rooms of downtown New York’s pre-eminent art galleries, it helps to be a deep-pocketed collector. Or you could just tag along with Bridget Finn, the new director of Art Basel Miami Beach, as she hopped between TriBeCa galleries on a recent afternoon.
The fair, whose 22nd annual edition opens on Wednesday with 286 galleries from around the world exhibiting inside the Miami Beach Convention Center, draws the global culturati, who swoop in for a week’s worth of art seeing, art schmoozing, and not least, art buying. Although an array of satellite fairs and pop-up shows engulf the entire city, the priciest sales are still brokered at the convention center, where a who’s who of selected dealers hold court.
In TriBeCa, a vibrant new center of New York’s contemporary art scene, Finn received the red carpet treatment as she made the rounds of the neighborhood’s galleries, scouting fresh talent and checking in on established players. Her easy rapport with gallery directors and their support staff is no surprise: She hails from their ranks.
“We all traveled together for the past 15 years,” Finn explained to me with a chuckle after yet another gallery staffer greeted her like an old friend. “It’s what happens with art dealers.”
Before being hired by Art Basel, Finn, 41, worked the other side of the Miami fair. She began as an assistant with Anton Kern gallery in New York — after graduating in 2005 from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, she left any art-making notions behind, “got in a U-Haul with all my possessions, moved across the country and asked Anton for a job.” Later she jumped to the similarly top-shelf Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, running its contemporary program. In 2017 she returned to Detroit and, with the fellow New York gallery veteran Terese Reyes, started Reyes Finn, which made the quick leap to exhibiting at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021.
This is the first time since the Miami fair’s 2002 start that it has been led by a former dealer. Previously the director role has been held by a telecom executive, an academic turned auction house specialist and a journalist. The change isn’t lost on Finn.
“I can honestly say to young galleries when I am on the phone with them, that I too have been wait-listed for Positions,” she said, referring to a section of the fair earmarked for up-and-coming gallerists. “I understand, in great depth — financially and psychologically — how fairs are a challenge.”
Those challenges have become increasingly stark as the art market continues to slump, creating a rash of gallery closures and sparking fears among some midsize survivors that soaring overheads are unsustainable.
Finn acknowledges that fairs promise new clients but also hefty new expenditures. The main sector of Basel’s Miami fair charges most galleries $60,000 to $80,000 with additional fees for a corner booth or prime placement on the show floor, Finn said. Add costs for shipping artwork to the fair, round-trip flights and a week’s worth of hotel rooms, and expenses can easily reach six figures. The Nova and Positions sectors set aside for smaller galleries are priced accordingly at $26,000 and $11,000. But tellingly, this year’s fair has 14 galleries sharing booths, a tough status downgrade for many dealers.
It’s not only galleries that are feeling the cash crunch. Art Basel’s fairs in Hong Kong, Miami, Paris and Basel, Switzerland, are battling with their rival, Frieze’s fairs in London, Los Angeles, New York and Seoul. Art Basel Paris, running just a week after Frieze London, appears to have stolen much of London’s thunder. But Art Basel Hong Kong, owing to a crackdown on free expression under China’s national security laws, has ceded the promise of an Asian art mecca to Frieze Seoul.
Yet while the parent companies of both Art Basel and Frieze continue to post multimillion-dollar losses, neither seems ready to accept that the fair market is oversaturated. As reported by Art News, Basel is in talks to manage a state-owned art fair in the United Arab Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi in exchange for that government’s investment of $20 million. Endeavor, the corporate parent of Frieze, recently announced that it was looking to sell off its Frieze fairs— but amid the prospective buyers is Endeavor’s own chief executive, the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, who has already raised over $100 million for his bid, according to Bloomberg.
Back on the ground in TriBeCa, there was also no shortage of hopefuls looking to enter the art fair fray. The Charles Moffett gallery, a modest storefront space, is among the 34 galleries making their Basel debuts in Miami, and Moffett himself was sanguine about the outlay of money involved.
“It’s not cheap, but the Basel fairs are the gold standard,” he said. He caught himself and turned with a sheepish laugh to Finn, who was standing nearby: “I’m not just saying that because you’re here! It’s an opportunity to build upon success.” Moffett already has secured several museum sales for work by the artist he’ll spotlight at Basel, Kim Dacres, who transforms tire rubber into impressionistic busts. But Dacres’s Basel-bound sculptures, priced in the low-five-figures, will be up for grabs — bucking a risk-averse trend by galleries to quietly sell many fair artworks before the fair even opens. “Going to Basel gives us the opportunity to start a relationship,” Moffett said. “Collectors hate stopping into a booth and finding out everything is presold. It kills relationships.”
A few blocks east, but seemingly an art galaxy away, the Marian Goodman Gallery was also approaching Basel as a relationship builder. Though it had exhibited annually at the fair since its inception, its staff was intent on demonstrating that despite the retirement of its namesake founder, the gallery remained as vital as when Goodman opened it in 1977 on West 57th Street. That effort was writ large throughout the gallery’s new Broadway home, where it filled a five-story, 35,000-square-foot, 19th-century cast-iron building.
Rose Lord, one of the gallery’s managing partners, was still riding high on the response to the inaugural group show there: “It feels great, 1,500 people came through the opening,” Lord said. “For a gallery to remain relevant, you can’t remain static.” That meant a show that included artists associated with the gallery’s early days, as well as a new, 12-foot-high abstract canvas by Julie Mehretu and a “staged situation” — a roughly 60-second sequence of choreographed hand gestures — by Tino Sehgal.
The gallery had not yet decided that afternoon which pieces would be headed to Miami for Basel, though the Mehretu painting was priced at “several million,” Lord said, and Sehgal’s handiwork (or at least the exclusive right to perform it) was $31,000. It would certainly be cheaper to send a staffer to perform the Sehgal gestures than to ship a 12-foot-high painting. But selling the Mehretu piece would cover all the gallery’s Basel expenses and then some. Though with rent and payroll to meet at not only their TriBeCa space, but also sizable Marian Goodman outposts in Los Angeles and Paris, such a seven-figure sale seemed like a necessity — and one that would need to be regularly repeated.
To the art adviser Todd Levin, a longtime Basel fixture, that is precisely the problem. “It’s really not about having enough collectors,” he said. “The truth is more that there’s just not enough good art made that can validate this many fairs. It’s not the buy side that’s the problem, it’s the sell side.” Even assuming a level of quality control, Levin continued, unless an artist is essentially operating like a Warhol-esque factory and churning out product, they “can’t be requested over and over to make work for all these fairs, plus their exhibitions and then museum shows.” Something has to give, he concluded: “I think the entire system has reached a level of exhaustion.”
Finn is aware of such dire predictions but remains upbeat. Yes, the art market was under pressure, but “it’s not a situation like 2008” with its global recession. Moreover, she pointed out, the talk of a rivalry between Basel and Frieze missed the point: “We are not operating in a scarcity economy where, if we do well, they suffer, and vice versa. Generally, when sales are good, sales are good for everyone.” And there was still plenty of growth potential, she said, citing the Miami setting for Basel, where the homegrown art scene had exploded in size and stature over the past two decades.
Yet Finn’s praise of Miami raises a sore issue for many South Floridians: If Miami’s own art milieu is truly thriving and a rising cultural tide lifts all boats, why were only five of its galleries — a record high — deemed worthy of being among Basel’s 286 exhibitors? Shouldn’t there be at least twice that number taking part?
“Yes,” Finn agreed, “I would say yes.”
So what was stopping her?
“The competition is fierce” with selection decisions that were hardly hers alone. Dealer-run committees had the final say. “It’s not a race,” she emphasized, citing the example of Miami’s Anthony Spinello, a regular exhibitor at Basel since 2012 — a good eight years after he began staging shows. “He has evolved what he’s doing multiple times to his benefit.” Indeed, his Spinello Projects operates out of a sprawling warehouse, showcasing some of Miami’s most hotly collected artists. But his beginnings were far more modest. Visitors to his first gallery space were likely unaware that it doubled as his apartment. “I did a pretty good job of camouflaging things,” Spinello once quipped to me, “unless you opened a closet and saw my entire life stuffed in there.”
So if Finn advises galleries to play the long game, was there a barometer she would look to this upcoming week to gauge the health of both Art Basel and the art market at large? Perhaps a key dealer she’d make a beeline to as soon as the fair opened?
Finn raised an amused eyebrow. “I’ll start by getting to the Miami Beach Convention Center at the crack of dawn to greet the carpenter’s union,” she said with a knowing smile. “They’ve been building the show for 22 years. Once the walls are up and things are moving, I’ll get to the galleries.”
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