Art Basel Miami Beach Is the Epitome of Sleaze

There was the time that Usher charged his phone in a woman’s vagina (2014). Or when a performance artist got naked and lulled around with pigs for 104 hours - with the pigs later contracting pneumonia (2012). A legit homicide attempt that was mistaken for performance art (2015), and Leonardo Di Caprio debuting yet another 20-something girlfriend (2012, 2019) or taking 20 of women home with him from the club (2014). And there's the $120k sale of a duct-taped banana (2019).

Taking place this year from Dec 5-7 2025, Art Basel Miami Beach is about many things - but the art is mostly set dressing for the circus of excess that goes on around it. The premier event of annual Miami Art Week, Art Basel Miami Beach is the largest art fair in the United States, and one of the most significant art events in the world. It boasts 286 galleries from over forty countries and territories, a scale described by The Bitter Southerner as “unbearable to an unmedicated nervous system”.

The US has spearheaded today’s culture of more is more - and while Art Basel originates, of course, in Basel Switzerland, it’s the American edition that has come to most vividly highlight the art industry’s most nauseating connection to capitalist sleaze. Here, loose 100 dollar bills are exchanged for a single vodka martini, art sells at unfathomable prices, and a heavy dose of scandal is stabbed into the veins of each day.

"While Art Basel originates in Switzerland, the American edition is what most vividly embodies the art industry’s most nauseating connection to capitalist sleaze..."

It’s not surprising that all this unfolds in Miami, a city that has come to embrace the term “sunny place for shady people”. Although originally coined by writer W. Somerset Maugham to describe the French Riviera, Miami has grown into the phrase’s rightful suitor.

"There’s a real class divide in Miami - a lot of ego and vanity based on how much money you have"

“There’s a real class divide in Miami - a lot of vanity based on how much money you have,” Kervin Pierre Louis, a queer DJ based in Miami. “You don’t know where a lot of people’s money comes from, I guess it’s based on the drug culture in the 80s. Take Biscayne, a main street with a lot of buildings there which are funded by drug money. That’s where that shady reputation comes from.”

The legacy of cocaine dealers is well-chronicled - 2021’s Netflix’s Cocaine Cowboys is a documentary on ‘Kings of Miami’ Cubans Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta in the 80s, while 2024’s Sofia Vergara-starring series Griselda delves into the real-life story of a Colombian, Miami-based drug queen who operated around the same time as Falcon and Magluta. Much of cocaine’s illicit money was channelled into real estate, meaning that this wealth has literally built the city’s skyline.

But beyond the shape and history of this city, how does Miami’s sketchy rep connect to today’s art fair sleaze the event’s ensuing scandals?

First off, unpredictability is a core Miami characteristic:

“Anything could happen,” says Kervin. “We just look the other way - you’ll see something crazy on the street, it’s like that Florida Man [internet joke], it's just like that somebody's like eating somebody's face in Miami.”

Then, there’s the money - that’s still coming in, fast and unquantifiable. With Miami now the world capital of crypto, tech bros are pumping even more money into the art scene.

It’s no secret that art is a tax-free investment for the ultra-wealthy; a way to sink capital into something easily transportable, often held in Swiss or Singaporean freeports, where it’s not what the meaning and quality of the piece that matters, but the worth of it.

That leads to the shock factor. More money, more problems - and Miami’s art world has had its fair share of them outside of the Art Week shenanigans. Take last April, for example, when Miami art dealer Les Roberts was charged with money laundering and fraud, after his Miami Fine Art Gallery sold $6m dollars worth of fake Warhols.

In an ‘only in Miami’ twist of events, while still awaiting the verdict for selling $6m worth of Warhol fakes, art dealer Roberts has now opened a store selling rare Labubus.

In an ‘only in Miami’ twist of events, while still awaiting the trial, Roberts has now opened a store selling rare Labubus - his bond conditions prevent him from selling art. Speaking to the Art Newspaper, the official Labubu manufacturer advised buyers against purchasing from the store.

Art Week, which includes Art Basel Miami Beach, concentrates the chaos into a number of days and crystallises the sketchiness by magnifying big money and loose morals tenfold. Despite boosting the city with an estimated $400-$500 million dollars each edition, local artists say they aren’t benefitting from the big spenders - and getting priced out of the industry. “A lot of local artists are excluded from being part of the main fairs because this is a competition. These fairs are in town to sell art; they’re not here to support artists. The people that come are here to consume that, and it overshadows what is happening throughout the city,” said Chire Regans speaking to social justice platform, Prism, in 2022.

"A lot of local artists are excluded from being part of the main fairs because this is a competition."

Regans, who is known as VantaBlack and has been based in Miami for two decades, points out that art fairs just eclipse the real underbelly of Miami’s creative scene, 'behind […] this diamond-encrusted veil that Art Basel brings to Miami'.

Locals like Kervin similarly feel the pinch - Art Week is arguably more about the parties than the art - but even the parties can be hard to get into. Be prepared to spend hours in massive queues that lead to nowhere, or missing events entirely due to standstill congestion:  “Ubers are going to be hell expensive during that week. Not being able to get somewhere because the traffic is insane,” he says. “You're spending a lot of money and feeling like you didn't get anything out of it.”

But despite the inherent sketchiness of Miami serving as a backdrop of the US’ largest art fair, there is a bombastic, invigorating energy rippling across the city. Kervin still goes every year if he is in the city, and says there are still plenty of underground parties and spots to check out where the Crypto Bros haven’t infiltrated (just avoid Club Space).

“You’ll still see something cool,” says Kervin. “It’s unpredictable. You could have the best Art Basel. Or the worst [if] shit doesn’t go your way. But I think that’s maybe the beauty of it?”

There’s always an unhinged duality to Miami, but during Miami Beach Art Basel the city becomes a microcosm of how American culture turns art into spectacle. Here, the value of art is inextricably tied to status, which is validated through excess and debauchery.

This arguably is the point of all art fairs: they are a marketplace, and Art Basel Miami Beach is the most shameless of them all.  Which may make it the most exciting one to visit - it embraces itself for what it is, rather than pretends to be something it is not.

As Joan Didion wrote in her 1987 non-fiction book on the city: “Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated.”

“Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated" - Joan Didion, Miami

Miami Art Week is where you’ll truly find some of the most unbearable people on the planet - yet if you play your cards right, it’ll also be a week that could change your life. You won't know until you visit. The only guarantee is that you’re coming out of the week broke as hell.