What Basel Miami Is All About

“If Venice is about the artists, and discreet Basel about dealers and collectors, brash Miami is about money. It is money that you can not only taste in the air; you can hear it discussed, and see it being spent all day long. The effect is strangely distorting. Twenty-four hours in, and you feel a touch under-dressed. Forty-eight hours in, and you wonder WHY you don’t own any Chanel couture. Thirty-six hours in, and you no longer turn clammy when you’re told the price of things. ‘It’s $68,000,’ the bald guy in the Prada suit will tell you. “Hmm, not bad,” you think, aware that the woman with the stretched face to your left has just written a cheque for six times as much.”