"They're getting so rich so fast now it's hard to keep up," said someone in the crowd that formed early on Wednesday, "Supermarket Sweep"-style, outside the Convention Center, awaiting a signal for the noontime VIP preview to begin.
When the doors opened, the throng rushed forward, racing toward favorite dealers' booths. These were not housewives wearing kerchiefs and rollers but socialites and hedge fund billionaires and Silicon Valley tyros and Palm Beach matrons with faces as taut and expressionless as the ones on inflatable love dolls.
"Art Basel essentially invented Miami Basel to cater to North American and South American capital," said Nadja Swarovski, of the famous crystal manufacturing company, who sponsors one of the week's big events. Swarovski was referring to Miami Basel's parent entity, a respected traditional art fair in Switzerland. "The world is flat now," Swarovski said. "The borders are breaking down. Cultures are merging."
Galloping democratization has struck the once rarefied hobby of art collecting, for instance, as the dealers first found and then fell on the reserves of capital that were lying around untapped in places like Mexico, India, the Persian Gulf states and Brazil.
Little about art collecting as a competitive high stakes game may be new. Yet the broadening of the consumer base is, and so is the inescapable truth that the trade is now substantially driven by marquee auctions and art fairs that come to feel like circuit parties for the ultrarich.
The profile of an average conventioneer at Miami Basel can perhaps be deduced from the number of private jets leased to fly here this week. NetJets alone — to name a leading vendor of shared jet ownership — booked 216 flights to Miami for this year's fair, a 44 percent increase over two years ago.
"I'm just making the first round," said Beth Rudin DeWoody, the philanthropist and collector, on Wednesday as she power-walked the aisles of the main fair, scattering in her path the red dots that signify a work has been sold.
"Crazy zeros" is how one longtime collector termed current art pricing. Pull a figure out of a hat and add a random nought or two.
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