On the opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach, an Uber driver with a Tesla took me from the convention center to Star Island, a three-mile trip that lasted nearly an hour in traffic. A man-made blip of land between mainland and beach, built by the Army, and home, at one time or another, to the likes of Shaq, Diddy, A-Rod, and Gloria Estefan, the island was eerily quiet compared to the madness of an art fair on its first VIP day, and completely dark by 6 p.m. I had ventured to the semiprivate locale to meet with Steven Galanis, the cofounder and CEO of Cameo, the start-up that allows users to purchase customized video messages from celebrities. Last week Matt Gaetz joined, and President Trump’s scuttled pick for attorney general will wish your conservative dad happy birthday in a MAGA hat for upwards of $500.

I’ve known Galanis since his pre-Cameo days. We were the same year at Duke, and I profiled him for the college magazine. But I hadn’t seen him since he moved from his childhood home of Chicago to Miami, a city he never visited growing up, and I had questions perhaps only a whip-smart, highly connected Miami tech-world guy like Galanis could answer. How has the town so rapidly shifted from a vacation haven with an undercurrent of noir-ish criminal intrigue—Carl Hiaasen, Miami Vice, “a sunny place for shady people,” etc.—to one of the country’s biggest tech and crypto hubs? And what’s going to happen now that the sector is once again reaching a crescendo?

And by that I mean…hitting a crescendo this exact week. On Wednesday night, a few hours after Art Basel Miami Beach had officially opened, sitting at the posh Greek spot Mandolin, my dinner mates felt the distinct buzz of a New York Times push alert on their phones. Bitcoin had hit an all-time high price of $100,000.

“Oh great, I’m rich again,” said one digital art collector sitting with us.

Galanis gave me his secret history of Miami tech and crypto mania. On December 4, 2020, the venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov posted, “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami,” and was shocked to see that Miami mayor Francis Suarez responded within hours, asking, “How can I help?” Just over a week later, the venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar hosted a dinner at his house on Star Island, COVID-tested and outdoors, with Suarez, along with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Peter Thiel associate Keith Rabois, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, former Uber executive Emil Michael, former Clear Standards CEO Betsy Atkins—and Galanis.

“That was kind of the primordial soup of this Miami tech ecosystem, and suddenly you have all these incredible founders and VCs that decided to move here,” Galanis told me. “I tried to draw the parallel to Chicago after the fire, when all these great minds from around the world just had this opportunity to build the next thing. And in that era of Miami, really that’s what it felt like.”

He was talking in a gigantic guesthouse next to an even bigger house, sipping an expensive rum on the rocks, the drink of Caribbean-exploring pioneers for centuries, and offered me one as well. He had flown in from New York that morning, spent all day on calls, and was headed to a box in the Kaseya Center that night to see the Miami Heat demolish LeBron James and the LA Lakers.

It’s only appropriate that the Heat are dominating the old guard of the Lakers and its aughts-era superstar these days. Miami’s been in a four-year sprint of expansion, with bankers pouring into neighborhoods like Brickell, led by another Chicago refugee turned Miami resident, Ken Griffin. (Two years ago I revealed that Griffin put his masterpieces on view at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach on a long-term loan.) Paul Singer has brought his company’s headquarters down here. Blackstone and Goldman Sachs have opened offices.

And the city’s rebirth comes at a time when Art Basel Miami Beach needs it the most. The fair once held an unrivaled perch on the art world calendar as the one must-attend event between September and May. Now it’s squeezed between Basel’s own Paris fair in October and Frieze’s Los Angeles fair in February, both started in the last half-decade. It doesn’t help that the art market has been in a bit of a dip for at least the last year.

And yet the optimism in Miami this week is palpable; the general feeling amid the crypto set is that the incoming Trump administration will be very good for business.

“The whole thing is getting unshackled. You had people that were so hostile and suddenly now you’re replacing the Cabinet with people that are so bullish, and they’re holders,” Galanis said. “The second that the US treasury buys the first Bitcoin, it’s just going to explode.”

By the time the fair opened on Wednesday, the art world seemed to have caught the optimism bug. In the opening hours, tens of millions of dollars of art exchanged hands. The day before the fair opened, an adviser had stopped me on Collins Avenue and said that he was trying to tell people that the “Trump bump” was real—we didn’t quite see it at the auctions, but another few weeks out, people would be feeling flush, and it would show in Miami. Turns out this adviser was right.

“People just have so much more money than they did a few months ago,” said Nicole Russo, the founder of Chapter NY, which is showing at Art Basel.

A few booths down, Tim Blum was sitting in the booth of his eponymous gallery, where by early afternoon he had sold more than a dozen works, including two sculptures by Yoshitomo Nara for $450,000 each.

“Today has gone amazing,” he said, riffing on the uncertainty that had hung ahead of the election. “It doesn’t even matter who won. It’s like on November 5, a spigot just went off.”

If it wasn’t already apparent, this city has no problem displaying its unfettered affection, of late, for Trump. In 2016, Miami-Dade County voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, giving her a 66%-to-33% victory, and there were visible signs of resistance at the fair that December. This year, Trump beat Kamala Harris in Miami-Dade County by double digits—a swing of nearly 40% in eight years. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison for that kind of urban climate, consider this: In order for Art Basel to find a major city that supported Trump that heavily in 2016, it would have had to hold its marquee American fair in Birmingham. Sweet home, Art Basel–bama.

Suddenly everything in Magic City seemed mired in MAGA-ness. Ray’s, the countrified downtown Manhattan faux dive part-owned by Justin Theroux that opened a pop-up at The Freehand on Monday, is pretty far from qualifying as Trump-y, but there was something striking about the usual oontze-oontze-oontze of techno in the club getting replaced by arty hipsters dancing to Morgan Wallen. There were Cybertrucks everywhere, including a long line of them parked outside of the fair on Wednesday.

The gift shops have racks of MAGA hats front and center, sometimes even on the mannequins, making a store called Vibe of Miami look a whole lot like a gallery showing an Isa Genzken sculpture. Venture farther into the store and you see “Let’s Go Brandon” gear and T-shirts with a bloody fist-pumping Trump post-assassination-attempt.

One dealer approached me at the Rubell Museum, in front of gigantic works by Vanessa Raw featuring nude women embracing, to ask a question in hushed terms. They had been invited to lunch at Mar-a-Lago. Should they go? The member who invited them, the dealer said, would definitely get them an audience with the president. Was it worth it?

It’s not just a general vibe. From the top down, Miami is a city where Trump supporters hold court. Suarez supported Biden in 2020, and ran against Trump in the Republican primary in 2023 by noting that the former president faced charges in Miami federal court over mishandling classified documents—but then backed Trump mid-2024. Since the election, his X feed is a lovefest for the president and his proposed Cabinet. (The classified documents case against Trump was later dismissed.)

Same goes for some of the start-up founders Suarez recruited to the city four years ago. Pishevar was an ardent Barack Obama supporter who was so upset when Trump won in 2016 he pushed for California to secede from the Union. By 2024, he was all in for Trump.

“The Democratic Party I knew under Obama doesn’t exist anymore,” he told the Financial Times at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The shift in Silicon Valley is indicative of the recognition that the Republican Party has become much more open to grand ideas to really rebuild America and embrace tech and innovation.”

And of course, the art world is quick to embrace the crypto-backed collecting classes if they can swoop in to end the malaise of art-buying recession. And in a world where nobody’s buying NFTs, what kind of art does a tech bro buy these days? Last month, Sotheby’s allowed bidding in cryptocurrencies on Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, and it was purchased by Justin Sun for the equivalent of $6.2 million—though in which currency is not clear. Sun has made no secret of his support for Trump. He’s spent $30 million on the president-elect’s own crypto venture.

Sun’s company Tron is currently facing fraud charges brought by the SEC for paying celebrities to promote the currency without disclosing. “This case demonstrates again the high risk investors face when crypto asset securities are offered and sold without proper disclosure,” said outgoing SEC chair Gary Gensler in bringing the charges last year. (Sun said last year that he believes the complaint “lacks merit.”)

That was very much then. Trump’s pick for Gensler’s post is crypto-loving Florida resident Paul Atkins. And so at this moment, there’s no reason why crypto investors looking forward to a potential golden era of deregulation and Bitcoin bumps wouldn’t take the opportunity to buy at Art Basel. Ryan Zurrer, the Swiss venture capitalist, confirmed to me that he was an underbidder on Comedian. He tapped out before the price went past $4 million. He was just a tad too late to buy the work when it debuted at Basel Miami in 2019, and he plans on buying at the fair for the foreseeable future.

“Art Basel Miami brings together collectors and artists in both digital and contemporary art, so it is a really great opportunity for jamming on new ideas that span different fields,” Zurrer told me. “Certainly a younger audience is attracted to Art Basel Miami, and that is great because it can onboard new people into both art and emerging technologies like crypto.”

It was a few hours into the fair and things seemed a bit quiet. The classic crush of billionaires at the front entrance didn’t quite overwhelm the convention center, and the QR code readers worked about half the time, contributing to avoidable logjams. The fair looked great—it’s the first year with Art Basel Miami Beach director Bridget Finn fully at the helm, and the galleries brought a fairly serious trove of goodies, even if a Miami fair will always be a bit heavy on big, splashy, colorful paintings.

But at some point in the early afternoon, people started to show up. Leon Black, the Apollo founder who left his firm and the MoMA board a few years back, trawled the aisles in sunglasses. Raf Simons was checking out Matthew Marks’s booth, Leo Villareal was admiring his own work that sold for $125,000 in the Pace booth, and Jared Leto confabbed with Dustin Yellin near a Dan Flavin sculpture at the Mignoni booth. Leonardo DiCaprio was there, as was Natalie Portman, who’s about to start filming her movie The Gallerist, about the local art scene. (They couldn’t film at the actual Art Basel Miami Beach, so they built a set of Art Basel Miami Beach off-island in Miami.) Beeple was deep in conversation with Brett Gorvy about a gigantic John Chamberlain in the booth, and at the Thaddaeus Ropac booth, Peter Marino waved over the gallery’s namesake to take a look at a Sigmar Polke painting.

“It has everything you want in a Polke,” Marino said.

Alec Monopoly sped his orange Lambo with suicide doors the whole two blocks from The Setai to the convention center, went straight to the Nahmad booth with Mr. Papi Steak himself, David Einhorn, and said, “What up, my guy!” to Helly Nahmad. He then Instagrammed the paintings by Pablo Picasso, with the text saying, “Picasso the goat!!!” It was unclear if Sylvester Stallone, a Miami regular, made it to the fair on the first day, but he did consign the Ernie Barnes at the Andrew Kreps booth. In case people forgot about the banana business, Chiquita was giving away the fruit on the top floor. No bananas duct-taped to the wall, alas, but there was a ton of Cattelan at the fair to capitalize on his moment, including an American flag battered by machine gun fire at MassimoDeCarlo, and a similarly bullet-strewn canvas at Gagosian, which sold in the opening hours of the fair.

“We’ve had a great start to the fair and sales have been strong,” Larry Gagosian said in a statement sent on the first day. “Collectors are taking their time, but we have already placed significant works by Maurizio Cattelan, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, and a Jeff Koons that came directly from the artist’s studio. There is an appetite for great things and the market feels like it’s coming back.”

Marc Payot, the Hauser & Wirth partner whose gallery sold tens of millions of dollars of art in a few hours, went even further.

“After a dark and nervous season, it feels like the clouds have broken and the perfect blue sky weather here in Miami is reflecting the art world’s mood—buoyant and fully engaged, minus the overly frantic energy of the past,” Payot said.

For all this Trump-assisted buying, there was still a bit of mystery, a sense of discovery, that bubbled up in the best booths. At one point, an art handler wearing a shirt repping the local Miami Beach high school entered the Galerie Buchholz booth and started asking about a work by Lutz Bacher. The piece in question was a door with a hole in it painted blue. Daniel Buchholz started to talk to him, giving a mini art history lesson about found objects and the ready-made and Duchamp, before stopping himself and looking the young man in the eye.

“Sometimes a hole is just a hole,” he said.

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…It’s Art Basel Miami Beach—there were parties. Highlights include a dinner for Venus Williams hosted by Cultured magazine at Major Food Group’s quite lovely design district spot, Contessa, followed by a dinner party for Gagosian at Mr. Chow, the only Florida outpost of the empire. By the way, Michael Chow was pulling off some epic socks at the VIP day of the fair. Beloved New York dream-pop outfit Chanel Beads performed at the David Kordansky Gallery bash to celebrate Lucy Bull’s show at the ICA, and was followed by a DJ set from the even more New York duo the Ion Pack. Collectors Lauren Taschen and Jason Rubell threw a dinner at the Jon & Vinny’s pop-up at the Rubell Museum. The night at Mandolin we mentioned earlier was a party cohosted by Sadie Coles, Chantal Crousel, Gladstone, Kurimanzutto, and Mendes Wood DM. There were some parties Thursday night, too, but at that point, most serious art buyers are long gone from Miami. A few even left on Wednesday this year, which is pretty next-level.

…Baselgoers have been coming up with some creative ways to get through the absolutely crushing Miami traffic. One friend said he paid his driver $40 to drive on the shoulder in order to not miss an opportunity to eat stone crabs. Others have been hiring electric scooters for the day. Personally, I did not, um, encourage or discourage one driver to do a bunch of illegal moves—he called them, simply, “Miami moves”—while I was very late to a meeting. Elon Musk’s approach takes the cake—apparently he’s still trying to build a series of tunnels under the city in order for Miami to finally function like a normal metropolis. Wonder how that fits into DOGE!

…ArtNews announced the first winners of its first-ever ArtNews Awards. It’s about time that the art world gets an awards show on the level of like, at the very least…the VMAs? It makes sense that a mag owned by Jay Penske, CEO of the company that co-owns the Golden Globes, can get this over the line. First batch of winners: Emerging artist of the year is Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio; established artist of the year is Delcy Morelos⁠; the lifetime achievement award goes to María Magdalena Campos-Pons; the best thematic museum show is “Scratching at the Moon” at the ICA LA; and the best gallery group show is “At the Edge of the Sun” at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. The winners were just announced this time, but there’s going to be a full awards ceremony in New York for the next edition, set to go down in the fall of 2025.

…Speaking of magazines and awards, ArtReview released its annual “Power 100” list, and at the top for the first time is Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates. Excellent pick! Al Qasimi founded the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2009 after working on the Sharjah Biennial—she took the reins of the show in 2003, when she was a 23-year-old art student. In the decades since, she’s transformed the cultural offerings in the region, and ArtReview’s choice to slot her in the top spot indicates that the headwinds of the global art market may be heading more directly toward the Middle East. Also coming in at number four is Steve McQueen, up from number eight last year. Read my profile of McQueen in the Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair, right here!

Subscribe to True Colors, Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch.

…Remember in 2021, when the fashion industry threatened to swallow Art Basel Miami Beach whole? Well, the luxury tycoons haven’t infiltrated Magic City on that level since then, but there were still a decent number of fashion activities around the city. I stopped by events for Gucci and Cartier in the design district Tuesday before dinner. Good on the brands for throwing the parties on the same night as the ICA openings, when the art folk are already on that side of the causeways.

…There are a few classic Art Deco hotels on Collins that seem absolutely nowhere close to reopening, and from the looks of it are still undergoing intense gut renos. No disrespect to the process, we just miss some of the classic spots! Here’s to hoping that The Delano, The Raleigh, and The Shelborne open in 2025…or 2026…or 2027…

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