Unfazed collectors drive strong sales on Art Basel Miami's first day

News headlines have been beating a continuous, ominous drumbeat about the Covid-19 omicron variant, but wealthy collectors continued to line up on Tuesday morning for the VIP opening day of Art Basel Miami Beach. 

The art fair is the latest test of rich peoples’ appetites for large gatherings. Based on the first day, art collectors’ tolerance for risk remains strikingly robust. 

“Everyone’s here this year,” says Kibum Kim, a partner at the Los Angeles Gallery Commonwealth and Council,  whose booth included a series of steel works by the artist Beatriz Cortez. “Even people who said they weren’t coming decided to come,” he says. 

Sales on the first day were accordingly solid. 

New York dealer, Marianne Boesky, sold multiple pieces in her booth, including a resin-on-wood piece by Donald Moffett for $160,000 and a new work by Jammie Holmes for about $85,000. “We’ve had a really good response so far,” she says. 

As sales reports trickled in over the course of the day, other galleries told similar stories.  Mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth sent out a release saying it had sold 18 artworks in the first few hours of the fair, ranging from a $250,000 painting by Henry Taylor to a solid, cast-glass sculpture by Roni Horn that went in the range of $1.2 million.

There is also a “crypto cocktail” event on a 279-foot-long yacht co-hosted by a group that includes Coinbase and the yacht brokerage Kitson Yachts; the SLS South Beach has offered NFTs for sale in every one of its hotel rooms; and CC, “the first-ever Metaverse digital pop star,” will debut in a “3D hologram live show.”