What to Skip During Art Basel Miami Beach

The short version

Most of what goes wrong during Miami Art Week isn't bad art. It's bad routing, a VIP night you shouldn't have gone to, and a fair you already walked last December. Skip the preview parties you had to chase, skip crossing the causeway twice in a day, and stop trying to see everything. What's left is a much better week.

Practical information

Skip the VIP opening nights

This is the big one, and it's counterintuitive, because the whole week is sold on access.

A VIP preview is genuinely valuable if you are buying. Dealers hold the good work for the first hours, and if you're in the market, that's the room you need to be in. If you are not buying, you have paid — in money, favours or an hour of queuing — for a crowd.

Red Dot and Spectrum's opening is the clearest case. Do not go to the VIP opening. It's overcrowded and you will not see the art you came for. The same fair on a Friday afternoon is the same art with space to stand in front of it.

Skip Art Miami if you went last year

Art Miami and CONTEXT are a good ticket. Two white-tent fairs, one entry, a mix of blue-chip names and work you could actually buy.

But some dealers bring the same show year after year. If you walked it last December and you're choosing between this and something you haven't seen, pick the something you haven't seen.

Skip the second causeway crossing

The fairs split cleanly across the bay, and the single most common way to waste a day of art week is to put one fair on the Beach and the next one in Wynwood.

Beach side: Art Basel, Design Miami, SCOPE, Untitled, Aqua, INK, The Bass, Faena. Mainland: NADA, Art Miami, Red Dot, the Rubell, the Margulies, PAMM, ICA.

Pick a side in the morning and stay on it. You will see more art and spend less of your life on the MacArthur.

Skip ICA as a destination

ICA Miami is free, quick and much stronger than its size suggests. It is also in the Design District, where art week traffic and parking are genuinely miserable.

So the verdict is conditional rather than negative: go if you are already in the Design District. Don't build a trip across town around it.

Skip the completist instinct

Eleven fairs run in six days. Nobody has seen all of them, including the people who will tell you they have.

Three fairs and one collection in a day is a full, good day. Five is a forced march that leaves you unable to remember anything by six in the evening. The reason to come to Miami in December is to see something you'll still be thinking about in March, and that does not happen at pace.

Nobody has ever walked out of the Convention Center wishing they'd done one more fair.

What people skip that they shouldn't

Faena. Free, on the sand, and the best public art of the week. It's also the most likely thing on your list to vanish behind a private event, so go early in the week and be prepared to try twice.

The last day. Sunday is quieter than the weekend and the art is the same. The one cost is that dealers start packing, and NADA has already closed — it finishes on Saturday 5 December.

Design Miami. Filed under "design" and skipped by people who came for art, which is backwards. It's the most unusual show of the week.

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through one, Living Spree may earn a commission at no cost to you. It never changes a verdict. How this works.