When an artist friend returned from his first Art Basel Miami Beach experience a few years back he recounted a frenzy that made me think of Black Friday, only instead of flat-screens and digital cameras, the gate-crashing mob of insanity was hording multi-million-dollar works of art.
“There were people literally running from booth to booth,” he said. The best – and often most expensive – artwork was sold within 20 minutes.
That image of collectors sprinting from convention booth to convention booth has always stayed with me. And as I planned for this years event, I couldn’t help but feel that I, too, would be in a constant dash from one supposedly cool thing to the next.
