At Miami’s Art Basel, a canvas of global inequality in the pandemic age
 A sculpture displayed during Miami Art Week on Dec. 1. (Lynne Sladky/AP) |
MIAMI BEACH — On the Rolls-Royce-clogged avenues of this art deco dreamland, the global One Percent are back — and richer than ever.
After a pandemic hiatus in 2020, the orgy of opulence known as Art Basel Miami Beach returned to the loving arms of South Florida this week, luring high-net-worth individuals from their coronavirus bunkers to duel for Warhols and Basquiats. Inside the city’s convention center, a sea of couture-clad contemporary art shoppers — at least one donning Gucci-logoed lederhosen — clinked glasses and perused works with asking prices stretching into eight figures.
With pent-up demand from the French billionaires, Hollywood stars and real estate barons in attendance, just months after the U.S. government first said it would lift most bans on travel from Asia and Europe, sales are “robust,” officials say.
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Outside the convention center, South Beach hotel suites are going for as much as $27,000 a night, tables at nightclubs for $75,000. The same Miami Art Week that in 2019 gave the world the $120,000 banana is now serving the $1,000 cup of coffee — a piece of performance art billed as “an exotic, big, fruity” brew poured to order in a “one-of-a-kind designed paper cup.” The velvet ropes are out for lavish parties thrown by Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tag Heuer.
So much for the pandemic as a great equalizer. Perhaps more than any other recent international event, Miami’s massive art show, the U.S. installment of a commercial art circus that also draws speculators and the cultural elite to yearly shows in Hong Kong and Basel, Switzerland, marks a post-coronavirus coming out party for the global mega-rich — even as the virus continues to loom over global affairs, with surging cases in some parts of the world and the emergence of the omicron variant.
Sure, there’s new mask requirements this year and the need to produce proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for entry. But the event is the latest evidence that despite, even because of, the pandemic, the lives of the global elite (or at least their bank accounts) have never been better.
In the United States, the net wealth of the top 1 percent richest households rose by nearly 35 percentage points during the pandemic, compared with a far more modest 5-percentage-point gain for households in the bottom 50 percent, according to a World Economic Forum analysis published this month.
Globally, poverty rates have climbed, especially among younger, lower-skilled and female workers, while the more moneyed have enjoyed roaring stock markets and surging property values. The World Bank estimates that inequality among countries is rising for the first time in a generation, with emerging evidence that it is deepening within more countries, too. It happens as it took only nine months for the fortunes of the world’s 1,000 wealthiest individuals to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to the antipoverty group Oxfam International.
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Few places offer a clearer glimpse into a pandemic-era world of starker inequalities than Miami-Dade County.
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Even before the first cases of covid emerged, this multicultural, international metropolis was second in the United States to New York City in terms of income inequality. In Black-majority neighborhoods of Liberty City, Overtown and Little Haiti, poverty festered a cultural world away from the glittering costal high-rises branded by the likes of Fendi, Four Seasons and Porsche, and where the most-coveted condos come with car elevators so the wealthy can keep their chariots close.
At least some of that shine rubbed off from Art Basel, which, for all its finery, is at its core about the serious business of art as a financial instrument. Since the show’s arrival in 2002, the global elite have descended on Miami each December in fleets of private jets, fueling the eruption of an already-growing local art scene and making a second, third, fourth or fifth home in Miami just another bauble for the well-rounded collector. Russians, Chinese and Turks joined the fabulously wealthy Latin Americans and Europeans who had long since pioneered the palace-sized South Florida pied-à-terre.
Then came the pandemic, and a wave of new buyers from an unexpected group: Americans.
Looking for larger, warmer pandemic digs — and to capitalize on Florida’s generous tax laws — New York hedge-funders and Californian tech bros were suddenly moving next door to Miami’s landed gentry of Venezuelan tycoons, Colombian superstars and Cuban American magnates. The result: A county with a subpar median household income of $51,000 a year witnessed one of the most blistering run-ups in property values in the United States. Not even the deadly collapse in June of an oceanfront tower could slow the frenzy.
Among 45 global cities, the Miami area’s luxury housing market witnessed the biggest price surge in the third quarter of 2021 year-on-year, outpacing growth in Shanghai, Moscow and Hong Kong, according to London-based real estate firm Knight Frank.
Those jumps put the American Dream of homeownership further out of reach for most Miamians. Ned Murray, associate director of Florida International University’s Jorge M. Perez Metropolitan Center, estimates that only 8 percent of Miami-Dade County’s 2.7 million residents can now afford the current median home price of $490,000.
“It really is a tale of two cities,” Murray told me this week. “In fact, it reminds me a lot of Rio de Janeiro. If we had hills instead of being flat, you’d be able see our poor neighborhoods from the more expensive coast, just like you can see the favelas in Rio.”
The wealthy here are enjoying the spoils of the pandemic. New towers branded by Missoni and Aston Martin have risen skyward; a supertall Waldorf Astoria is on its way. In the exclusive Design District — a sort of tropical Fifth Avenue spread out over several city blocks — the fashion house Chanel is pouring $40 million into a new flagship store.
During the pandemic, major art collectors, both in Miami and beyond, drove business to record heights for local gallerists, several of whom say they saw record sales even as local jobs were lost. They attribute the wild sales at least partly to the surge in real estate, and the need for the wealthy to cover ever more wall space.
“We had multinational executives buying places in Miami; they wanted an alternative to living in Manhattan,” Miami art dealer Fredric Snitzer told me at his buzzing Basel booth.
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As house prices soared, rents in South Florida rose faster than anywhere else in the country, jacking up living costs. In October, Miami’s city commission insured that those who could no longer afford a roof over their heads did not end up as eyesores in the streets. The city passed a law that the Miami Herald decried as “criminalizing homelessness,” banning encampments while giving the homeless the choice of going to a shelter or face arrest.
Freddie Davis, 51, a disabled truck driver, is one of many Miamians struggling under new burdens.
He told me this week that his landlord jacked up the rent for his Miami apartment last year from $825 to $1,400, in what Davis described as a bid to update appliances and attract better-off tenants. Forced out, he turned to a community homeless program that, for the time being, has found him a room in a local hotel.
It is on the wrong side of a major interstate on the mainland — far from the art shoppers on gilded Miami Beach.
“You have all these rich people spending all this big money,” he told me, referencing Art Basel. “Good for them, man. But what about me?”
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