Hint Fashion Magazine -- Art Crawl

Early in December, when temperatures drop and spending rises, the art flock migrates to Art Basel Miami Beach. After only two years, the American spin-off of the preeminent Swiss art fair is already North America's most important art event. This year, it attracted over 30,000 curators, artists, dealers, collectors who descended on South Beach in a horde of all-around arty-goers. And while the official fair focused on the Miami Beach Convention Center—where 175 of the world's most established galleries showed their artists alongside the smaller and edgier Art Nova and Art Statements fairs-within-the-fair—the fun, like the alcohol, flowed freely throughout the city. A handful of independent satellite fairs created scenes of their own, while South Florida's hotels, stores, museums and collectors hosted special events and soirees, all amounting to a shark-like feeding frenzy the likes of which Florida has never before seen.

Snooping around people's houses is especially titillating when the medicine cabinet could be a Damien Hirst. During Art Basel, private collectors—including Ruth and Richard Shack, Monica and Javier Mora, Dennis and Debra Scholl, and Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz—opened their homes to visitors who saw works by the likes of Olafur Eliasson, Ernesto Neto, Katy Grannan, Gabriel Orozco and Andreas Gursky. The larger Margulies and Rubell collections (the latter of the hotel family that included Studio 54's Steve Rubell) also opened their converted warehouse doors to the crowds for whom museums and galleries sometimes aren't enough.

Getting more buzz than an army base barber shop, the independent NADA Art Fair was inaugurated in an unfinished building away from the fray of Art Basel. The brainchild of an enterprising cadre of young New York dealers, its forty booths were a Who's Who of up-and-coming galleries. There was Daniel Reich, the one-time Pat Hearn right hand, who last month opened a space in Chelsea after famously running his gallery out of his studio apartment for the past two years. And Grimm/Rosenfeld, the new Munich gallery (with a New York space in the works) founded by Matthew Marks alum Adrian Rosenfeld and Andreas Grimm. Others ranged from LA's Peres Projects and Chicago's Monique Meloche to New York's John Connelly Presents, Rivington Arms, Bellwether, LFL Gallery and too many others to list. Even an inauspicious power outage on the first day couldn't dampen the frenetic mood, with wild buying emptying many booths. "I'm going to go out and have a cigarette," one breathless young collector announced at Grimm/Rosenfeld, before pointing to a large charcoal drawing by rising German artist Matias Becker. "And then I’m going to buy that."

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After last year's successful run—as well as stints in New York and Los Angeles—the jet-setting Scope art fair returned to South Beach's trendy Townhouse hotel. Taking up four floors, sixty galleries occupied a room each, recalling the format of New York's now-defunct but fondly-remembered art fair at the Gramercy Park hotel. Scope is organized in part by the owners of Manhattan's RARE gallery, and its participants all have a similar emphasis on emerging artists. Wandering the bustling hallways, poking into rooms, visitors could also have their photos taken—wearing garlands and flowers—as part of New York-based artists Mathias Kessler and Alex Kellas's I Love Paradise project.

The heavy metal shipping containers reappeared on the beach this year for Art Positions, the offshoot of Art Basel set aside for work by less established artists, where twenty European and American galleries quartered themselves in as many containers laid out on the sand. New York's Henry Urbach gallery broke the orange monotony by camouflaging his container in the loud graphics of artists Aziz + Cucher. Meanwhile, Maccarone gallery, also from New York, provided some off-tune entertainment with artist Christian Jankowski's The Day We Met installation, which invited guests to belt out karaoke, while the rest of us tried to drown it out with the complimentary drinks outside.

There are many ways of looking at art, but the only way to see it in Miami was through a hung-over haze. Parties were as ubiquitous as mosquitoes in the Everglades, and everyone caught the itch. Visionaire hosted a poolside fête at Andre Balazs's Raleigh Hotel after a heart-racing beachfront performance by girl band Chicks on Speed. Developer Craig Robins once again opened his multi-block Miami Design District for a raucous street party, and party photographer extraordinaire Patrick McMullan brought us back to the Raleigh to celebrate his "so80s" book of photographs. Meanwhile, gallerist Gavin Brown's party at Ian Schrager's troubled Shore Club hotel was high on attitude but low on energy, despite being DJed by New York import Spencer Sweeney. Lenny Kravitz's soiree at the still-under-construction Setai Hotel suffered a last-minute move to The Shore Club, while a party for "GOAT" (Taschen), a book about Muhammad Ali, saw the legendary boxer become The Greatest no-show of the fair.

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