On Wednesday, Art Basel Miami Beach opened its VIP preview with something the art market hasn’t felt much lately: momentum. The skies were clear outside, while inside a queue of well-heeled attendees snaked around the convention center, waiting for the doors to open. A cluster of extravagantly dressed older collectors, many sporting multiple large glinting rings, swarmed the entrance, scanning for acquaintances who might let them edge ahead. A tanned woman in gold heels and a skin-tight yellow-and-pink leopard-print dress put it best, muttering as she stepped inside, “Lord, I haven’t seen it this busy in years and the fair hasn’t even started yet.”
Whether there were actually more attendees than in previous years—or simply the feeling of more—the mood was undeniably buoyant, bolstered by a $2.2 billion November auction season in New York. Perception is reality, as the political strategist Lee Atwater once said, and in the art world that goes double. The excitement from last month appears to have continued into December, despite lingering anxiety in the gallery sector and a larger-than-usual number of first-time exhibitors.
By mid-morning, major early sales were already circulating. At the top end, David Zwirner reported selling a Gerhard Richter for $5.5 million, followed by a 1967 Alice Neel for $3.3 million, two Josef Albers paintings from his Homage to the Square series for $2.5 million and $2.2 million, and a Ruth Asawa wall-mounted wire sculpture (ca. 1969) for $1.2 million. Hauser & Wirth sold George Condo’s Untitled (Taxi Painting) for just under $4 million; two Louise Bourgeois works followed at $3.2 million and $2.5 million, and additional sales by Ed Clark, Henry Taylor, and Rashid Johnson all reached the seven figures. A substantial group of additional sales between $80,000 and $800,000 included works by Pat Steir, Günther Förg, Qiu Xiaofei, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Bul, Nairy Baghramian, María Berrío, Catherine Goodman, Angel Otero, William Kentridge, Jenny Holzer, Firelei Báez, Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, Roni Horn, Uman, Jack Whitten, and Ambera Wellmann.
Meanwhile, Perrotin reported a sold-out Lee Bae solo presentation with works priced from $60,000 to $200,000. It also said it sold works by half a dozen other artists between $30,000 and $60,000, as well as a $95,000 Daniel Arsham painting and three works by Mr. x Takashi Murakami.
Zwirner, reached a few hours into the preview, summarized the morning by saying simply, “I can’t complain.” Dominating his booth was a huge new Dana Schutz painting, The Cooks, finished just in time to ship to Miami and sold to an American museum for $1.2 million.
Even so, many dealers told ARTnews that the pace felt more measured than last year’s edition. “It’s much quieter and a bit more serious, which is better,” New York gallerist Nicola Vassell said. Major collectors—including the Rubells, Beth DeWoody, Jorge M. Pérez, Komal Shah, and Lisa Goodman—were seen moving through the aisles.
Sales aside, many in attendance framed the week more in terms of psychology. “People are going into this with a really positive attitude,” art advisor Mari-Claudia Jiménez told ARTnews. “It’s the glass half full—everyone’s looking at everything in the best possible light.” Had New York’s auctions faltered, she noted, the reaction to Miami’s booths might have been very different.
Brett Gorvy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, meanwhile, suggested the current momentum in the market should be viewed through the lens of the long-discussed Great Wealth Transfer, in which some $83 billion is expected to pass from aging Baby Boomers to their Millennial and Gen-Z heirs.
“The things we thought of as for grandparents are being bought by younger people,” he said. “They’re not thinking, ‘This is what my grandparents liked.’ They’re thinking, ‘This is what the museum is showing.’” Miami, he added, “might be on the leading edge of that generational transfer,” given its young and internationally mixed collector base.
Galleries across the emerging-to-blue-chip spectrum reported early activity. Uffner & Liu, in only their second year at the fair, sold more than seven works by Anna Jung Seo, Talia Levitt, Anne Buckwalter, Sarah Martin-Nuss, and Roger White for a combined $90,000–$110,000. Matthew Brown sold Carroll Dunham’s Box Creatures (1995) for $350,000 and placed more than a dozen additional works for a combined $750,000–$850,000 total take.
As for the other megas, Pace Gallery reported a strong start, led by Sam Gilliam’s Heroines, Beyoncé, Serena and Althea (2020), which sold for $1.1 million. Additional sales included a Lynda Benglis work for $400,000, a 1995 painting by Emily Kam Kngwarray for $350,000, an Elmgreen & Dragset installation for $320,000, two new Alicja Kwade sculptures for $130,000 and $110,000, a Leo Villareal sculpture for $85,000, and new paintings by Pam Evelyn and Lauren Quin, each around $80,000.
While Gagosian wouldn’t share prices—as is usual—it did say in an end-of-day report that it had sold Roy Lichtenstein’s Portrait (1977) and Tom Wesselmann’s Bedroom Blonde with T.V. (1984–93), as well as new work by Jonas Wood, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Rudolf Stingel, among others.
At West Palm Beach’s Gavlak, an untitled 1960s Helen Frankenthaler work on paper sold for $300,000, while contemporary works by Jessica Cannon, Maynard Monrow, T.J. Wilcox, and Nancy Lorenz brought in another $100,000. Founder Sarah Gavlak attributed much of the energy to mood rather than macroeconomics. “The sales [in New York] boosted this confidence. It’s all psychological. It’s emotional,” she told ARTnews.
Gavlak, who has been based in Palm Beach for 20 years, argued that Miami Basel has been essential to shaping American taste. “This region wasn’t known for very much,” she said. “But Miami Basel is one of the reasons contemporary art became popular in America. People come here, they have an experience, they start collecting.”
The current slower pace of business, Gavlak continued, may ultimately benefit galleries focused on long-term relationships. “It’s how I’ve always worked and, if you’ve never left that, you don’t have to return to it,” she said.
Eric Firestone, whose booth drew steady foot traffic throughout the day, said he avoids bringing anything “played out” in the market, preferring work that creates a sense of discovery. By Wednesday afternoon, he reported selling three Pat Passlof works for $250,000–$300,000; three Huê Thi Hoffmaster pieces for $25,000–$95,000; and three Lauren dela Roche works for $30,000–$75,000.
Among the most talked-about works at the fair was the 2-inch-tall Frida Kahlo painting Autorretrato en Miniatura (Self-Portrait in Miniature). A crowd could be seen at Weinstein Gallery’s booth, hovering around the $15 million work, surrounded in thick theft-proof glass like it was the Mona Lisa.
Another show-stopper was Martin Wong’s 12-foot-wide Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo), from 1982, which had been in storage for nearly 40 years until this week. It took up much of P·P·O·W’s booth. The gallery had priced it at $1.6 million to match the artist’s auction record, as ARTnews reported last month. By Wednesday evening, the gallery confirmed that it sold the painting to a US museum.
While Warhol is a perennial market darling, important artists who don’t command those prices often get greater attention when there’s an important exhibition of their work coming up or already on view. That’s the case with 20th-century artist Wifredo Lam, who is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which “does a good deal of necessary historical rewriting for Lam,” as our colleague Alex Greenberger wrote in his review of the show for ARTnews.
On the fair floor, ARTnews spotted Lam’s work in at least two galleries. New York–based Leon Tovar had three works by the artist. The priciest of these was Sans Titre (1939) for $1.65 million, while two works from 1942 were on offer for $575,000 and $600,000. Mazzoleni had a Kabinett presentation dedicated to Lam with works ranging from $450,000 to $1.1 million, the latter price being for his Femme Cheval (1966).
As the afternoon continued, additional sales rolled in. Olney Gleason, appearing for the first time at Basel under that name, reported placing twenty works between $10,000 and $150,000.The standout was a group of four Tony Lewis drawings—including Summons (2024), included in the Menil Drawing Institute exhibition “What drawing can be: four responses”—all sold. A Marcia Marcus painting sold for $150,000, a Robert Indiana painting for $135,000, two Diana Al-Hadid wall panels sold for $110,000 each, a Robert Motherwell painting went for $100,000, and an Alexis Ralaivao work sold for $80,000.
Sprüth Magers sold work by a number of its artists, including George Condo’s Open Forms (2024) for $1.2 million, Anne Imhof’s Pink Cloud (2025) for €250,000, Rosemarie Trockel’s Gogol (2011) for €250,000, and Lucy Dodd’s Becoming Butterfly (2025) for €180,000.
Gladstone Gallery reported significant activity as well, led by a $1.5 million Robert Rauschenberg Copperhead work. Multiple George Condo works on paper sold in the $95,000–$200,000 range, while several Ugo Rondinone sculptures placed for between $300,000 and $350,000 apiece. The gallery also sold a new David Salle painting for $130,000, three Robert Mapplethorpe editions in the $200,000 range, an Andro Wekua painting for €75,000, and an Elizabeth Peyton watercolor for $300,000.
David Kordansky Gallery placed Rashid Johnson’s God Painting: I Dream A Lot for $750,000, Sayre Gomez’s COSTCO for $110,000, and Shara Hughes’s Good Choreo for between $450,000 and $500,000. Works by Tristan Unrau sold for $60,000 and $35,000, respectively.
Jessica Silverman reported early demand for Woody De Othello, selling three works, including the bronze inner knowing (2025) for $275,000. Additional works by GaHee Park and Lava Thomas placed at $55,000 and $75,000, respectively. A Loie Hollowell painting sold, as did four Guimi You paintings ranging from $20,000 to $88,000. Ceramic wall works by Rebecca Manson sold for $65,000 each.
By late afternoon, it was clear that while the top end of the market remained steady, the overall pace was calmer. “There’s no urgency in the market,” one prominent New York advisor said. Sales were still happening, she noted, but “the pace is more spread out”—a “new normal” that galleries are adjusting to, even if “it’s a hard pill to swallow.”
Thomas Danziger, the New York lawyer who represents a global cadre of art collectors, took a similar view. “The 2025 fair got it right,” he said, praising exhibitors for bringing “safe but not boring works which don’t shock but actually sell,” and noting the prominence of the Zero10 section, where a crowd-pleasing Beeple sculpture—depicting prominent billionaires and the artist as robot dogs—suggested that digital art had “moved beyond one-trick NFTs.”
And then, delivering the kind of line that could only be said in Miami, Danziger added, “Let’s face it: no matter what’s on the walls, for New Yorkers like me, December in Miami is never a hardship.”