What the Booths Have to Earn

Art Basel Miami Beach opens to invited guests on December 2 with 272 exhibitors, eleven fewer than took part last year, on a floor about 12% smaller. The fair calls the change refinement. The trade press calls it a smaller fair. Both are right, and the difference between them is the subject of this page.

A booth is a four-day lease with freight attached. In the main sector last year it was priced at $1,244 per square meter, by Artnet’s reading of the fee sheet, and the gallery that signs for one has to sell roughly twice its all-in cost before it keeps a dollar. Everything visitors see on the floor in December, from the choice of artist to the size of the canvases, follows from that sum.

What follows is the arithmetic, the record of who left and who stayed, what dealers said they sold last December, how buyers are behaving, and where the auction houses sit in South Florida. Each claim is tied to a named report, and the reports are gathered in a link library at the foot. The wider year is covered in 2026 in review and in the essay on the economic forces; the fair’s own statement is annotated in the announcement, read closely.

The published 2025 rates give the scale. A solo stand in Positions cost $11,000, Nova $24,500, and Survey $31,000. Main-sector stands ran from $36,520 to $199,040 depending on size. Rates for 2026 have not appeared in the fair’s public materials. Not yet announced

The fee is the smaller half of the bill. Artnet’s example took a $65,000 stand to about $105,500 once travel, shipping, lighting, meals, and staff were added. Because a primary-market gallery typically splits a sale evenly with its artist, and because a discount is customary, the same example needed about $211,000 in gross sales to reach zero. The economic essay works the same sum from the gallery’s side of the ledger.

The landlord’s side

The fair has costs of its own. Its parent, MCH Group, ran a profit margin of 0.7% in 2024, Artnet reported, and this summer it was negotiating its rent with the City of Miami Beach. Art Basel pays about $1 million a year for the convention center. City officials proposed a base rent of $400,000 to $500,000 and offered to absorb $300,000 in police and fire costs, in return for a ten-year commitment; the fair wanted five. The outcome has not been reported in the sources read for this page. Unconfirmed

A booth is rented inside a market, and the market has an annual audit of sorts. The charts below draw the 2025 figures from the Art Basel and UBS report, written by the economist Clare McAndrew and published by the fair and its lead partner, and set the booth sums from the section above against them. Every bar carries its number. Where the report gave no figure, the space is left empty.

The report appears once a year, in spring. Between editions, Biennale tracks the numbers as they are published, sale by sale and fair by fair, on My Biennale’s market pages, with reported fair sales under fairs and the direction of travel under trends.

The 2026 list is shorter by design. The main Galleries sector falls from 226 stands to 204, and Nova and Positions were trimmed in proportion, according to The Art Newspaper and Artnet News. Both outlets name Kurimanzutto, Night Gallery, and Gallery Wendi Norris among those not returning. Artnet adds Goodman Gallery and Sperone Westwater, which has closed. Neither report gives the galleries’ reasons.

Last year the shrinkage was unplanned. Between the July 2025 announcement and the December opening, 14 galleries withdrew and 12 came off the waiting list to replace them. That is the story The New York Times told on the eve of the fair.

Artnet’s Katya Kazakina followed the fourteen. Altman Siegel of San Francisco had closed, and owed $22,000, half the cost of its stand. Tilton Gallery was closing at year’s end. Sperone Westwater was dissolving after 50 years. Miguel Abreu withdrew before the August deadline and showed at Art Basel Paris and Frieze Masters instead. Asked about the cancellation fees, Art Basel’s chief executive, Noah Horowitz, was brief: “Everyone pays.” No stand stood empty.

What the fair has changed

The organizers have been adjusting the terms for two years. In 2024 the fair introduced smaller main-sector stands of 30 to 41 square meters and a two-year discounted rate for galleries moving up from the entry sectors, The Art Newspaper reported. The director, Bridget Finn, said then: “Smaller booth scales made a lot of sense. It has been a challenging year for galleries.”

This year’s announcement goes further. Art Basel says the floor has been redrawn to open sightlines and improve circulation, with four plazas in place of five and the largest galleries dispersed. It reports strong representation from Latin America and the Caribbean, with Brazil the third-largest national contingent and first appearances from the Bahamas, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, and Hungary. Zero 10, the digital sector, returns in its largest form to date under Karen Archey with Eli Scheinman, and Nicole Sales Giles joins as its first global head. A new body of work by James Turrell, presented by the Turrell Art Foundation and Art Basel with support from Pace, will be shown outdoors and free to the public. The Art Basel Awards return with BOSS, and UBS remains lead partner. The details are in the official release and on the sector guide.

The 2025 fair opened weeks after New York auctions that totaled about $2.2 billion, and the mood carried. The top first-day sale that Art Basel listed in its own report was a Gerhard Richter abstract of 2016 at David Zwirner, for $5.5 million. Hauser & Wirth sold George Condo’s Untitled (Taxi Painting) for about $4 million and two works by Louise Bourgeois at $3.2 million and $2.5 million. The gallery reported 27 sales, and said its first three hours had brought in 40% more than its whole week the year before.

Three qualifications belong beside those figures. First, the Condo and the Bourgeois works were sold before they reached the stand, The Art Newspaper noted, and Payot told Il Sole 24 Ore that such negotiations often run for months. Miami was where those deals closed, and they had been made elsewhere.

Second, the prices are the dealers’ own. The appraiser David Shapiro, writing in Shook, Hardy & Bacon’s art law newsletter, observed that galleries have no obligation to disclose what a work fetched, so fair reports are approximate in a way auction results are not. He put the highest asking prices on the floor at about $22 million, well below the top of the November sales.

Third, the report thins quickly below seven figures. The same Art Basel list records paintings at Uffner & Liu for $12,000 to $30,000 and a wall work at Document for $28,000. In Zero 10, ten Beeple works sold at $100,000 each. Artnet’s closing analysis found buyers price-sensitive about new work and more resale material on the stands; its summary also cites an $18.5 million Joan Mitchell at Gray, a figure not seen in a second source. Unconfirmed

They are buying at fairs, and deciding before them. In the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, which polled 3,100 wealthy collectors in ten markets, 58% said they had bought at a fair, up from 39% two years earlier. Much of that buying is done from a PDF. Art Basel conceded as much in June, when nearly 200 of the 232 main-sector galleries in Basel agreed to hold works back from their previews. No equivalent has been announced for Miami Beach. Not yet announced

They are slower above a threshold. Sean Kelly’s line, quoted above, dates from September 2025, and the 2026 fairs have not contradicted it. At the Armory Show last month, of about 266 works reported sold on the first day, 54% were priced between $10,000 and $100,000 and 36% below $10,000, by Artnet’s count. Negotiation is ordinary. Artnet’s break-even example assumes a discount as a matter of course.

The hemisphere splits. UBS’s regional cut of the same survey found 72% of Brazilian respondents planning to buy in the following year, against 42% in the United States, and only 8% of the Brazilians buying through Instagram. That appetite for buying in person is one reason the fair leans on its Latin American exhibitors, and one reason Pinta Miami exists.

The money moved south. The Art Newspaper reported in 2023 on the arrival of Jeff Bezos and of Kenneth Griffin’s Citadel, and on wealthy Venezuelans and Colombians taking permanent residence. Artnet’s Tim Schneider had argued in 2021 that the migration would last. Residence and collecting are different habits, though, and no source read here measures how much of that wealth buys art at the fair. The local history is told in the Miami scene.

A note on tax

Florida’s general sales tax is 6%, and the state levies a use tax at the same rate on goods bought elsewhere and brought in, according to the Florida Department of Revenue; counties may add a surtax. Since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, a dealer may also have to collect tax for the state where a work is delivered, as The Art Newspaper explained at the time. No recent reporting on how this is handled at the fair was found. Ask the gallery what the invoice will include, and a tax adviser about the rest.

No major house holds a marquee sale in Miami during Art Week. The evening auctions are in New York in November, and the week in Miami Beach belongs to the galleries. What the houses keep in South Florida are offices, galleries, and regional salerooms, and most of them are in Palm Beach County, where the winter season runs from October to April.

The exception is Christie’s, which has an office and showroom in the Miami Design District, open by appointment. A local report in March described it as a new space for previews, private sales, and talks, and as the house’s second location in the region; Christie’s own page could not be read for this guide, so the detail rests on the district’s listing and that report. The house has brought highlights of its New York sales to the district in past Februaries.

As of October 5, none of the houses below had announced an exhibition, preview, or sale in South Florida for the week of the fair. That may change in November. The table records what could be verified.

Two omissions are deliberate. Phillips has staged previews in the Design District in the past, including a Latin American exhibition in 2016, but no permanent South Florida office could be verified. And the many small salerooms that advertise during Art Week were left out unless a house publishes its address, its sale dates, and its terms.

The useful one for a visitor with a spare day is Sotheby’s in Palm Beach, a public gallery whose winter shows are for sale. Palm Beach Modern Auctions is the regional house the trade reads, with estimates far below the fair’s. Both sit north of Miami on the Brightline corridor; see short drives from Miami. Auction results as they arrive are on My Biennale’s market pages.

• Late withdrawals. Fourteen names changed between the 2025 list and the 2025 fair. A list that holds from September to December would suggest the smaller floor was sized correctly.
• The first-day ledger, by band. Count how many reported sales sit above $1 million and how many below $100,000. A report made only of seven-figure works says little about the galleries in Nova, Positions, Survey, and Zero 10.
• Sold before the doors. When a report says a work sold in the first hour, it may have sold in October. Dealers who kept something off the PDF will probably say so.
• The Americas. More than two-thirds of exhibitors operate in the Americas, the organizers told The Art Newspaper. Whether Latin American buyers appear in the sales reports, which last year did not single them out, is worth noting.
• The November carry. Last December rode a $2.2 billion New York auction fortnight. This year’s sales fall in the same weeks; the economic essay sets out what is on the block. The link between the two is plausible and, as Shapiro wrote of 2025, hard to prove.

Two fairs that would sharpen the picture, Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, open later this month. This page will be read against them. It is free to read, like the rest of the guide.