Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Index Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Inside the Global Art Fair Wars

The Gulf is only the latest front in the rivalry between Art Basel and Frieze, a conflict that has played out for two decades across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. But in the evolution of the so-called global art fair, battles are no longer fought over artistic innovation but over the circulation of capital, visibility, soft power and branding.

Today’s art fairs have become far more than cultural and commercial events; they operate as platforms of visibility, machines of global branding and instruments of geopolitical power. The rivalry between the mega fairs exemplifies the newest phase of art’s globalization, but this system—in which fairs shape where capital circulates, where legitimacy is produced and which cities become cultural nodes—did not emerge naturally. It emerged from a broader transformation inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, reaching its symbolic apex with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The globalization of capital, the liberalization of markets and the rapid expansion of cross-border financial flows reshaped not only economies but also the cultural sphere, accelerating the transnationalization of the art market. The art fair became the perfect platform for this new regime: a flexible, mobile, instantly deployable structure capable of producing visibility, attracting investment and activating cities as temporary cultural markets.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

The experiential art fair was born in Madrid

When we look back at the evolution of the Global Art Fair, or GAF, in the 1990s, the real rupture did not occur in Basel or in Cologne, where the first European fairs emerged, but in Madrid. Under the direction of Rosina Gómez-Baeza, ARCOmadrid introduced a format that, at the time, seemed anomalous: part art fair, part biennial, part urban cultural festival.

By the early 1990s, Art Basel was entering what Lukas Gloor, former director of the Swiss Emil Bührle Foundation and one of the most knowledgeable analysts of Basel’s institutional history, has described as a period of structural fatigue: declining revenues, an outdated selection system, inadequate exhibition formats and growing competition from new fairs in Paris, Chicago and, increasingly, Madrid. FIAC, Art Chicago and ARCOmadrid began to challenge Basel’s long-standing dominance by offering fresher formats, stronger curatorial voices and a more dynamic engagement with artists and institutions.

In 1989, Ernst Beyeler and Trudl Bruckner—two of the founding gallerists who had shaped the early Basel ethos—stepped back from the selection committee, marking not only a generational transition but the recognition that Basel could no longer rely solely on modernist authority in a rapidly globalizing art market. When Lorenzo Rudolf took over in 1991, he inherited a fair that urgently needed reinvention—while in Madrid, a new model was already taking shape. But why was Madrid able to invent a new format when Paris, Chicago or New York could not?

Spain, emerging in the early 1980s from four decades of dictatorship, was culturally starved and eager to reconnect with contemporary art. When Rosina Gómez-Baeza took over ARCOmadrid in 1986, she inherited a publicly funded fair supported by the City of Madrid, the Regional Government and the Chamber of Commerce, and championed unreservedly by the national press and the political establishment. At a time when Spain had almost no contemporary art museums—the Museo Reina Sofía would not open until 1992—ARCOmadrid became the country’s principal gateway to international art.

Within a few years, it was attracting more than 100,000 visitors, driven by an unusually young audience whose enthusiasm transformed the fair into a cultural event of national significance. Spain’s determination to reinsert itself into the global cultural circuit allowed Gómez-Baeza to build what other fairs could not: high-level theoretical panels that brought figures such as Glenn D. Lowry, Hou Hanru, Barry Schwabsky, Ute Meta Bauer, Okwui Enwezor and Alanna Heiss to Madrid; alongside curated sections and guest-country programs led by documenta and biennial curators such as Jan Hoet, Nicolas Bourriaud, Chus Martínez and Dan Cameron. All of this was accompanied by parallel exhibitions across the city’s institutions and an ecosystem of openings, receptions, parties and after-hours that turned the fair into a week-long urban experience.

Yet ARCOmadrid could only operate at this scale because it devoted around one million euros every year to promotion, invited guests and international collectors—a figure unmatched by any other fair, and something neither Art Basel nor Frieze has ever had at its disposal. In a country with no established market, no gallery system of scale and hardly any museums of contemporary art, ARCOmadrid ended up catalyzing the very infrastructure it lacked—precisely because nothing comparable existed. It endowed the emerging Global Art Fair with what I have termed the curator–open–space model. At ARCOmadrid, curators were not an accessory but a structural presence: curated sections, project rooms and guest-country pavilions broke with the classical dealer-booth-and-alley grid and replaced it with open formats that operated more like biennial zones than commercial corridors. The fair also began to expand physically beyond its own architecture—into museums, public institutions and the city itself—anticipating later developments such as Art Basel Unlimited or Frieze Projects, where the fair spills outward into large-scale commissions, performances and site-specific works. In Madrid, this spatial and conceptual opening was not an add-on but the core of a new model: the art fair as a curated, urban, experiential infrastructure.

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Lorenzo Rudolf—supported closely by influential dealers such as Pierre Huber, Gianfranco Verna and Felix Buchmann—was radically restructuring Art Basel. Together they replaced the traditional dealer-driven logic with a project-based selection system that aligned with the new neoliberal ethos of the 1990s; what mattered was no longer a gallery’s pedigree but the strength and ambition of its proposal. At the same time, Sam Keller, then the fair’s young and hyperactive director of communications, traveled to Spain and spent a full week embedded with the ARCOmadrid team. He observed not only the curated sections and the guest-country programs but also the entire ecosystem of theoretical panels, museum openings, receptions, parties and the unmistakable Madrid rhythm that culminated every night—without fail, and I can attest to this—with the art crowd ending up at the legendary after-hours Bar Cock at Calle de la Reina 16.

The contrast with Basel’s earlier experiments was stark. ARCOmadrid had made curatorial input the core of its identity. It introduced ARCO Videoarte as early as 1987, while Art Basel’s Bankverein Video Kunstpreis would only follow in 1994; it launched Cutting Edge in 1996, with Art Basel’s Statements section appearing later that same year; it created the Project Rooms in 1998, two years before Unlimited in 2000; and from 1994 onwards its Guest Country programs—Germany, France, Korea and others—installed national pavilions inside the fair as a central device.

ARCOmadrid, in other words, had already embraced the curator as the central agent of the fair, creating what would become the first fully articulated curated art fair. Its yearly Guest Country structure reproduced with unexpected clarity the logic of the Venice Biennale. It was this conceptual leap—turning the fair into a curatorial platform rather than a mere corridor of booths—that Keller saw unfolding in Madrid, and that Basel was only just beginning to realize it needed to emulate.

This transformation was evident to observers at the time. The Madrid model produced a cultural intensity that exceeded anything seen in Basel, Chicago or Paris. As cultural journalist Miguel Mora wrote in the leading newspaper El País on Sunday, February 16, 1997: “They are all well dressed; the gentlemen with expensive shoes and the ladies in high fashion clothes; but the shadows under their eyes give away the exhaustion caused by an overloaded program: performances, parties, museum, art fairs, conferences and after-hours, then they begin all over again.” Few descriptions capture more vividly how ARCOmadrid had already evolved into a full-scale urban event—a precursor to the experiential model that would later become standard across the Global Art Fair ecosystem.

And although Sam Keller would subsequently argue that Art Basel itself had pioneered this fair-as-event structure, his own words reveal that Basel was adapting to a broader paradigm. As he told Cristina Ruiz and Melanie Gerlis in a 2007 interview for the Art Newspaper: “Art Basel has developed as an event which combines commercial and cultural goals. We don’t even use the term ‘fair’ anymore to describe Art Basel; we call it an art ‘show’, which is more appropriate.” What he didn’t mention was that the experiential framework he celebrated had already been fully articulated in Madrid a decade earlier.

The GAF origin story, the Miami turn and the London response

If ARCOmadrid invented the experiential art fair, it was in Miami in 2002—when Art Basel exported its brand to the United States—that the model finally became global. What emerged there was not an American imitation of Basel, but the first fully realized prototype of the Global Art Fair: the ARCOmadrid model pushed to its most festive and immersive extreme, amplified by a city with beaches, warm weather, a thriving club scene crowned by the nightly pop-up of Le Baron and a backdrop of kitsch Art Deco hotels such as The Betsy and the Leslie Hotel that transformed the fair into a cultural and social spectacle unlike anything Europe had ever produced. At the same time, Miami’s status as a tax haven and its year-round good weather drew wealthy collectors from Latin America and the United States to the fair each December, turning it into a magnet for capital, visibility and elite sociability.

What took shape in Miami was the operational birth of the Global Art Fair, something I witnessed first-hand as the Basel team translated lessons absorbed in Madrid into a new continental scale. The fair ceased to be a self-contained commercial hall and re-emerged as a city-wide machine: more than 20 satellite fairs—including Art Miami, Photo Miami, PULSE Miami, NADA Miami, SCOPE Miami, Aqua Art Miami, CONTEXT Art Miami and Untitled Art Miami Beach; the public opening of major private collections such as the Rubell Museum, the de la Cruz Collection, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Craig Robins Collection and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO); and the creation or consolidation of new museums including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), together with the relaunch of The Bass, all of which collectively rewired Miami Beach into a temporary cultural metropolis.

One of Miami’s historical dealers, Bernice Steinbaum, is of the opinion that “Miami became very trendy because, unlike other U.S. cities, it attracted many affluent individuals or celebrities, spawning a series of other parallel art fairs.” However, she also says that “the arrival of Art Basel Miami Beach reshaped the ecosystem by creating a dynamic where the focus shifted increasingly toward global players and less toward the local gallery community.” Additionally, the proliferation of parallel fairs raised another question—one that has often come up in my conversations with Julián Navarro, director of CONTEXT Art Miami. Aware of the competition, Navarro suggested that........

© Observer