MIAMI – When Art Basel Miami Beach debuted in 2002, a year after its planned first edition was delayed after 911, it featured 200 galleries, including Gagosian.

But Mr Larry Gagosian, one of the art world’s most powerful dealers, was not present.

“I didn’t go to the fair for the first few times,” said Mr Gagosian, who founded his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980 and now has 19 exhibition spaces around the world. “What changed my mind was some good feedback.”

He added: “Now, I stay for a couple of days.”

The fair, held at the Miami Beach Convention Center from Dec 1 to 3, had its biggest edition with 282 galleries, evidence of its success over time.

Mr Gagosian’s conversion reflects the transformative growth of the event, art fairs in general and the Miami cultural scene writ large.

Over the past two decades, the fair became the anchor of a whole creative ecosystem. Satellite fairs were created, helping to establish the informal constellation of events known as Miami Art Week, which takes place amid a dizzying array of brand partnerships, pop-up exhibitions and champagne-fuelled parties.

In 2019, a work by artist Maurizio Cattelan – Comedian, a banana duct taped to a wall – became a symbol of the meeting place of conceptual art and attention-getting high jinks when a performance artist ate it as a stunt. The limited-edition work sold three times during the fair for US$120,000 (S$161,750) to US$150,000, and the work’s notoriety forced Perrotin, the gallery showing Comedian, to remove it because of the crowds gathering around it.

But around the fair, the institutional landscape also grew and matured, with new museums appearing, some established by the area’s top private collectors, and older ones expanding.

“That’s the miracle of Miami,” said collector Mera Rubell. “Sun and fun became a cultural destination. That’s a big victory.”

This edition, fairgoers feasted on the usual superabundance of art, including 20 large-scale projects in the Meridians section, curated by Ms Magali Arriola, director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

They include Devan Shimoyama’s The Grove (2021), a massive work made of utility poles, shoes, crystals and silk flowers, presented by Kavi Gupta gallery. The piece, conceived in response to the upheavals of 2020 and the idea of spontaneous memorials, draws on the urban tradition of hanging shoes from telephone wires and the many different ways it can be perceived.

As organisers and participants reflect on how far they have come, Art Basel, owned by the Swiss company MCH Group, is also undergoing a leadership transition that will affect what fair visitors and collectors see in 2023.

Mr Marc Spiegler, the fair’s global director, is leaving the company. Mr Noah Horowitz, who formerly served as director of Americas and the day-to-day chief of the Miami Beach fair, has become chief executive, a new position. Mr Spiegler will spend six months as an adviser as part of the transition.

“We’ve grown tremendously,” said Mr Spiegler, a former journalist who shared the job running Art Basel for several years before taking it over solo in 2013. He noted that when he started, there were some 25 employees, a figure which has grown to around 120 today.

“Marc’s years were the expansion and maturity phase,” said Ms Silvia Cubina, executive director and chief curator of the Bass, a contemporary art museum in Miami Beach.

The Bass also grew in that time, completing in 2017 a renovation and expansion that added nearly 50 per cent more exhibition space. It recently announced that it will get US$20.1 million from the city to build a new wing.

Perhaps most significantly on Mr Spiegler’s watch, Art Basel created two new fairs: a Hong Kong edition was added in 2013 and Paris+ by Art Basel debuted in October.

They arrived in an era of fair proliferation, notably by Frieze, a magazine publisher that created an art fair in London, then added versions in New York and Los Angeles in the United States and Seoul, South Korea.

Mr Spiegler cited the Paris and Hong Kong fairs as the main achievements of his tenure, and pointed to the way Art Basel has weathered the pandemic. For a time, the events went virtual and did not take place in person, with editions such as the 2020 Miami Beach fair becoming online viewing rooms.

“It was a huge adjustment,” said New York dealer Jack Shainman, whose Miami Beach booth featured works by photographer Tyler Mitchell, sculptor and installation artist Nick Cave, painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and others.

Although no one thought the virtual move was an ideal situation, it seemed to work, with dealers selling enough art to get them through to the return of in-person events and, in some cases, exceeding expectations. The online viewing rooms became a standard part of all Art Basel fairs.

Mr Spiegler described his overall role in showman’s terms. “Being a fair director is being an impresario,” he said.

The galleries are the clients because they pay to exhibit at the fair, but he put that dynamic in a larger context.

“When it works, it’s this virtuous circle,” he said. “Galleries bring great work because the collectors are there, and collectors come for the great work.”

Mr Gagosian praised how Mr Spiegler had handled the impresario role.

“He’s had a lot of mouths to feed and egos to soothe, and he managed it well,” Mr Gagosian said.

Now, Mr Horowitz takes on the lead role after a stint at Sotheby’s, serving as worldwide head of gallery and private dealer services.

“The weight of what I am stepping into is not lost on me,” he said. NYTIMES