Photo: Getty Images

Readers of this blog who want New York to get its own Art Basel — sorry. The Swiss company that owns the fair announced last week that it is shopping other towns, but they're in Asia. The art world’s next likely destination (a couple of years down the pike)? Art Basel Beijing.

That said, don’t book your plane tickets yet. This morning, UBS, chief sponsor of the fair — whose huge dinner tent on the beach was temporarily shut down by the Miami Beach fire marshal last week for overcrowding — announced a quarterly write-off related to mortgage loans gone bad. The loss: $10 billion. —Alexandra Peers

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In one sense, it's a very good time to be an artist. There's a lot of money out there, collector and corporate, to fund new work. Companies are using art to get publicity for their business ventures; the overwhelming memory of Art Basel 07 is one of corporate logos, hard-sell pitches and luxury branding.

Talk about positioning: Thirtysomething Sheikh Majed Al Sabah went shopping at the upstart Pulse art fair and two days later announced a huge Dubai real-estate development, Villa Moda, that includes an art gallery. The sheikh, a luxury retailer and artist himself, released a statement that the Dubai complex would be "a new concept in retail therapy."

By week's end, what was legit and what wasn't had blurred beyond recognition. One of the better artworks in the city was Grammy-winning musician Henri Scars Struck's lush, complex 24-hour "sound installation," which played crickets and campfires at midnight and East European cafés at dinnertime. Where was it? In the elevator of the Le Meridien hotel. Says the artist: "I wanted to surprise people." Penthouse, please. —Alexandra Peers

Art fans at the Miami Beach Convention Center yesterday.Photo: Getty Images

Miami. A city lit by tiki torches and scored by dance music for an entire week. With Art Basel Miami over and satellite fairs finishing up, the work begins of figuring out who bought, who sold, and what that means for contemporary art now. Forget the parties — the event matters, giving tip-offs to tastes and trends.

Hot now: Bright, shiny art; big, sprawling pieces (Tobey Maguire bought a 53-inch-long painting by Japan's Kaz Oshiro); video and even virtual art. Two artists broke out of the pack: Aaron Young — he of the motorcycle riders scorching over his giant fluorescent panels at the Armory last fall — and Hernan Bass, whose homoerotic installation at the Rubell Collection was the talk of the town. (At least when people were sober.)

Just imagine a smaller, knockoff version of this painting with a $2,000 price tag.Photo: AFP

Few artists better embody the boom-bust cycle of the New York art world than Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enfant terrible of the eighties downtown scene. At Art Basel Miami, the boom is definitely back: Seven different galleries are hawking Basquiat's paintings — including one $7.85 million piece offered by Chelsea's Van de Weghe gallery which a rival dealer recalled unloading for $600,000 back in the mid-nineties.

Even copies of Basquiat's work are flying off the walls. Inside the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) benefit preview for the New Museum, collectors made a beeline for Soho's Renwick Gallery booth and Los Angeles artist Chris Lipomi's '84 Olympics series — small replicas of every painting Basquiat executed in 1984. Were they Richard Prince–like "appropriations"? Or simply a shameless attempt to cash in on the mania? Whatever you call them, collectors want one. Barely an hour into the NADA preview, all 70 of Lipomi's baby Basquiats had sold, grossing over $130,000. Later that evening, Renwick Gallery manager Christine Messineo still looked dazed. "People got a bit crazy," she chuckled. "I didn't even have a chance to show them the other artists we represent." She's also preparing for round two. Lipomi is working on another 60 mini-Basquiats to finish his series. Like the others, they're about a third the size of the genuine eighties article, so no one's going to be leveling the charge of counterfeiter. Yet. One couple, informed that Lipomi's Basquiats were sold out, could be heard whispering to each other: "Do you think we could convince him to paint us a full-size one?" —Brett Sokol

An art patron at the Neuger
Reimschneider Gallery.Photo: Getty Images

"BEST ART DEAL IN MIAMI. NOTHING OVER $250," reads the sign in one booth of the upstart Geisai Art Fair in Miami. In the booth of Eric Doeringer, "they're selling like hotcakes," he says of his small-scale works that echo — okay, outright copy — works by bigger names. "The Warhols are doing particularly well," he notes.

The gimmick of the Geisai Fair — and it's a gimmick that got top collectors like Marty Marguiles, the Powerhouse Rubells, and Beth de Woody though the door so far — is that the artists sell directly from their booths, removing the dealer middleman. It's the brainchild of artist Takashi Murakami, who juried the show.

Art patrons enjoy a shiny thing by Anish Kapoor at the Lisson Gallery exhibit yesterday.Photo: Getty Images

At Art Basel Miami, where lobsters at the UBS dinner on the beach are as big as cats, the overwhelming trend this year is size. Dealers, eager to justify high prices with "important" pieces, have, by and large, brought wall-eaters to the fair — Matthew Marks is showing a seventeen-foot-long Andreas Gursky (sold, for $900,000), just one of several dozen oversize works on view in the halls. At Gagosian, where they've done $10 million worth of business in a day, "the market is very strong, it's stabilizing at the top," says director John Good.

Then there were the big guns. Michael Govan of LACMA. Adam Lindemann chatting design with Nadia Swarovski under giant stone chandeliers at the Delano. Major Warhol collector Alberto ("Tico") Mugrabi shopping. Big star Tobey Maguire dropping coin at a satellite fair, Art Miami. At Gagosian, how many pieces have sold? "It sounds vulgar, but we lost count," says Good. —Alexandra Peers

Some art lovers check out a naked lady.Photo: Getty Images

"It's too early to tell," says bewhiskered Upper East Side art dealer Robert Mnuchin, a little more than an hour into the blockbuster and busy Art Basel Miami fair. The event begins its second day at noon today but, in one sense, the jury's already in; a quick sprint across the floor of the Miami Convention Center shows some artists who've already hit the jackpot because powerhouse dealers are displaying them alongside bigger names.

Who's in good company? (Remember these names.) In Mnuchin's booth, vet L.A. artist David Hammons gets pride of place next to Warhol. Gagosian's booth anoints Mark Grotjahn, whose sleek abstracts hang not far from vet Mark Tansey. At Mitchell-Innes and Nash, a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture abuts seventies feminist pioneer Martha Rosler — and former Whitney Museum of Art president Joel Ehrenkranz is getting apoplectic protesting that he can't buy one from her sold-out Vietnam series. In Jeffrey Deitch's buzzy booth, the entrance is marked by a striking life-size nude by Brooklyn painter Kurt Kauper (a Whitney Bienniel veteran). Nearby, people are squinting at the card and scribbling down the artist's name. Insiders know the anchor piece in Deitch's booth is traditionally done by an artist poised for takeoff. Previous ones were Vanessa Beecroft, Kehinde Wiley, and Barry McGee, whose showcase Art Basel piece one year was snapped up by MoMA president Jerry Speyer. Nothing's cheap here — Monaco dealer David Nahmad offers the prize of the fair, an exquisite 1932 Picasso portrait priced at $100 million. (He admits it's high, but "I think I don't really want to sell it," he says.) Leading Chinese-contemporary-art dealer Larry Warsh complains about the prices but says he'll probably end of buying as he's got an "addiction." The mood is good, the celebs are walking the floor: Lance Armstrong draws a crowd, and Tom Wolfe lounges in the VIP.

Photo: Getty Images

"Here we go again!" Sam Keller, impresario of Art Basel Miami, cries out to a friend on a Miami street late last night. As if on cue, the double doors of a giant geodesic dome swing open over his shoulder to reveal millions of dollars' worth of glittering jewels. Inside the Cartier Dome, Calvin Klein and a smiling Lance Armstrong sip the jeweler's house brand of Champagne as waiters circle with trays of Daniel Boulud yellowtail-sushi cones.

Welcome to Art Basel Miami.

The 50,000-strong art fair begins today, with a rush of collectors though another suite of double doors at the Miami Convention Center in South Beach. But last night, with a couple of notable exceptions (a grinning André Balazs hosting a groaning cheese board at the surprisingly zippy New York Times Website party), was largely for the corporate sponsors. An unprecedented and glittering flotilla — Krug, Netjets, Cipriani, UBS, Hennessey — have paired with the fair or ancillary events this year for access to its Über-wealthy international attendees. It's all about "partnership with art," says Cartier president Frederic de Narp, in the dome, then whispering to an employee that there's interest in two of the diamond rings and, "We need prices."