Following an eighteen-month deadlocked negotiation between MCH Group, the Swiss-based owner of five international Art Basel fairs, and the city of Miami Beach, the fair has announced that it will stay in Florida through 2031. MCH Group argued that the city’s fee to use the convention center every December was too high and threatened to move the fair to Las Vegas.
Art Basel demanded to essentially halve the nearly $1 million annual rent and assured the city of Miami Beach, which has hosted the fair since 2002, that it was ready to walk away from the location altogether. The city gave in. Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner and commissioners voted six-to-one to approve a new five-year contract with Art Basel through 2031, with an annual rent reduction to $500,000.
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An article in the New York Times states that the fair and its accompanying events draw some 80,000 attendees and bring $60 million into the city every year. Yet Norman Braman, the billionaire Miami auto dealer and philanthropist who is credited with persuading MCH to create a Miami Beach edition of its fair, balked at the suggestion of a rent reduction, calling it “offensive,” and considered talk of relocation to be a bluff.
MCH’s most recent public financial statement reports profits of nearly $22 million for the first six months of 2026, much of which was credited to the success of its Art Basel fairs. Braman argued that taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing MCH. But Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s chief executive, said that MCH’s recent profits followed years of “extraordinary losses in which MCH almost faced insolvency. They took in a large investment from James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems family office to stabilize the business.”
He also claimed that MCH’s five primary fairs are “currently facing a cyclical downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach in the early 2000s.” Just last month, the organizers of Art Basel Miami Beach announced a reduction in the number of exhibiting art galleries for the 2026 edition of the fair, from 285 to 272, but said that it was “more about refinement than contraction.”