The World’s Headline Writers Are Divided on What Event Just Happened in Miami Beach

Well, Miami Art Week has come and gone. It’s that special time each year when the eyes of culture watchers worldwide turn to the Miami Beach Convention Center and say with one voice… what is the name of this event again?

Reviewing the 2022 coverage, we discover that if you still write “Art Basel Miami Beach,” you are almost certainly an art magazine. That’s how Artnet News does it. It’s how , , the , and all the rest of the art gang all do it.

Generally, the other publications who feel the need to give you the full, four-word mouthful are publications that cover the art market regularly (or writers who do, in the case of Axios’s Felix Salmon).

 

As far as what more general-interest U.S. publications think, it seems, there is only one “Art Basel”—and it ain’t the one in Basel.

 

There’s also a small chance that the event becomes something called “Miami’s Art Basel.” Mainly if you are .

 

Ditching the “beach” (at the price of being a little inaccurate), “Art Basel Miami” pops up quite a bit on the lifestyle beat.

 

And at last, the more eccentric name, favored by international media (and/or fashion magazines) is “Miami Art Basel.”

None of this addresses that brief period of time a few years ago when Art Basel committed to rebranding itself with a pesky preposition: Art Basel Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong. After a while, the PRs stopped emailing to ask for that branding to be used—but it might have left a little confusion behind.

It also doesn’t even begin to touch the confusion over whatever Art Basel was doing this fall in Paris, which was officially dubbed Paris + par Art Basel.

Luckily, now that the book is officially closed on this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach/Miami Art Week/Miami Art Basel, we don’t have to face this existential onomatological question for another year.