Miami: The Final Scene

The bacchanal is over. The sixth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach has come to an end.

43,000 people descended on the city for the fair — that's 3,000 more than last year — and NetJets flew in a reported 220 private planes carrying collectors and other art world players.

The top story in the Art Newspaper's final fair edition on Saturday was "Art market alive and kicking," a sentiment echoed by Bloomberg, which proclaimed "High Prices, Robust Sales, Hangers-On Dominate Miami Art Fair."

If you missed the action, you can watch it here.

What else we learned from the bevy of blogs and newspapers covering Miami: Basquiat is back. The company that owns Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach has taken a stake in Design Miami and Design Miami Beach — together, the two may venture to China. There's an edition to the ever-growing ranks of private museums: Rosa de la Cruz plans to build one in Miami's Design District. (Both of the last items — and one in the previous paragraph — come from the Art Newspaper's fair editions, which are available in PDF format here.)

It's no wonder that many had reached their "saturation point" by Friday. The Wall Street Journal points out that some exhausted fair-goers stopped into Xu Zhen's supermarket at ShanghART — an installation filled with empty wrappers and containers — seeking, in vain, bottled water to revive them.

And, rest easy, the $10 billion writedown that UBS, the fair's main sponsor, took today, won't preclude a lobster feast at the Delano next year.