All the Luxury Automakers at Art Basel Miami Beach

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Art Basel Miami Beach is, ostensibly, a fine-art fair, held in a convention center on a barrier island off the coast of Florida’s biggest city. But much as “Pebble Beach” has become shorthand for the panoply of automotive-related events that take place each August on the Monterey Peninsula, so has “ABMB” transmogrified into a stand-in for dozens of art and design exhibitions, installations, and events that populate The Magic City and its environs in early December.

Also like Pebble Beach, the purview of ABMB has extended far beyond its original content area to incorporate other realms relevant to the needs of the globe-trotting legion of luxury lifestyle bacchanalians. Fashion, retail, hospitality, and, yes, cars, have all joined the party.

In recent years, automakers have expanded their reach into all sorts of questionable content areas, including apartment buildings, speedboats, restaurants, fashion, drones, motorcycles, and even submarines. This is in part because affiliation with these items brings further prestige to the brands, and in part to meet the wealthy where they already are, cocooning them in an all-enveloping branded embrace. This is the same reason why OEMs activate at ABMB: because it’s cheaper and more targeted to go to where rich people are already congregating in order to sell them cars than to hope they give up their Aspen ski weekends to spend February at the Chicago auto show. Miami in December is much more appealing.

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