Art Basel Is Coming To Save Your City ​​​​​​​

The art fair claims it can replicate what it did for Miami all around the world.

- James Tarmy

After Diego Radivoy’s first visit to Art Basel Miami Beach in 2004, he was hooked. A Buenos Aires resident, Radivoy originally traveled to the art fair as a member of a museum acquisition committee. But the art, parties, people, and culture brought him back the next year, and then the next.

Over time, Radivoy noticed a change. When he started attending, much of Miami was relatively seedy. Yet in a few years, unsafe neighbourhoods such as Wynwood became “a place where everyone was walking freely and enjoying it,” he says. “The same thing happened to the whole city: It was a very powerful transformation.” To his eye, Art Basel was the catalyst for that shift. “It provided an art and culture identity to the city,” he says.

In 2015, Radivoy was appointed general director of creative industries for the Buenos Aires municipal government. When Art Basel announced an initiative called Art Basel Cities the following March, he and the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, saw a chance to effect a Miami-like transformation of their hometown.

The Cities project was conceived as a form of cultural consulting by Art Basel, the multicity art fair business that’s owned by Swiss MCH Group AG. In a press release, it stated that the organisation “will use its expertise, network, and communication channels to support cities in developing their individual cultural landscape.”

At the time, Buenos Aires and the nation as a whole were slowly reemerging on the international stage after more than a decade of hostility to foreign investors and populist policies championed by Argentine presidents (and spouses) Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. “I said, ‘This is what we need,’ ” says Radivoy. “And I think we are what they need.”