How the Art Basel Miami Beach VIP preview works, and what a pass can buy

By the time the public walks into Art Basel Miami Beach on Friday morning, the fair has already been open for two days. On Wednesday and Thursday it belongs to the people with cards: collectors, museum directors and curators, advisors and the galleries' best clients. Those two days are where most of the week's selling happens, and they run on a hierarchy that Art Basel publishes but rarely explains.

If you are there to buy, the preview is the fair, and the way in is a gallery you already buy from. If you are there to look, a public day gives you the same art, some of it already sold, and the First Access hour is the quietest the fair will be. The rest of this piece explains why.

The hours and prices below come from Art Basel's visitor and ticket pages, checked on October 23, 2026; how the preview works comes from Art Basel's own reports and from reporting in The Art Newspaper, Artsy and Artnet.

The cards and the hours

Art Basel's private days run on three tiers of access (Art Basel):

The gap that matters is Wednesday. First Choice cardholders have five hours on the floor before Preview cardholders arrive, and a day and a half before the Vernissage crowd. Both VIP cards also get in on the public days, and Art Basel lists a third kind of card for artists; First Choice, Preview and Artist cardholders get free entry to the museums and collections marked on Art Basel's list of cultural institutions (Art Basel).

Groups are capped at six people on the VIP days and twelve on the public days (Art Basel).

Who gets a card

There are two routes in, and neither is a shop.

The first is the galleries. Each exhibitor receives a set of VIP cards to give to its established clients, usually with a plus-one (Artsy). Art Basel does not publish how many each gallery gets. This is why the cards are a quiet measure of a collecting life: they go to the people a dealer wants in the room on Wednesday morning.

The second is Art Basel itself, through a global network of VIP Representatives who work with collectors, galleries and institutions; the team is led by Carly Murphy, Global Head of Collector and Institutional Relations, formerly head of client strategy at Christie's and Sotheby's (Art Basel). Requests are reviewed by the VIP team. In 2014 an email from Art Basel's VIP office, reprinted by Artnet, said cards from show management went to internationally recognised collectors and to the directors and chief curators of major museums, and asked applicants which artists they collected, which participating galleries they bought from and which museum boards they sat on (Artnet). That is twelve years old, but it describes the logic: a card follows a buying record.

Anyone selling a "VIP card" is selling something Art Basel does not sell. The only access to the private days you can buy is the Vernissage, through a premium pass, below.

The sale before the sale

The preview does not begin on Wednesday. Two or three weeks before the fair, galleries send their clients and their clients' advisors a preview file of what they are bringing, and for many buyers that is when the real work starts; the advisor Elizabeth Fiore told Artsy it is when hers begins (Artsy). Some works are spoken for before they are hung. At the 2025 fair, Hauser & Wirth's George Condo, Untitled (Taxi Painting), and a Louise Bourgeois were not on the stand at all: both had been sold after the gallery sent its preview to clients. Within the first three hours of the fair, the gallery said, its sales were 40% above its whole total from 2024 (The Art Newspaper).

That is why the sales lists arrive so fast. On the first VIP day, Art Basel and the art press publish the deals galleries report: in 2025, Art Basel's first-day report led with a Gerhard Richter sold by David Zwirner for $5.5 million, and in Zero 10 Beeple Studios sold all ten works in a series at $100,000 each (Art Basel). Read those lists as what they are: figures the galleries chose to report. Art Basel publishes no total for the fair.

Art Basel has started to push back. At Basel in June 2026, its "Basel Exclusive" asked exhibitors in the main sector to keep at least one major work, a focused group or a whole booth out of pre-fair previews, online viewing rooms and pre-sales, and unveiled them at the First Choice hour (Art Basel). In Paris, it added a slot the day before First Choice for each gallery's closest clients, up to six per gallery (The Art Newspaper). Neither appears in Art Basel's announcement or hours for Miami Beach 2026.

Is the first day everything? Not quite. Art Basel's former head of VIP relations, Irene Kim, called Miami Beach an "everyday selling" show, and other fair directors told Artsy that weekends sell too. But the most sought-after work goes early, and much of it goes to people who saw it on a screen weeks before.

Who is in the room

Art Basel has said who its VIPs are. From a survey of more than 1,400 collectors on its VIP lists, published in January 2025: half are over 60, they have collected for 20 years on average, they spend more than twice the share of their budget at fairs that other wealthy collectors do, and only 10% of what they spend goes on work bought online without seeing it first (Art Basel).

Museums come in numbers too. More than 240 museums and foundations sent representatives in 2025, and Art Basel expects Miami Beach to draw its largest contingent of museum groups of any of its 2026 fairs, with a week of guided visits and invitation-only events for them (Art Basel). Some of what sells on the preview days is bought with a museum in mind: in 2025 a work by Nike Davies-Okundaye sold in Survey was pledged to the Toledo Museum of Art.

What money can buy: the premium passes

Since at least 2019, Art Basel has sold a way into the Vernissage. In 2026 there are three passes, each for one person, with re-entry (Art Basel):

None of them reaches First Choice or Preview. What they buy is the Vernissage, the lounges and an easier public run.

The ladder has climbed. Art Basel's ticket pages, kept by the Internet Archive, show a "Premium+ Card" at $500 in 2019 and 2021 for the Vernissage and the public days. In 2022 a new card at $2,200 first added the Collectors Lounge. In 2025 the basic Premium Pass was $850 without the lounge; in 2026 it is $1,250 with it (Art Basel, 2019; 2022; 2025).

The public days

Friday, December 4 to Sunday, December 6, the fair is open from 11 am to 6 pm. Day, weekend and reduced tickets enter from noon by time slot; the First Access ticket and the premium passes from 11 am (Art Basel).

• Day ticket: $92, single entry from 12 pm.
• First Access: $105, single entry from 11 am, an hour before the day-ticket slots.
• Weekend ticket: $170, Saturday and Sunday, with re-entry.
• Reduced ticket: $68, for students, ages 13 to 18, seniors, veterans and Miami Beach residents.
• Children 12 and under: free with an adult.
• Art Basel and Design Miami: $132 for a day at each.

A day ticket is single entry: when you leave, you are out, so eat first or at the fair. Guided tours run through ArtNexus on the public days and do not include admission. Full details are in our tickets guide.

Other fairs' previews

Most of the other fairs open on Tuesday, December 1, a day before Art Basel's private days, and run their own previews. Art Miami and CONTEXT have a Platinum preview by invitation from 11 am to 1 pm, a VIP preview from 1 to 4 pm for holders of its $330 VIP pass, and open to the public at 4 pm; the previews benefit PAMM (Art Miami). NADA's preview runs from 10 am to 4 pm by invitation before a public opening from 4 to 7 pm (NADA), and UNTITLED holds a VIP and press preview the same day. Design Miami's members and collectors previews are on December 1, with a VIP preview from 11 am to 1 pm on December 2 before it opens to the public at 1 pm. Each fair's terms are on its own site and on our fair pages.

Our view

• If you are buying, start now. Tell the galleries you buy from that you are coming, ask for their preview, and ask whether they have a card for you. The first conversation happens weeks before Wednesday.
• If you want the opening, the $1,250 Premium Pass gets you the Vernissage on Thursday evening and the lounges, without an invitation. It does not get you Wednesday.
• If you are there to see the art, take First Access on Friday at 11 am, start with the project sectors, and spend what you save on a hotel near the fair. Our guide to the sectors has what to look for.