An island mansion with glowing, vaporwave pools. Models with mermaid tails and stilt-walking drag queens. NFTs on glitching monitors, open bar cocktails, house music DJs and, somewhere in the middle, a bit of branding.
If you were lucky enough to get an invite to Creativo and Superfly’s The World Is Yours private mansion party on Hibiscus Island—held in partnership with SPIN—you could have made a clean sweep of your Art Basel 2022 bingo card.
The Friday night celebration ushered guests into what would surely continue as a debaucherous weekend with the sounds of DJs Coco & Breezy, Gianni Lee, Young & Sick, and a back-to-back set from M!nt and Jasmine Solano.
There were performances by dancers dressed like ‘90s-era Fly Girls, the aforementioned stilt-walkers, and “Weed The Wizard,” who we’re pretty sure was that guy at the bar who kept snorting a whole joint up his nose only to magically pull it out of his right ear.
Given that the party was titled “The World is Yours,” there was a definite Scarface vibe to the whole thing. What was the dress code, anyway? Was it “fresh,” “comfy but cute?” No one was really sure, but well-dressed financiers mingled with vibrantly-weird hipsters and no one seemed truly out of place.
The hundreds in attendance moved up and down from terrace to terrace along a singular, roped-off path through the pristine mansion. Guests milled about past expensive furniture and a kitchen that shined as if it had never been used, all angles of the modern home highlighted by blue and pink ambient lighting.
This level of casual opulence and over-the-top sensory input is what Creativo’s Sasha Bernier was after. For four years, he and his team have worked to merge music, art and movies with the time-honored tradition of throwing damn-good parties. For Bernier, it’s all about “getting people together in a creative way,” and that’s pretty much what Art Basel is all about.
Ostensibly, there was digital art to be enjoyed on the first floor from an array of artists including Alienqueen, Post Wook, Probcause and Lindsey Price featuring Charlotte McKinney; though it felt more like the whole scene was one big performance piece commenting on the party-fication of Miami’s Art Week season.
Do the world’s affluent and well-cultured masses travel from Switzerland, Mexico, New York City and Los Angeles to consume and appreciate the latest in visual mastery? Or, do all these people come together to drink free drinks, post-psychedelic selfies, fall in love with a hired pool mermaid, and take advantage of the global networking opportunities?
Perhaps we speak for all of Miami when we say, “¿por que no los dos?”
Kira Bursky, aka All Around Artsy, was one digital artist exploding on the metaverse who came from South Carolina to showcase her evocative pieces at the posh event. She told us how she’d decided to come to Art Week just three weeks ago, and in a matter of days had lined up eight different showcasing events and opportunities.
“My goal was just to line up one,” she smiled with excitement as a giant man with leaves in his hair flapped colored scarves around a disco-dancing queen. “NFTs propelled my art forward because the response has been so positive.”
For Corey Nocco of Superfly’s Web3 event brand Superf3st, this is the kind of excitement around the digital space that can only be learned through experience. From the creators of Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, Superf3st tries to “bring luxury to the wild west of crypto, but also build community.”
Events like The World Is Yours are still very much the muddled frontier of blending the sci-fi promise of Web3 with the physical plane, and Nocco promises there is yet much to come in the elevation of the pop-up party, but we’re pretty sure no one left Friday’s event without a slightly sloppy smile on their face, inspired in their hearts by the real winner of the evening: the art of conversation.
