This article from the Guardian about Art Basel summed it up best, I think.

If Venice is about the artists, and discreet Basel about dealers and collectors, brash Miami is about money. It is money that you can not only taste in the air; you can hear it discussed, and see it being spent all day long. The effect is strangely distorting. Twenty-four hours in, and you feel a touch under-dressed. Forty-eight hours in, and you wonder WHY you don't own any Chanel couture. Thirty-six hours in, and you no longer turn clammy when you're told the price of things. "It's $68,000," the bald guy in the Prada suit will tell you. "Hmm, not bad," you think, aware that the woman with the stretched face to your left has just written a cheque for six times as much.