Art Basel Miami Beach is one of the biggest events in the contemporary art world. It is also a spectacle, where every bit of glamour is matched by another bit of grime, and a contradiction, since beauty and money, high culture and low, rigid status consciousness and anarchic freedom coexist only uneasily within it.

Daniel Arnold was there, arriving a bit early but staying almost until the bitter end, with only day-by-day reservations at some of Miami’s less reputable motels and fewer invitations than he might have initially hoped for. Starting on the periphery, he wandered the art fair in an elliptical orbit, never escaping its gravity completely, but periodically straying to its furthest reaches.

His photographs reveal an uncanny and paradoxical event. A basketball star is presented with a painting like a modern-day king, while spectators walk past a work by Kara Walker without seeming to even notice it. Celebrities of bygone eras like Paris Hilton and Wyclef Jean appear unexpectedly before receding once more into memory. Exhaustion competes with elation, celebration with melancholy, and all around it the city of Miami lives and breathes, occasionally infiltrating the fair and transforming its visitors.