MIAMI

Get in the art crowd. Art Basel Miami Beach runs December 1-4 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Some 180 international galleries exhibit modern and contemporary work (358-5885; artbasel.com). Don't miss the first-ever design.05 exhibits at the historic Moore Building in the Design District (572-0866, design05miami.com). Look for events all over town and especially in the galleries and studios of the Wynwood Art District (wynwoodartdistrict.com).

Get a dose of design. Walk the 18-block Design District, with showrooms, stores, and galleries (designmiami.com) Learn about MiMo (Miami Modern) and architect Morris Lapidus on a Miami Design Preservation League tour at Art Deco neighborhoods (672-2014; mdpl.org).

Miami: Once known mainly as a vacation hot spot, the city is now an international art and design mecca, with pleasures that go way beyond the beach.

To the uninitiated these days, boarding a flight to Miami In early December can be a disorienting experience. Anticipating a planeload of shorts-bedecked pleasure seekers, travelers instead find themselves staring at a vast sea of black. The dark sartorial uniformity indicates only one thing: Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual pilgrimage of the international art world to the tropical nexus of preening, Cavalli-clad models, exclusivity, and excess. "Yes, the art crowd." admits Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), with a knowing laugh. "You can spot them a mile away."

The four-year-old offspring of the long-established annual art show in Switzerland, Art Basel Miami Beach is the clearest indication yet that Miami can no longer be considered merely a hedonistic playground lor fashionistas and hip-hop impresarios. The presence of the show, and the more than 180 galleries and thousands of art enthusiasts it attracts, suggests that something has shifted-that, in the words of local architect and designer Alison Spear, "Miami has become more serious." It also illustrates the particular ways that art, architecture, and design mix in this city. "You have developers hiring Jenny Holzer to create installations for their building openings," says Spear with some amazement. For Social Miami, the new restaurant-cum-gallery at the Sagamore hotel on South Beach (it will open shortly after Art Basel has packed up), designer Mark Zeff has devised 3 bank of glass screens in the lounge to showcase videos "curated" by Christine Taplin, who owns the hotel with her husband. Marty Taplin.

Clearly, Miami has come a long way since the 1960s. when Lenny Bruce clubbed it the place "where neon goes to die." Today, it draws music moguls, Latin-American tycoons. European tourists, and a coterie of the young and the beautiful who think nothing of plunking down $300 for a bottle of vodka at trendy nightclubs like Mansion, B.E.D., and Privé. And the glam quotient continues to escalate. Casa Casuarima, Gianni Versace's flagrantly outre 20,000-square-foot estate, has just reopened as an exclusive social club where initial membership will set you back S70,000 and annual dues are $3,500.

While the city's sybaritic delights have been a draw since the turn of the century, things didn't heat up until the late 1980s. when the fashion and music worlds hit the beach. Hip-hop artist Lil' Kim best summarized the excessive glamour of the decade and a half that followed: "It's sweaty in Miami." she said last year, "but the diamonds will keep me cool."

A good barometer was Fisher Island, home to celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Boris Becker. Exclusive ever since its days as the retreat of William K. Vanderbilt II (great- grandson of the commodore), it continues to hold the distinction of having the highest per capita income in the country. But even here development had stalled until an infusion of billionaires in the '80s jump-started restoration and led to the first new construction the island had seen in many years.

The city's renewed popularity also sparked a preservation movement to save the famed Art Deco District. Restaurants and clubs were suddenly thriving. New Yorkers were swooping in and buying cheap apartments on the beach, and a gallery scene began to gestate. That first revival was fairly localized, however, mostly in South Beach, (Miami is enormous, encompassing Miami Beach-actually a long barrier island connected to Miami proper by causeways across Biscayne Bay-and a much larger area on the mainland.) South Beach became so replete with attractions designed to lure the glittering and the gauche that pioneer types began to push out beyond the main drags of Collins Avenue, Lincoln Road, and Ocean Drive into industrial neighborhoods like Sunset Harbour.

But something else began shifting around the millennium. Since 2001, the city's population has grown to the uninitiated these days, boarding a flight to Miami In early December can be a disorienting experience. Anticipating a planeload of shorts-bedecked pleasure seekers, travelers instead find themselves staring at a vast sea of black. The dark sartorial uniformity indicates only one thing: Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual pilgrimage of the international art world to the tropical nexus of preening, Cavalli-clad models, exclusivity, and excess. "Yes, the art crowd." admits Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), with a knowing laugh. "You can spot them a mile away."

The four-year-old offspring of the long-established annual art show in Switzerland, Art Basel Miami Beach is the clearest indication yet that Miami can no longer be considered merely a hedonistic playground lor fashionistas and hip-hop impresarios. The presence of the show, and the more than 180 galleries and thousands of art enthusiasts it attracts, suggests that something has shifted-that, in the words of local architect and designer Alison Spear, "Miami has become more serious." It also illustrates the particular ways that art, architecture, and design mix in this city. "You have developers hiring Jenny Holzer to create installations for their building openings," says Spear with some amazement. For Social Miami, the new restaurant-cum-gallery at the Sagamore hotel on South Beach (it will open shortly after Art Basel has packed up), designer Mark Zeff has devised 3 bank of glass screens in the 800-square-foot apartment. He is now Miami's architectural golden boy, drafting plans for close to $5 billion worth of projects in his 8,000-square-foot office in the Design District. He is (allowing a similar trajectory to Arquitectonica before him, which created buildings like the Atlantis condominiums that have become iconic. Barring a huge unforeseen economic downturn, Oppenheim will be responsible for dramatically altering the city's skyline. "I couldn't have accomplished that in any other place but Miami." he says.

Lewis Aqui, partner in the landscape design firm Hall Bell Aqui, points out that "South Beach is not the only hot spot anymore. A lot of the design scene has moved out of Miami Beach to concentrate on other areas. "Areas like the Design District. Visionary developer Craig Robins (who was also responsible for injecting life into Lincoln Road) deserves credit for transforming a neighborhood that was once deserted by nightfall into one that now teems with activity. Trendsetting showrooms like Holly Hunt and Odegard have hung out shingles, and Jalan Jalan draws savvy shoppers. The new Niba sponsors events that merrily blur the line between design and art. During Art Basel, for instance, Niba will show an installation by furniture and rug designers Doug and Gene Meyer.

Down Biscayne Boulevard Is the trendy Wynwood Art District, which has become the center of the gallery scene. Here, collectors like Dennis Scholl and the Rubell family have exhibition spaces, and local artists like Rogelio Lopez Marin (Gory) and Jose Bedia show alongside Pepon Osorio and Takashi Murakami (the latter at a new space designed for Paris art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin). "Miami is no longer a regional art center," notes Clearwater. "It's part of the international scene." This month, her museum inaugurates MoCA at Goldman Warehouse, a 12,000-square-foot satellite space, in the district.

Farther south, the resurgence has been more about preservation. Coconut Grove and Coral Gables (one of the first planned cities in America) hark back to the turn of the century, when Henry Flagler first extended his railroad down the East Coast and made Miami a booming port city. Coral Gables's elegant Biltmore hotel, designed by Schultze and Weaver in 1926, was a famous tropical stopover for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (as well as the place Johnny Weissmuller taught swimming before he was discovered by Hollywood), but had been transformed into a hospital and then largely abandoned by the late 1960s. In 1983, Coral Gabies awarded the structure landmark status and it was renovated as a resort. The cur-rent owners have spent another $40 million, recently completing a ten-year refurbishment. Miracle Mile-actually only a half-mile stretch of Coral Way-has also been cleaned up. with trendy stores, antique shops, and galleries.

The heightened importance of art in the cultural life of the city has proved a particular boon lor architect Rene Gonzalez, whose minimalist, sculptural style has made him the darling of collectors, museums, and other aficionados of Miami's contemporary art scene. lt has earned him commissions like the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation as well as the office-studio of Karla Dascal-events planner extraordinaire for Madonna, Ricky Martin, and this year's lavish Bulgari party for the Art Basel crowd-which could bo mistaken for a gallery were it not for the walk-in refrigerators and the leaf-strewn worktables.

Gonzalez, a Cuban emigre who was raised in Miami but left years ago because he found it so culturally vapid, returned in 1990 in part because the city was becoming such on international destination. "When I get my coffee in the morning," says Gonzalez. "I hear people from all over the world. You always heard various Spanish accents, but now I hear German and French-and from people who live here, not just tourists." The busy architect leans back in his Design District office and smiles contentedly-dressed completely in art- world black.