Each year at about this time, nearly everyone involved in the day-to-day routines in Ponte Vedra Beach will begin preparing for the last pivot of the season, whether they realize it or not. During this last month of summer, there’s a specific type of visitor that begins to arrive quietly and is often unnoticed by many locals. Some of these visitors are already in residence while others will be arriving soon. The families from earlier in the summer have already departed and are tending to fall school schedules and any planned projects they had hoped to complete before Labor Day in their home communities.
August in PV follows a familiar pattern. It’s a month of “closing out the books” and adhering to a schedule that was set in motion long before Ponte Vedra Club built the Sand Piper Cottage on the low dune above the beach, just north of the Club. This isn’t an exploration of regional nostalgia or pining for a bygone era; far from it. This is an active chronology that involves influencers and others from within the leisure economy who are now finding time for their own rest and renewal, Ponte Vedra Style.
The connoisseurs are here, and oddly enough, they’re here because this bumpy beach-road-of-August parallels in many ways the state of art in America today. They have nowhere else to be, but PV. It’s a point worth considering. They’re the trustees and like everyone else, they need a place to retreat. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But the environment around them is highly charged, curated and most spectators will never even catch a glimpse of them. There’s no lure of instant gratification. That’s not part of the culture. Decision makers in Jacksonville will be eager to meet them. There’s an anxiousness around their arrivals by the types who are constantly searching. “What’s next?” they’ll ask. It’s been a long summer and it’s not over yet.
When a leisure economy dovetails with the leisure class, the little things that help all of us get through the day can be amplified to the level of distraction. It was certainly an understatement but true when Michael Crichton attributed to Jasper Johns: “Driving in the car one day, he said, ‘I think artists are the elite of the service class.’” Mr. Crichton wrote in his 1977 book titled “Jasper Johns.”
The reality is that artists have patrons and patrons do travel. With an overemphasis on advertisements, entertainment, technology and the designed environments around us, in general, a good majority of those looking in from the edges will often feel empty, isolated, unheard and frustrated. It’s a sense that there’s little if any time left in a busy life for contemplation or reflection. There is a feeling that everything is moving too fast. A sense that satire has somehow crossed a line and now resides as a type of emotional farse. To some, it might even be feeling a lot like arriving late to a party while at the same time trying to figure out whether it’s better to be over-dressed or under-dressed. For the record, it’s always better to be over-dressed.
There is austerity in August, and it’s a type of exhaustion that nobody wants to talk about, but nearly everyone feels. The guests and visitors arriving in PV this month are here specifically to break the hold that plainness has on their daily lives. They’re here to reconnect, to use this time to turn inward and examine with all honesty the responsibilities at play in the world around them. It’s no small feat. From time to time, it’s vital for everyone to see the forest for what it is before trying to find a path through it.
This hospitality sentiment was no different 50 years ago in PV than it is today. Those living as full-time residents are accustomed to the August rough patches. There’s a different tempo in PV in August than there is during any other time of the year.
In the arts, the saying is this, “If New York’s art galleries are shut, it must be August.” The phrase was made famous in a 1982 article in the Christian Science Monitor by art critic Theodore Wolff. From a practical standpoint, August’s window is a time for maintenance and refurbishing. “Quiet or closed,” means “by-appointment only.” The movers and shakers are already making the rounds. The best destinations are often conveyed by word of mouth and for many, this is their first visit. They’re in good company. Ponte Vedra Beach will not disappoint.
The Venice Biennale turns Venice, Italy, into a citywide biannual art destination from May until November. La Biennale di Venezia is the independent cultural institution founded in 1895 when the first International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice opened in the Giardini di Castello. In the 1930s, it added cinema, music and theater; in the 1980s, architecture, and in the ’90s, dance.
1895 was also the year that Henry Flagler designed and installed a nine-hole golf course around the perimeter of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine. He also consolidated and renamed his rail lines in Florida that year to become The Florida East Coast Railroad. He pushed transportation infrastructure down the State that led to a surge in tourism and major infrastructure additions.
Seventy-five years later, in 1970, Art Basel was founded in Basel, Switzerland, as an experiment by three local gallerists, Ernst Beyeler, Trudi Bruckner and Balz Hilt. The first edition of Art Basel opened with 90 galleries and 20 publishers from 10 counties and attracted 16,300 visitors. In the 50 years since, Art Basel has grown into a global brand with multiple editions; 2002, Art Basel Miami Beach; 2013, Art Basel Hong Kong; 2022, Art Basel Paris; and 2026, Art Basel Qatar. But it’s the original Art Basel that remains the flagship and is still considered the most important of the group.
What began as an idea and partnership, is now the dominant global network of art fairs owned by the Swiss Company MCH Group. “See in Venice, buy in Basel.” In other words, Art Basel doesn’t just reflect the art world, it actively shapes the market dynamics. It influences the global art calendar, and it sets tastes, trends and visibility. It drives the art market. The fashion and luxury goods associated with high-status social networking overlap comfortably with finance, and this pattern language has been well choreographed along Florida’s First Coast since 1883 when Mr. Flagler first visited and found the local lodging and infrastructure lacking for affluent travelers. Sound familiar? It should.
“Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine” by Thomas Graham is on the Lightner Museum’s summer reading list in partnership with St. Johns County Public Library. Read it. It’s a fascinating story of a hard-headed business leader and a dream that grew from very little. There is no doubt that Henry Flagler accelerated development in Florida and connected isolated areas to the outside world. In the context of the Carnegies on Cumberland Island, and Flagler’s vision for Atlantic Beach and areas farther south, this is the same tree, the same fruits that dropped to create the Venice Biennale and Art Basel. Art carries culture forward. Dismiss it as an amateur enterprise and the importance of its influence on Ponte Vedra Beach will be lost entirely.
Mr. Flagler knew the importance of art when he established a “dedicated art colony at the Hotel Ponce De Leon, constructing a distinct, two-story artists’ building at the rear of the resort grounds when construction originally broke ground in 1885.” He used the colony to elevate the hotel’s cultural status, “handpicking up-and-coming American artists to reside at the luxury property and create art directly onsite as a form of elite evening entertainment for his visiting guests.” The acorn never falls far from the tree.
In the museum world, they’re called “preparators.” They are the ones who unpack, install, light and maintain exhibitions with curators, registrars and conservators. If they do their job well, as most do in this highly competitive field, they are almost always invisible once an exhibition opens. To keep a resort community alive, and active, and interesting, there are always handlers, shippers and temporary crews like those who make Art Basel booths and Biennale pavilions appear seamless. Affluence always depends on articulation that remains largely unseen and in Ponte Vedra Beach, that articulation is maintained by locals who have chosen to be close to but not secured by wealth.
Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” is also on the Lightner Museum’s summer reading list. It supplies literary weight on the performance of leisure, the moral emptiness beneath “mirth,” and the dependence on unseen support systems mapped onto seasonal patterns and curated stages for status and recognition. It’s here where prestige and commerce go hand in hand, and as every champion knows, it softens isolation.
Art Basel and the Venice Biennale are not breaks from the Gilded Age patterns of Henry Flagler’s St. Augustine or the Carnegie’s Cumberland Island family enclave; they are their globalization and professionalized continuation. Collectors and connoisseurs in Ponte Vedra Beach feel the same hunger for the experience of life within carefully managed visibility. “We’re glad you’re here.”
It’s a simple phrase that extends the work of Henry Flagler. The best of Ponte Vedra Beach is ahead, and this is what makes acknowledging those who have stood out as pillars of community excellence that much more important in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach. Welcome home.
