Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Close to 40,000 people from every habitable continent on the planet went to Miami Beach last week just to look at art.

They saw a shipping container filling with 26 tons of sand. They stood eye-to-eye with a Picasso bust of his onetime mistress, Dora Maar. They stared, open-mouthed, as a crushed cigarette pack skittered around a dealer's booth at the Miami Beach Convention Center like a puppet on a string. They spent millions.

Most important, caught for four days in a bubble of unbridled consumerism and adept social engineering, they watched each other do all of it.

Art Basel Miami Beach, which ended Dec. 10, is not just the country's largest and most important marketplace for art. (Sales this year were estimated at $200 million to $400 million.) It is theater of a most entertaining sort. On its stage, every level of the art world is on intoxicating display, and the mysteries of the art trade, if not art itself, unravel.

The action starts on the convention-center floor but continues at private lunches and dinners, at promotional events held beneath the swaying palms of hotel bars and free concerts on the beach. One artist, Kenny Scharf, performed at the Raleigh Hotel swimming pool with a chorus line of costumed cave dwellers, while others -- such as Yoko Ono -- came to cocktail parties to launch campaigns for new videos or books.

By day, dealers with nowhere to hide from armies of collectors demanding personal attention also gave performances, repeatedly extolling their artists' work in well-rehearsed (and effective) spiels -- whether or not the art was still available for purchase.

Sell Till They Drop

``It's very `They Shoot Horses,' isn't it?'' said New York dealer Barbara Gladstone, comparing her experience to Depression- era marathons where couples danced for prize money, literally till they dropped.

Meanwhile, museum directors in search of sponsorship for future exhibitions chatted up corporate CEOs, while curators from the Tate, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the museums of modern art in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco prowled the fair, ``investigating,'' one said, artworks they hope to acquire.

Galleries tend to privilege major museums, because their artists benefit from inclusion in public collections. That makes competition among private collectors even more fierce.

``Because of this frenzied, art-fair mentality, it's not what an artist does that matters,'' said Zach Feuer, a dealer with galleries in New York and Los Angeles. ``It's what another collector is doing.''

Buyers Old, New

At Art Basel -- and at more than a dozen small but lively fairs surrounding it -- an important collector such as Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire, can affect the mood without buying a thing. At the same time, hip-hop stars like Jay-Z and Beyonce Knowles may easily enter the market for the first time, bringing novel cache to a cultural universe that is continually expanding.

Fashion aside, none of this would amount to a hill of beans if art itself were not so elastic, and if art audiences were not so willing to embrace the bad, or rebellious, as well as the beautiful. Maccarone Inc., for example, found three takers for customized tombstones by artist Nate Loman, at $20,000 each. ``It's conceptual `suicide,''' dealer Michele Maccarone said.

Clearly, what sells may be a matter of taste, having little to do with meaning, form or cultural import. The danger is that, drawn by all the new wealth available, artists seeking not just fame but health insurance will be interested chiefly in pleasing, rather than challenging, their audiences.

The result could be boring. But that was not the case at Art Basel.

Surprising Combinations

To find an Alexander Calder mobile hanging near a giant kite by the African-American artist Kori Newkirk came as something of an epiphany. It was surprising to happen upon collages by Kurt Schwitters just steps away from 1970s photographs by William Wegman, just after encountering a brand-new, painted, monumentally scaled black-and-white photograph of a tree by Tacita Dean.

From there, it was a short hop (physically, not intellectually) to a booth where artist Rirkrit Tiravanija had mirrored the floor, then to the cigarette pack by Urs Fischer circling the near-empty booth of Gavin Brown.

Those many juxtapositions of young and old, formal and formless, made art seem far more exhilarating than it has been in galleries lately, especially with thousands of various viewers trying hard to make sense of it.

Container Art

Take that giant hourglass by the beach -- actually a work of conceptual art by Aaron Young -- in an off-site section of the fair called Art Positions. There, Art Basel's 22 shipping containers were put to use as mini-exhibition halls for small, individual galleries.

At Harris Lieberman (Young's New York gallery), four hired hands poured sand through four holes drilled into the container's roof. Young's plan was to fill it up until the container burst.

One Miami collector, Dennis Scholl, offered to pay $100 to cart away the sand when the work was done. Asked if he was serious, Scholl replied, ``Only if they'll sell me the piece!'' (The $40,000 price tag includes the container and sand.)

While I was there, two couples came in. After studying images of several works on paper by Young on a computer, they bought two, at $8,000 each.

Pure theater.

The next Art Basel fair is June 13-17, 2007, in Basel, Switzerland. The next Art Basel Miami Beach is Dec. 6-9, 2007. Information: http://www.art.ch/ca/cc/ss.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Linda Yablonsky at fabyab@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: December 12, 2006 15:06 EST