BASEL, Switzerland— The good people of Basel have the entertaining notion that if you're in town for Art Basel, with its dozens of exhibiting galleries, its ten separate components, and the several burgeoning satellite fairs, you might still go wanting for art exhibitions. As a consequence, the city's impressive family of museums has actually extended its hours this week for visitors in need of an additional visual fix—or put another way, for folks who want to look at art without the constant ringing of cash registers in the background.

This year there is a genuinely fascinating line-up in town, and while there is something for every taste—"The Ancient Civilizations of Bulgaria," anyone? "The Most Beautiful Statues of Antiquity?"—I spent today looking at some from ARTINFO’s favorite territories, the postwar and contemporary genres.

Shades of Gray

I started the morning at the Kunstmuseum Basel. From Art Basel it’s a short ride on the No. 2 tram down the hill and over the river. First of all, let me say this: I've been to art museums all over the world, but the rooms on the top floor of the Kunstmuseum, which is where the National Gallery-originated Jasper Johns show "An Allegory of Painting" is currently hanging, are among the ugliest and most dispiriting that I have ever been in. Downstairs there are a couple of airy courtyards, which were full of warm sunshine this morning, but upstairs the little square special-exhibition rooms are ghastly. The walls are painted not quite white, not quite gray, and they are "lit" by overhead translucent glass panels that refract the daylight. It was a beautiful sunny day outside, but the Johns show hangs in a milky off-white gloom. "It's better for the paintings," a guard told me. Well, maybe in conservation terms, but these Johns pictures, particularly the gray ones—and that's most of them in this show—suffer terribly. I have never seen Johns look so vacuous.

On the positive side, there's often something to be discovered in even the worst of circumstances. Maybe this monochrome murk captures something of the 1950s and early '60s coldwater walk-up, Lower East Side existence that we're encouraged to believe generated this work. And the neon letters that illuminate pictures such as Zone (1962) and Field Painting (1963-64) seem really quite shocking, as they obviously did at the time these works were made. In the same vein, Johns' repeated statement of colors's names, "RED, YELLOW, BLUE," in the relatively colorful Land's End (1963) and the utterly gray Periscope (Hart Crane) of the same year (which, let's face it, have come to seem terribly over-familiar over the years) are charged with a new tension between their monochromatic, colored, and "mis"-colored versions.

And while we’re thinking about Johns as an artist of meanings, interpretations, and contradictions, I don't think it's flippant to add that the playfulness of his titles is given a further twist by the Kunstmuseum's decision to translate them into German and French on the wall labels. Good Time Charley works well as Bon Vivant Charley, but does Peinture de champ or Feldgemälde really carry Johns' reference to color-field painting in his title Field Painting? And Flag Above White with Collage (note: not "over white," or "on white") just is not the same as Drapeau sur blanc avec collage. Frustrating as these translations issues can be, they are something to think about while you're trying to ignore how bad the pictures look.

Anarchy Watch

My next port of call—the wonderful Museum Tinguely—couldn't have come as a nicer contrast. It's a longish walk back over the river and out into deep suburbia in a park full of air and birdsong (which has the splendid name of Parc Solitude). The museum is currently hosting a curious and somewhat underwhelming commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the official founding of that uncomfortable group of philosophers, anti-artists, and political activists who called themselves The Situationist International.

They're normally given credit for initiating the Paris riots of 1968, but as far as many of today's critics are concerned, they've pretty much slipped off the historical record apart from that. Which may be what they would have wanted. As the people at the Tinguely pointed out, the Situationists' "revolutionary program included the elimination of all forms of representation, the undermining of all authority, the destruction of all symbols of power, [and] the elimination of art and all other forms of cultural spectacle." No wonder then that there's not that much to look at—mostly just letters, manifestoes, magazine articles, scribbles (literally) on the backs of envelopes, and lots of photographs and bits of video. Ironically much of the stuff that has survived is either slightly off to one side of the show’s main thrust, such as paintings by SI's predecessors the CoBrA group, or takes on a weirdly fetishistic air that guiding spirit Guy Debord (who died in 1994) would have loathed.

Speaking of Debord, he'd have been absolutely horrified to know that he and his cohorts were being discussed as a sideshow to that temple full of moneychangers up at Art Basel. On the other hand, he wouldn't have minded that his work is celebrated in what must be one of the most anarchic museums in the world. The permanent collection here consists mostly of Jean Tinguely's own work. Much of it still functions kinetically so that the general museum-like calm is periodically shattered as someone steps on an electric foot pedal and one of the artist's mechanical behemoths clanks into frenzied action. This is usually followed by a gaggle of school kids, on what I am sure must be one of the most memorable school outings, rushing around the corner to see the source of the commotion.

I was filled with sheer joy by the mega-metamatic Grosse Meta Maxi-Maxi Utopia (1987) and its warning sign that only ten people were allowed to climb on it at any one time. It's about 22-feet high and 52-feet long, a size that puts it right up there in Richard Serra territory. In appearance and spirit, however, it couldn't be more different. It has step ladders of one sort or another all over it, wheels and chains, a carousel horse on one side, a velvet curtain that opens and closes itself, and window boxes full of plastic flowers up on the top.

Wonderful. Anarchic. And full of the sort of genuinely irreverent spirit that makes a lot of the stuff in Art Basel, despite the frequent pretentiousness, seem terribly genteel and, I'm afraid, a bit boring. Thinking about the typical fare at "the big fair," Debord's plan to undermine all authority and to eliminate all art suddenly seemed rather attractive.

Truth in the Buzz

By the time I got out to Schaulager—it’s a 20-minute ride on the No. 11 tram from the train station—I was feeling rather Situationist myself. And so, the fact that the museum's current Robert Gober show is regarded by the Art Basel set as the hottest ticket among the city's exhibitions inclined me to dislike it.

It was early afternoon when I arrived, and the visitors were out in droves, sporting their suntans and expensive black clothes and ever-so-"unusual" glasses frames. My mood chilled further when I found myself in the first gallery room with an elderly couple who (and I've never encountered this before) were reading the wall labels not to discover the name of the work, nor even its date, but whose collection it came from.

"This one's Burt Reiner's," the old lady hissed to her husband.

Yes, I thought to myself, this is a perfect accompaniment to the fair. The work's well known; the humor's just dry enough; and there's a nice cynical undertow. Without having to try too hard, anyone can congratulate themselves on how they "get" this intellectual and rather iconoclastic stuff.

But you know what—and this is the damnedest thing—I couldn't help but be drawn in by what I saw. Put it down to the transformative power of art, if you like, but I left the exhibition realizing not only that I had seriously underestimated Gober in the past but that this is one of the best art displays I have ever seen anywhere. Ever.

The installations, in particular, and most of all the Schaulager's own Untitled (1995-97), are simply wonderful. I actually saw a woman weeping in there. It's a big gallery space, at the back of which a wooden staircase seems to lead up somewhere through the back wall. It's lit from above, and down pours a flood of water. Real water. Real running water. Eat your heart out, Bill Viola. It floods down the staircase and runs into a classic Gober outsize grate in the floor. There are no barriers. You could put your foot in it if you wanted to.

Then, 20 feet forward in the space are three things. To each side there's a slightly oversize suitcase; they are open. And right in the center there's a cast concrete Madonna, which might have been stolen from a local Roman Catholic church, except that through her middle she has a hollow metal pipe, about a foot across. She stands above another oversize grate, which you can stare down into—into where that staircase cascade seems to be flowing. It’s a brightly sunlit rocky pool, maybe a foot deep, and somewhere by the sea. It's sandy on the bottom, with rocks and limpets and mussels and sea urchins. And coins. People have been throwing money in there. Except that the pennies seem to be maybe six inches across. Giants' pennies.

Leaving the Gober, the world seems a different place. You find yourself questioning where reality begins and ends and wondering whether that word "reality" shouldn't always have those quotation marks around it. As I retrieved my bag, I found an old chap very carefully composing a photograph of the security lockers with his camera-phone.

"Everything turns into art," I said, under my breath, speaking to myself as much as anything.

But he turned around, beaming, and in a heavy German accent said, "Yes! Exactly!"

So, if you’re in Basel and want to rediscover why you value art in the first place, three words of advice:

Go see Gober!