BASEL, Switzerland—Art Basel's organizers are pretty bullish about the Art Statements section of the fair. "Gallerists and artists know," they say, "that whoever is allotted one of the coveted encouragement booths will be sure to enjoy the attention of the trade to a degree virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world."

Whether or not that's true, being tipped for future success with a one-person show at Art Basel can't hurt a young artist's career (or that of their gallerist). Past Art Statements representatives have included Vanessa Beecroft, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Mariko Mori, Elizabeth Peyton, and Kara Walker, and there is a lot of competition to be numbered among what the organizers call: "The next generation."

There are 26 Art Statements this year and, because they are situated right inside the entrance to Hall 1 of the Messe, they get a lot of attention from people who've just arrived and still think they have time to look at everything diligently.

Characteristically, there aren't many common characteristics among these works. But there are some, like the way the exhibitions seem to reflect the dizzying internationalism of this stratum of the art-world. And so a gallery from London (Max Wigram Gallery) shows an artist from Copenhagen, while another from Naples (Galleria Fonti) shows a pair of American artists who live in Berlin. The artists and gallerists come from as far away as China, Lebanon, India, and South Korea.

Other points of similarity also reflect diversity—different media thrust together, there's a lot of that. Anthea Hamilton's Das Buschwoman, for example, offered by London's IBID Projects, is a rope enclosure with a black-and-white striped, ceramic-tile floor. There are plywood figures in there, held together by metal clamps, and there's some kind of outsize fan. To one side, a length of garden cane is suspended from the ceiling with objects attached to it, and hanging from a rope on a panel at the back, there's a croissant!

Maybe it goes without saying, but very few of these artists just throw together an exhibition; they make an installation. Irony is still quite popular, despite its reported demise, and things are generally not quite what they seem to be. There are several video and film projections in darkened rooms—for example, Kerry Tribe's at Galerie Maisonneuve, and Ariane Michel's at Jousse Entreprise. There are artists who've produced complex and elaborate shows (such as Zheng Guogu's bamboo and red felt enclosure, housing his paintings for Vitamin Creative Space), and those who seem to feel they don't need to bother.

As you might expect of artists near the beginning of their careers, there are imitations and tributes and unwitting repetitions. Maybe the most discouraging recurrent characteristic—which, thankfully, is not too overwhelming—is a somewhat arrogant "So, what do you make of this, then?" attitude. The organizers admit that in some cases they have chosen artists "whose approach is not easily accessible." Sometimes, it seems, this is mistranslated into the assumption that art that is readily accessible is in some way un-cool.

But perhaps this attitude is a response to the competitive nature of Art Statements. Artists and their gallerists must compete for inclusion in the first place, and more than one gallerist admitted to me that there were rivalries among their artists for gallery support. And even when an artist has been selected by the Art Basel Committee, there is further competition at the fair—for the two Baloise Art Prizes, worth 25,000 Swiss Francs each, plus commitments to purchase.

This year, the prizes went to Haegue Yang and Andreas Eriksson, neither of whose works meant much to me. In Yang’s piece for Galerie Barbara Wien, she apparently picked "an element, such as diffuse light, to allegorically formulate her thoughts about community, in which individuals belong together without noticing the fact of belonging and perform an 'enclosed conversation' within it." That's funny, I thought, it's just a lot of light bulbs hanging on metal stands.