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.

(Which leads me to another unfortunate thread: frustration with art whose ploddingly stated rationale promises far more than the work delivers.)

But I have no complaint with these two artists winning special attention. In the art world's current happy plurality, anyone's taste is as useful as anyone else's.

For my part, I was really taken by Aneta Grzeszykowska's work, which was presented by Warsaw's Raster gallery. It's called Untitled Film Stills and, yes, it's a faithful attempt to remake the famous Cindy Sherman cycle, except that it's in color.

Grzeszykowska (who even looks a bit like Sherman) features herself as model in all the pictures, shot in Warsaw last year. It's a wonderful homage to Sherman, and a lovely intelligent twist on all those identity issues in the original. The realization of the lengths she had to go to make these facsimiles, including having to hand-make the outdated clothing and objects, gives them a presence far beyond that of a simple imitation. Representatives from Sherman's gallery, Metro Pictures, showed enough interest to actually buy some.

Very different, but equally exciting, I think, is Akram Zaatari's work shown by Galerie Sfeir-Semler. There is no lack of accessibility here, as a text panel that introduces the two pieces, Saida, June 6, 1982 and Earth of Endless Secrets, is actually included in the installation. Still, this is delightfully complex stuff, involving a letter buried inside a shell case in 1991 by a former member of the secular Lebanese resistance. The fighter's journal was discovered by the artist, who then encouraged the family living in the house where the shell case was buried to dig it up and find the letter that was intended for them. With his pile of help-yourself printed images of the shell case, Zaatari also creates an homage to an older artist, this time Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Zaatari, like Grzeszykowska, is an artist to watch.

I think the same might be said of Ricardo Valentim, who showed with Galeria Pedro Cera. His Film Festival is a treat. It's a series of 70 screenings of vintage British and American public education films, made between the 1930s and '80s in their original 16mm format, redolent of both well-meaning didacticism and now often-horrifying political assumptions. While I watched this morning, I learned, in a movie called Not with an Empty Quiver, how Native Americans were encouraged to "better themselves" in the 1970s by designing and manufacturing gravestones. And as a loyal Englishman, I'm hoping to get back tomorrow afternoon for the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Excellent, witty, seriously engaged work, I'd say.

I also enjoyed the pieces that Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom have made for Galleria Fonti—they’re like shiny, black Sol LeWitt’s, but with sound. And I was intrigued by Naama Tsabar's encore, presented by Dvir Gallery and made by encasing a rock band's entire stage gear, appropriately enough, in what must have been miles of black duct tape. I also was struck by the enterprise of FOS (Thomas Poulsen), who, in his show for the Max Wigram Gallery, had actually included a functioning pay bar.

As I started out by saying, the differences among these artists’ Statements are far more obvious than their similarities. But that’s to be celebrated, as is the fact that the cynicism that characterizes some of the work here is easily outweighed by the passionate engagement and exuberant intelligence of the rest of it.