NEW YORK—It was an unusual sight. Among the suited businessmen, frenzied shoppers, and the gawking tourists of midtown Manhattan, a clutch of art world types in hipster attire stood outside a drab office tower, down the street from Macy’s and across from the Empire State Building. Above them, flanking the entrance to the lobby, were signs advertising the Volta New York art fair. Sister to the four year old Volta in Basel, it's a satellite fair of the Armory Show, which is owned by the same parent company, Merchandise Mart, and it’s making its New York debut on the 11th floor of that office tower. Just as bold as the location is the fair’s format. Volta's executive director, Amanda Coulson, and the fair’s curatorial advisor, sometime art critic and former art dealer Christian Viveros-Faune, have instituted a curatorial take on the standard fair model, featuring all solo shows in booths labeled by the artist’s name, with the gallery’s in smaller print. (The norm at fairs: booths are tagged by the gallery’s name.)

The show opened to VIPs at 10:00 a.m. and like clockwork, by 10:30, there were dedicated collectors Mera and Donald Rubell and Susan and Michael Hort, two couples always eager to support new efforts in contemporary art. Other collectors trickled in later. Though the aisles were sparsely populated at first, that didn't stop one New York collector from laying out a full $85,000 on an installation by David Ersser shown by London’s Seventeen Gallery. Ersser’s sizable, multipart artwork is a 1990s-era living room constructed entirely from carved, unpainted balsa wood. A pack of cigarettes and lighter and a paperback book on a coffeetable; a Playstation console with joysticks; a DJ’s turntables and stacked records – all are lovingly reproduced with a dazzling degree of verisimilitude. Particularly striking is the way Ersser re-creates the kinks and curves of the Playstation and the DJ’s headphone wires, in so inflexible a medium.

Volta itself proved to be a flexible medium — for at least one dealer. The fair required each booth to be a solo show, so London dealer Kenny Schachter, who wanted to exhibit both young photographer Muir Vidler, who takes vivid shots of punk rock types, and midcareer performance artist William Pope L., who makes, among other things, drawings on Pop Tarts, decided to take an additional booth. By 3:00 p.m. the Pope L.s had sold out — all of them going to new clients, which Schachter says is a first for him at any fair — and the dealer had slipped into his stand some furniture by the Campagna brothers and Tom Dixon, which added a dash of color to the usual boring booth decor.

London’s Hales Gallery was showing more serene works by Adam Dant. These large ink-on-paper drawings, which range in price from $3,000 to $16,000, depending on size, depict fanciful scenarios in actual New York locations – a beached whale in Grand Central Station, a cluster of windmills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange – in a Dutch Old Masters style, and Hales director Paul Hedge was seen showing, and selling, a number of them to collectors. It may have helped that his booth was painted red in the manner of a Victorian sitting room. “All we’re missing is the Persian rug!” Hedge joked. Then he added, more seriously, that he thought that, in addition to being fascinated by depictions of their city, New Yorkers were going for Dant’s work because “it looks like the opposite of contemporary art.”

True enough. Dant stood out in a fair dominated, it seemed, by loud, kinetic artworks. Artist David Ellis and composer Roberto Lange, the collaborative team brought by New York’s Roebling Hall, had constructed elaborate sculptures, made with everything from chicken wire to empty beer cans and wine bottles, that play musical arrangements controlled by a computer program. The work’s strange, clanging music filled the aisles and perhaps was the siren song to some collectors who, according to gallery director Joel Beck, expressed interest in the both of the large pieces, priced at $60,000 apiece. (One of them, Hell’s Angel, will be on view next month at the Theory clothing store in Manhattan’s trendy “meatpacking” district.)