For a middle-aged fair, Art Basel, 39 this year, still has legs.

Though there was no stampede of collectors as the doors on the Messeplatz opened for the VIP contingent at 11 a.m. today, business inside was instantly brisk.

Still, several seasoned observers noticed a hesitancy in the air and a thin American presence compared to previous, frothier years.

“I haven’t seen many Americans,” said Cincinnati übercollector Ron Pizzuti, who confessed that he probably wouldn’t have made the trip to Basel either, except that his daughter is living in London, just a short hop from the fair.

He managed to do well for himself, though, having bought a small drawing by Carroll Dunham at Barbara Gladstone and a 2007 work by Gerhard Richter — a 25 Farben in lacquer on Aludibond — at New York’s Marian Goodman. Referring to the sixteen modestly scaled paintings Goodman had on show, Pizzuti snapped his fingers and said, “they went like that.”

Low U.S. presence aside, Pizzuti seemed satisfied with the tenor of the fair, noting, “It’s still the best fair in the world as far as I’m concerned. You always learn something and always see something new.”

Los Angeles collector and storied dealer Irving Blum, buttonholed outside the Gagosian shopping area on the ground floor, also noticed a decrease in dollar-wielding buyers. “There aren’t as many Americans here, and you feel a certain hesitancy,” he said. “And why shouldn’t there be? A bank fails every day.”

Still, inside the spacious Gagosian stand, works by John Currin, Mark Grotjahn, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Anselm Reyle had sold in the first few hours of the preview at prices ranging from $100,000 to $2.5 million. The one primary-market Currin had four holds on it before it sold in the $400,000 range.

Perhaps Blum was correct in his view that “luckily, the Europeans and the Russians have taken up some of the slack.” (Russian megaspender Roman Abramovich and his companion, Dasha Zhukova, were spotted shopping around.)

Murakami was seemingly everywhere, most notably in Art Basel’s adjacent Art Unlimited hall, where his 18 1/2-foot-high, platinum-leafed Oval Buddha had sold through his Los Angeles Gallery, Blum & Poe (no relation to Irving Blum), for approximately $8 million. The work is the second large Murakami Buddha to sell since the artist’s mid-career retrospective opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last October: Blum & Poe sold another for roughly the same sum before the show even came down. That one, too big for the current rendition of the Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (through July 13), is now on view in an indoor public sculpture garden at 590 Madison Avenue in New York. 

A stunning and smaller version of the Buddha in solid sterling silver, taken directly from the maquette created for the large one, sold at Blum & Poe’s stand to a European collector for $2 million. Dealer Tim Blum expects the edition size for the smaller work to be ten. “The interest level is not an issue,” he said. “It’s a problem of managing disappointment.”

Murakami must have been pleased, as he got into the buying ritual himself, snagging from Blum & Poe a unique self-portrait by Julian Hoeber — an untitled, 9 ½-inch-high, bullet-ridden bronze head — for $15,000. “Takashi collects quite a bit,” said Blum.

The gallery also sold two new paintings by Mark Grotjahn for $350,000 each, Untitled (Angry Flower, self-portrait at 40, gray hair, no glasses, big nose, baby moose number 5-7260), at 60 by 50 inches, and Untitled (Angry Flower, Guga the Architect Number 727), at 60 by 48 inches.

But even with the swift early commerce at this year’s Art Basel, Poe says there’s a change in the air. “I just remember past years,” said the dealer, “when it was as if you were on a trading floor with two phones and people screaming. It certainly isn’t like that.”

There wasn’t any shouting or shoving at Sadie Coles, either, though the London gallery sold most of the works on view during the orderly late-morning opening. According to Coles, sales included John Currin’s 2008 X-rated oil After Courbet, at 18 by 23 inches; two new untitled watercolors by Elizabeth Peyton; and the large, unique Untitled (Cabinet) by Urs Fischer, in cast aluminum, mirror, and local plants, at prices ranging from $50,000 and $600,000.

The gallery just finished a sold-out Currin show in London, where 11 paintings found new homes at prices ranging from $40,000 to $1.2 million. “The thing about John,” says Coles, “is that in a good year you might get two paintings, so people wait for a very long time. And they tend to be repeat buyers as well.”

Zurich heavyweight Bruno Bischofberger had one of the more engaging, if not daring, stands, slathered with an eye-popping mix of contemporary works and older masters. Oddly, to some at least, the great big 1983 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting Onion Gum was priced at €10 million, higher than Paul Gauguin's quieter Femme en Bretagne (1894), which was set at €8.5 million, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's oil on panel Madame Poupoule (1899), at €4 million.

“We like to show a few old things,” says Bischofberger. “We just want to let people know we have them.”

And if there wasn’t enough excitement at the fair, James Roundell found some outside on the usually well-behaved streets of Basel. The London dealer spotted a pickpocket pinching a lunch-goer’s coat and gave spirited chase for about six blocks before the sprinting thief dropped the jacket. “I wasn’t expecting that kind of excitement,” Roundell said, still flushed.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.