BASEL—I suppose it might be possible to be here for Art Basel and not realize that something much bigger — and in the minds of most locals, much more important — is going on. If you duck straight into a taxi outside your hotel and stick your head in the fair catalog until you reach the Messeplatz, you might not notice the flags of many countries flying from storefronts and café terraces, or the huge video screens being erected in the city’s squares and on the bridges over the Rhine, or the banks of bleachers going up, or the posters and billboards with images of smiling, cheering folks wearing the colors of their countries’ soccer teams.

But starting Saturday June 7, UEFA Euro 2008, a three-week championship hosted this time around by Switzerland and neighboring Austria, is being slugged out between the best of Europe’s national soccer teams. And it kicks off right here, in pretty little Basel, when Switzerland plays the Czech Republic at 6 p.m. local time.

Now while this jamboree means next to nothing to most Americans here for Art Basel — and in passing, let’s revisit the recurrent assertion that there are no Americans here this year: there might be fewer big-money collectors spending dollars, but the place is swarming with Americans just the same — this sports extravaganza is something most Europeans cannot ignore. Even us hapless English who, thanks to a series of excruciating qualifying games against teams like Russia, Croatia, and Israel, don’t have a team to cheer on, find ourselves drawn to the action.

And to put it all in perspective, nothing sums up Basel’s attitudes toward art and soccer so eloquently as the fact that the Kunsthaus Baselland, which was hoping to attract Art Basel visitors to its exhibitions of Gavin Turk, Thomas Baumann, Dan Perjovschi, and Stefan Burger this weekend, was forced to close on Wednesday evening because of its location next to the St. Jakob-Park stadium — and thus within ticket-holders’ security area for the game.

This got me thinking about just how important art is or isn’t in people’s lives, and a piece in Art Unlimited caused me to ponder the matter further: Peter Coffin’s Untitled, a 30-monitor video wall featuring looped clips of animals at play. As elephants, polar bears, whales, monkeys, and cats frolic, nuzzle, wrestle, and dance, people — even the coolest black-clad art aficionados — stand in front of the monitors utterly rapt. And a part amused, part affectionate, altogether entranced expression creeps across their faces, one that very few other art pieces here in the Messe, or at any of the other fairs, managed to elicit. The source of the near-universal entrancement? Not art, but animals being cute.

Wandering away from the Coffin piece, I stumbled upon what I think is one of the most remarkable works in Basel this week. It’s Berlin-based Shahryar Nashat’s 2007 video installation Plaque (Slab), which features a six-minute digital Betacam video showing a huge, rectangular, reinforced-concrete slab about twelve feet long being fabricated in a German industrial plant, accompanied by the sound of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s “Toccata in C Minor.” Of course you can set images of just about anything to Bach’s solo keyboard compositions, and the resulting experience will be satisfying, due either to the suitability or, as here, the exquisite contrast of the music. But there is a sublime moment in Nashat’s video that, for me, turns easy satisfaction into simple, ecstatic poetry.

The slab-making process completed, the shot shifts to a stop-action series of black-and-white images of Gould actually playing. He’s in a 1960s television studio, wearing a tuxedo and sitting on that strange little chair that he took with him everywhere, and surrounded by the weirdest set you can imagine. It’s meant to suggest sophistication, presumably, and consists of several rectangular faux-marble slabs, each maybe twelve feet tall. And just as you’re making the connection — at once revelatory and absurd — the camera drifts up to focus on the slabs, and the frame freezes briefly. Then the video loops back to the factory again to show us a romantic vision of industrial fabrication — beautiful young men pouring concrete over a steel frame, smoothing out its surface, and allowing it to set — and then back to the completed slab, being raised up on end by a crane.