It’s not a difficult work that Nashat has made, and at its heart is just a clever visual pun, but it’s also more than simply amusing. The neat closing of the intellectual circle in the moment when you recognize the connection between Glenn Gould in a forty-year-old television clip and what was going on in that German factory sometime last year provides the sort of happy transport that keeps many of us coming back to art again and again. Human imagination can turn anything into anything else, Nashat reminds us, making our experience of the world around us that much richer.

Plaque (Slab) provides the sort of resonance-filled delight that, precisely because it is more intellectually stimulating than the excitement of a soccer game or the entertainment provided by playing animals, gives art an intensity of meaning — and an importance — that greatly outweighs those of the other two.

Look around Art Unlimited this year, and you’ll find that it’s full of such delights: Tony Oursler’s Untitled Work with Money, with its talking, slobbering $100 bill; Qiu Anxiong’s astounding Staring into Amnesia, a whole, real Chinese train carriage you can walk through while video projectors throw harrowing historical footage onto every window pane; Banks Violette’s gradually self-destroying Mirror Wall; or Rina Banerjee’s gorgeous installation that has a title too long and complicated to reproduce here. It’s not exactly for everyone, but it’s enough for enough of us that we remain convinced of art’s — and Art Basel’s — importance. It means that we’re here this week, and that we will return this time next year.