BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y.—It should come as no surprise for a first-time fair, but at the July 11 opening of the inaugural Art Hamptons, nobody seemed quite sure what sort of fair it was meant to be. Whereas most of the fairs ARTINFO covers have their own flavor, for good or ill, one of the most entertaining things about Art Hamptons, which ran through July 11–13 on the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society, was the range of juxtapositions its 54 exhibitors offered. In one passageway, for example, a couple of classic Robert Longo prints (Cindy and Max — on offer from New York’s DJT Fine Art, at $10,000 for the pair) were hung opposite Lluis Ribas’s Sobre La Arena (offered for $26,500 by Wally Findlay Galleries, which has branches in New York, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, and Barcelona). They’re all figurative works, but in virtually every other sense they occupy entirely different artistic universes.

Aesthetically, some dealers went for ornate gilt frames and the Old Master look in their booths, others for stark contemporary. And the range of work was just as diverse — including everything from faux-Impressionist Paris street scenes to all styles of modernism (with a particular emphasis on Americans, including plenty of Romare Bearden and a number of small de Koonings) to a peppering of contemporary work. The one point that all exhibitors seemed to agree on, however, was that this was a fair for bright colors and chirpy signature styles, rather than anything too technically, emotionally, or intellectually challenging. There was no Marina Abramovic or Paul McCarthy here, as far as I could see, nor anything that threatened the standard categories of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Instead you had lots of Wolf Kahn and fair honoree Will Barnet (who was feted at the July 10 opening gala), more Paul Jenkins than you might have expected, and lots and lots of Andy Warhol. “High-end conservative,” was how George Billis, coordinator of the Red Dot art fair, summed it up when I asked him to characterize this new competitor. That said it pretty well, though you’d have to add, “almost exclusively secondary market.”

On Friday afternoon most of the dealers I spoke to were still trying to decide how well they’d selected works to bring and how successful the fair was going to be for them. “Good traffic and good interest,” the assessment from the folks at New York’s Hirschl and Adler Modern, was a typical comment. New York, L.A., and Hong Kong dealer Sundaram Tagore told me that there had been “major, major collectors” at Thursday’s opening gala, but that “they hadn’t been in a buying mood per se; there was more of a party mood.” Tagore is famously an art fair enthusiast, but I suspect he spoke for many other dealers when, responding to my question about why he’d decided to come to this one, he said “To try it out. A lot of collectors come to the Hamptons in the summer. I want to get my artists’ work on their radars.”

Ray Waterhouse of London’s Waterhouse and Dodd, one of a handful of international dealers at the fair, admitted that when first told about Art Hamptons he hadn’t really taken it seriously, but when he saw “the sort of galleries that were included,” he applied and was accepted at the last minute. “We don’t have a booth, we have a wall,” he joked. This didn’t prevent him from doing business. He sold Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Porta (1977) for $35,000 on Friday afternoon.

Other sales turned out to have been made prior to the fair’s opening. Gavin Spanierman of New York gallery Spanierman Modern admitted that Loom III (1966), a lovely little Ibram Lassaw, was already sold when he brought it out to Bridgehampton (retail price $100,000), and Luis Accorsi of Accorsi Arts Associates insisted that Larry Rivers’s Last Civil War Veteran (1961) — one of the most notable pieces in the fair — had been reserved “by a museum just before the fair opened.” This frustrated a number of people who also saw themselves as potential buyers.