On the most obvious level, Brown was investing in his gallery’s reputation—building a brand (a word he and most dealers find horrifying) that would presumably bring in collectors down the road. But there was more to it than that. Six months after Frieze, Brown participated in a panel discussion at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of American, during which he said, “To me, museums are becoming increasingly irrelevant. And art fairs, extraordinarily enough, are becoming relevant. I think they are stuck in a trade-fair template, but they could become the most interesting exhibitions of our times.”

Brown has developed a reputation as a P. T. Barnum for the fair-going set. At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2006, he brashly installed a single work in his large corner booth. Nach Jugendstiel kam Roccoko, 2006, by Urs Fischer, was composed of a crumpled cigarette pack dangling from a line of fishing wire attached to an inconspicuous mechanized apparatus high above the floor; the pack seemed to dance around the space. Brown’s stand was a magnet, drawing so many gawkers on the fair’s opening night that it nearly out-VIP’d the VIP lounge. Simon de Pury, who heads the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co., dubbed it the “most radical stand I’ve ever seen at an art fair.”

“It was a kind of cocky thing to do, but in the end it used its context to create—unexpectedly—some quite beautiful poetry,” Brown says of Fischer’s work. “The art fairs have become more public events. Now they are hybrids of a trade fair, an exhibition and a biennial. I think you are wasting an opportunity if you just put up some things from your stockroom.”

As it turns out, installing the dancing pack paid off in traditional ways, too. The New York–based collector Adam Lindemann bought one of the edition of three, calling the work a “masterpiece” and a “conceptual tour de force.” François Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, also purchased one and installed it in the Palazzo Grassi, his private museum in Venice.

But Brown has competition at the top of this game. For example, at Basel in 2005, the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider installed a doozy of a piece by the conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: He bricked up the entrance to an empty booth, and the dealers stayed home in Germany. The gallery’s co-director Tim Neuger says that Tiravanija’s work wasn’t created for Basel. An earlier version had been shown at Neugerriemschneider and then at the Tate as bricked-up doorways. “Many people try to fish for compliments and make a spectacle,” he says. “This wasn’t about that. It was an artist making a statement. That was the most liberating booth we ever did. We didn’t sell one work. We wanted to prove that it’s great to be at fairs, but you don’t need to do it to survive.”

For several years now, the New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch—who remains the premier impresario of all things downtown and bohemian even as he goes on making major secondary-market deals—has been taking full advantage of the platform that art fairs provide. Once a year, Art Basel Miami Beach becomes a sort of second branch of his SoHo gallery, Deitch Projects, which represents artists including Chris Johanson and Vanessa Beecroft and regularly stages events. His booth may be rather tame, but Deitch mounts productions all over town—from performances by acts like the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at the Delano Hotel to museumquality exhibitions in the Design District. And he multiplies the spectacle factor by bringing along a massive entourage—one year it numbered 65 people, including the cast of a performance piece at the Delano.

Deitch may be easing off his Design District projects a bit this December. “Now that there are 21 satellite fairs, and dealers who didn’t get into the fairs are renting spaces, the whole situation has just become saturated,” he says with a sigh. But he acknowledges a fundamental shift: “The role of the art fair has changed from a very specialized market for serious collectors and dealers to a kind of commercial version of an art biennial.” Even someone as established as Deitch can’t ignore the exposure. While an exhibition at his gallery might attract 1,000 visitors during a good month, his displays at Art Basel Miami Beach, in a booth located enviably close to the entrance, effortlessly attract 30,000, including all the industry’s top names.