Some collectors don’t take showy booths too seriously, however. “I think the Rob Pruitt flea market was very interesting and a lot of fun, and the performances and other things that are out of the ordinary are breaks from the monotony,” says Michael Hort, a New York–based collector of contemporary and emerging artists. “But I don’t know that they do much for the galleries. The Chapmans’ project at White Cube’s booth was clever, but the line was about two hours long, so most people I know just looked at it, smiled and moved on.”

Not all dealers are eager to shoulder the pressure to show off, either, especially in sections of the fairs that focus on younger artists and galleries. New galleries are often invited to fairs because they are radical, and they are then encouraged to do projects that are attention getting—but not necessarily lucrative. Brian Butler, who was director of the L.A. gallery 1301 PE when it participated in Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005, is proud to have displayed Social Pudding in the fair’s Art Nova section. The work, by Superflex and Rirkrit Tiravanija, involved selling instant dessert kits at 99 cents apiece, and it attracted many hungry spectators. But Butler doesn’t want to be forced to bring a high-concept crowd-pleaser every time. “This is what Amanda [Sharp] and I come to blows over,” says Butler. “There is all this camouflage—the lectures, the artists projects. But it’s a commercial event.”

Even for established galleries, putting on a show can be a major undertaking. At last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, Hauser & Wirth devoted a full third of its booth to a sprawling installation by the controversial Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. Called Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy, it was a smaller version of the massive artwork that was halted in midproduction at Mass MoCA after the museum filed suit over the ever-expanding budget. At the fair, the piece, which comprised thousands of odds and ends— from a child’s bike to American flags to folding chairs, to orange-juice jugs, potato-chip bags, balloons and bullhorns—spilled out into the aisles and rose to a second floor of the gallery’s booth that was accessible via a rickety ladder. The work was expensive to mount, but it sold for €250,000 ($367,000) to the German collector Friedrich “Mick” Flick, and it’s now on view at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum.

The sale illustrates the underlying logic of eye-catching displays. Hauser & Wirth’s director, Florian Berkhold, says that even though going all out on a dramatic installation can be financially risky, “it helps long term to do something great, spectacular and profound with an artist on a booth. It draws the attention of professionals, collectors, and journalists, because it sticks out.” The gallery upped the ante again a few months later when it showed a Martin Creed miniretrospective at New York’s Armory Show that included a piece in which a pianist dutifully trudged through monotonous scales day after day.

Fair selection committees are watching these developments with great interest—they fit the members’ self-conception as organizers of something more than just trade shows. “What our selection committees value in a stand is not how much it sold but how good the stand looked,” says Art Basel’s co-director Marc Spiegler. “A highly commercial approach to creating a stand is, long term, damaging to a gallery’s business—at least in terms of its relationship to Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach.”

Art fairs are about doing business, but they’re also run—and staffed—by restless creative types who don’t want to fall asleep on the job. No matter what happens to the art market, the top fairs aren’t going away; the question now is how best to approach them. Having become thoroughly “bored with the whole trade-fair thing,” as he puts it, Casey Kaplan is forever thinking of new ways to spin his booth. “People are so used to fairs, I guess my colleagues and I are trying to take advantage of that, or to circumvent it and make it more interesting.