MIAMI—Whatever else can be said about Shamim Momin, the Whitney Museum curator who co-organized last spring’s Whitney Biennial, among other exhibitions, she does know how to put on a zeitgeisty show. In the midst of the commercial mayhem that took over Miami this week, Momin and artist Nate Lowman installed works by over 40 artists — including Peter Coffin, Hanna Liden, Rob Fischer, Sterling Ruby, and other young stars — in a vast luxury building under construction in the city's Midtown area, near the Wynwood and Design districts.

The show, called “The Station” and running through December 7, feels alternately ramshackle and provisional and altogether edgy, with work displayed on raw concrete floors and wall labels fashioned from scraps of construction tape. A sign on the door advises visitors to don appropriate footwear, a warning that went all but ignored on the show’s opening night, a buzzy event that encompassed much of the hipper strata of the New York art world — White Columns curator Matthew Higgs DJed; Terence Koh did a performance — and included sightings of onetime child star, now fashion designer Mary Kate Olsen.

In the three-floor, 12,000-square-foot space, the most successful works are those that pick up on the unfinished state of the building, such as a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid, a large, honeycomb-like work that has the air of an enigmatic structure either coming into form or atrophying.

But the standout piece is a sprawling, two-story, multi-room installation on the third floor, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun #13 (2008), by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. The first two rooms of this quirky Gesamtkunstwerk — somewhat in the style of artists like Mike Nelson or Gregor Schneider — provide the meth-lab conceit: It looks as though a small apartment has been taken over by a team of hyperactive and overambitious drug producers, with plastic tubes and vats of chemicals snaking in and out of kitchen cupboards and running over tables strewn with detritus like used tea bags, beer cans, light bulbs, and hotplates.

Upstairs, past a deeply ironic poster emblazoned with the desperate-sounding (in this context) words “How Can I Help?” is a rabbits’ warren of rooms in various states of dilapidation. There are crude wooden shelves stocked with jars of mysterious substances and a worn carpet strewn with an arrangement of taxidermied dogs. Exit one room through the portal of a disused refrigerator, and you end up in a dimly lit hallway with fraying wallpaper and dusty floors. The sum effect is claustrophobic and strange — and it almost feels like an egg thrown in the face of luxury architecture, as if the work envisions a scenario in which drug-crazed hobos and looters had squatted in the space, started a frenzied meth business, and were awaiting eviction.

Which is another way of saying that whatever’s up in the world of the market — by which one means today’s lifestyle-ish mix of art, design, and luxury goods — the avant-garde appears to be alive and kicking.

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction. She blogs at "The Appraisal."