Even better was German artist Stephan Reusse’s Monkey Talk, for which he made a film of monkeys playing, then turned it into a green laser silhouette, which in turn was playing on a wall in Vienna gallery Lukas Feichtner's booth. The gallerist almost apologized for the price, $50,000. “The laser box has to be specially created in Germany,” she said. Where is the American museum of new media that will buy this piece?

Brooklyn artist William Powhida’s renegade pieces at Schroeder Romero were low-tech, but they packed a big punch, especially his hand-drawn New York Times Arts & Leisure section and his cranky lists of things that are wrong with the art world. “He’s our little star right now,” the gallerist said.

Although there weren’t many large-scale pieces this year, one room-sized installation on view seemed perfect for Miami: Ohio-born artist Libby Black’s Work Out, a complete gym made entirely of paper, at San Francisco’s Marx & Zavattero gallery, priced at $61,500 for the whole thing, including a wall mirror.

Pulse looks out for emerging artists, and on Thursday, the fair awarded its Pulse Prize to the most interesting work in its ImPulse section devoted to them; the $2,500 prize, sponsored by the Financial Times, went to Emilio Chapela Pérez of Mexico City for a set of bound books called According to Google.

Pulse is also the stepparent to Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami’s juried Geisai Art Fair, which is devoted to emerging artists who do not yet have gallery representation, and which takes place right upstairs. While the Pulse building and tent are deliciously air conditioned, Geisai does without (thus the Geisai freebie: plastic fans).

It’s possible that with the art market so hot, as it was until recently, almost any artist could find a gallery. But many of the artists at Geisai seemed like low-hanging fruit. The pleasure here is that the artists themselves are the ones manning the booths, from Japanese artist Mayu Daigen, who was offering $2 postcards and a sweet $4,000 nude painting in broken English (pointing was the order of the day), to Kyoko Nakamura, who does the kind of obsessive hand-lettered screeds that were big in the American art world a few years ago. Hers are primarily in Japanese, but the energy and wit come through.

Down at the far end of the sales floor, Brooklyn-based photographer Carrie Villines (who is also a designer at ARTINFO) drew a crowd with her deadpan color portraits of people at home. The work was, of course, Arbus-esque, but felt more like laughing-with than laughing-at. Her subjects include a young Hasidic boy, a woman trucker and her two dogs, a soccer mom, and a man who invented the society to protect corduroy, which meets on 11/11 each year, the date that looks most like corduroy, of course. The unframed color prints were priced at $900 each and will tempt a lot of collectors.

“All of Miami feels a little more subdued this year,” said Pulse director Allen. “But people will buy.”

Linda Lee is the editor in chief of www.MA2Dweek.com, a Miami Web site that covers Art Basel.