MEXICO CITY—The consensus about this year's Zona Maco (Mexico Arte Contemporaneo) festival, held April 22–26 in Mexico City, was that it was a higher-quality show than the 2008 effort, with more galleries and artists and better works.

That it also saw slower sales and fewer visitors can be ascribed to hard times.

Gallery owners were prepared for the effect the financial crisis might have had on business, but who knew there’d be an outbreak of swine flu halfway through the festival? While participants were optimistic on the first day, and some galleries reported good sales at the outset, by the final day, Sunday, dealers were looking at empty halls and waxing philosophical. At that point, Mexico City had already seen the closure of museums and schools and the suspension of many public events because of the flu situation.

The light attendance wasn’t all bad, however. Even before the fair opened, gallery owners had pointed out that one of the advantages of the festival is that its modest size in relation to big fairs like Art Basel gives galleries, museums, and Latin American artists a place to connect and to set the groundwork for future sales and exhibitions.

Begun in 2002 in festival founder Zelika Garcia's hometown of Monterrey, the fair moved in 2004 to Mexico City, where it has grown from around 30 international galleries to 90 galleries from 19 countries featuring more than 800 artists this year. Although focused on Latin America, it has attracted galleries from Europe, Japan, and the United States as well as Mexico and points south.

Billing itself as the most important contemporary art festival in Latin America, this year it debuted a special "Zona Maco Sur" (Zona Maco South) section curated by Brazilian writer and independent curator Adriana Pedrosa to introduce emerging Latin American artists as well as galleries from outside the region who work with them.

Despite the difficulties, some galleries did see good sales. First-time Zona Maco exhibitor Claus Robenhagen, co-director of Danish gallery Nicolai Wallner, sold Danish and Norwegian duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s work Boy Scout, a full-size metal bunk bed with the top bunk turned upside-down, for $104,000 to a major contemporary Mexican art foundation that he would not name.

Robenhagen said he was particularly happy to be able to talk over coffee with collectors and curators. “It is much smaller than some of the huge European fairs, where you have maybe one minute to talk to someone.”

Artists and galleries in Mexico, Robenhagen added, seemed enthusiastic about contemporary art and supportive of each other. “In Europe it is much more competitive," he added. "We could use this spirit in Denmark.”

Long-time attendee Nils Staerk Contemporary Art, also from Denmark, had less-than-stellar sales this year, although on the final Sunday it was "still talking" to prospects. The gallery did sell a piece by Superflex, three artists who live and work in Denmark and Brazil and who had a recent hit with a flooded MacDonald's installation. Here they were showing a large Danish flag partially covered by a red and yellow flame. It went for $13,000.

Allison Ayers of the Houston-based Sicardi gallery, said she was “quite pleased” with the festival. This is Sicardi’s second year, and Zona Maco afforded an opportunity to talk with curators and museums about the gallery's artists, including the Brazilian Regina Silveira, who was showing an impressive vinyl wall installation called Encuentro (Meeting). This piece, begun in 1991 and finished in 2000, showed black figures standing in the center of increasingly larger everyday objects set on expanding black rays.

Mexico City's Galleria Myto was seeing interest for Cuban-born conceptual artist Ariel Orozco, who offered perpetually spinning secretarial chairs and a candelabrum welded to a bicycle. There were plenty of people snapping pictures, but as of the final day no one had purchased either of the pieces, and actual sales of other artists on offer in the booth were thin.