Dealers had mixed reactions to Open Space, the five-year-old section made up of solo presentations arrayed in the center of the fair’s upper floor. Basel’s Nicholas Krupp gallery didn’t make much headway selling abstract paintings by American Joanne Greenbaum, priced at $12,000 for small works and $32,000 for large ones, and a representative of the gallery said that while they didn’t regret participating — what with the exposure it provided to curators and others — attendance had been a bit sparse. And yet, nearby, Los Angeles gallery 1301PE sold several Kirsten Everberg paintings of art looted during World War II placed in decadent interiors for $16,000 a piece.

The convention center wasn’t the only place to find emerging art last week. Hug isn’t generally a fan of satellite fairs — “they take collectors and visitors out of the main fair,” he says — but he was smart in his first year to give Art Cologne’s endorsement to the scrappy Dark Fair, housed in a building across the Rhine from Art Cologne and a brainchild of the organizers of the equally scrappy Milwaukee International. With its art, from 22 exhibitors who paid all of $400 to participate, lit only by flashlights and candles; its nocturnal hours (6 p.m. to midnight); its array of performances and DJ’ed events; its satirical, Onion-style daily newspaper (sample headline: “Uncool!: Some scheisse went down last night”); and its freewheeling, low-price-tag art — doctored album covers by Ajit Chauhan were going for $300 apiece at Jack Hanley Gallery — the Dark Fair was the perfect antidote to art fair fatigue. It also had an artwork that could stand for both the market boom that just ended and its painful hangover: In New York dealer Leo Koenig’s booth was a piece by Tony Matelli that, through clever engineering, made it look as though a stack of €500 notes was on fire — a real flame sprouted from it — without ever really burning. It sold, for $14,000.