The exhibition will also launch Provence, a new publication “devoted to hobbies” in all their myriad forms, edited by Showroom curator Tobias Kaspar as well as Daiga Grantina and Hannes Loichinger. The first issue features disparate offerings from Ceryth Wyn Evans, Basel artist Kaspar Müller, and Merlin Carpenter, as well as an essay by Andrea Legiehn on the 1980 Richard Gere film American Gigolo and a reprint of Richard Prince’s “Menthol Pictures,” which first appeared in the celebrated (and now defunct) American magazine Real Life in 1980.

If Showroom’s present activities are concerned with a kind of devotional literature, Galen’s show should prove to be a bit more explosive. The newest space of the three, Galen is run by artists Emil Michael Klein and Kaspar Müller. (As is often the case in Basel, both have shown work at or otherwise been involved with the previous two spaces.) Galen’s inaugural show will feature Andreas Zybach, a Swiss artist based in Berlin whose work often engages energy systems and inspired engineering, such as the pneumatic Self-Producing Pedestal, a tunnel in which human movement triggers drips of paint to coat a nearby canvas. Called Barrels — Bricks — Cameras — Carrots — Doors — Pipes, the new work will gather the preceding grocery list of items at Galen’s space at Kleinhuningerstrasse 94, where they will be assembled for a class picture of sorts, then driven to a German factory, where they will be crushed into a colored powder. This powder, a poster made from the photo of the original elements, and a possible performance, will be on view at Zybach’s opening on the afternoon of June 6, as well as at his regular gallerist Johann König’s booth in the fair proper.

This year’s Art Basel falls at a time when the art world is in full self-reflection mode: Anxious debates about whether the global recession will ultimately be good for art or will simply starve even more of its artists are being waged daily. Art Basel is exactly the kind of art event that brings this kind of anxiety to the fore. But however the excitable predictions play out, it is telling that in the fair’s very backyard a different kind of art world continues to thrive, one in which ambitious young artists make work, curate shows, and produce publications in a manner less showily DIY than simply pragmatic. Perhaps only in an alarmingly moneyed time of exhaustive consumerism could a city be put on the map by its art fair. If so, the sober global after-party (not to be held in the hotel lobby) might be just the right time for the city to return to simply being itself.