BASEL, Switzerland— “Fair is a fair is a fair is a fair,” yes, but Art Basel might be the fairest of them all. Its eminence is such that its hometown — a small, often lovely medieval city sewn together by the jade-green ribbon of the Rhine at the locus of Switzerland, France, and Germany — has become synonymous with the art fair it hosts for one week every June. For unlike New York’s Armory Show and London’s Frieze, sited in teeming metropolises with seismic art worlds, Art Basel simply has Basel: an international border town that features a sprawling pharmaceuticals industry, the inevitable Swiss banks, and the headquarters of illustrious architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Despite Basel’s outsize number of world-class museums — from the Kunsthalle Basel, expertly helmed by Polish curator Adam Szymczyk, to the grand dames of the Beyeler and the Schaulager — it’s still easy for visiting New Yorkers, Berliners, Londoners, Angelenos, and Muscovites to forget that Basel has an active contemporary-art scene that is engaged 52 weeks a year.

During Art Basel this month, the city’s estimable alternative-art scene will make that fact a little bit harder to forget. Year-round, Basel’s mostly artist-run off-spaces — among them, New Jerseyy, Showroom, and the nascent Galen (as well as Radio Arthur, an art–centered Internet radio station) — mount inspired exhibitions, publish experimental magazines, and stage ambitious performances that pull together local artists and international art stars with remarkable assurance. This month’s bag of events — from a “hobbies” magazine launch, to an atypical window display, to a series of concerts, to a dynamite-determined installation — promises to be the same mix of the rigorous, the riotous, and the relaxed that characterizes the Basel experimental-art scene as a whole.

Last year’s Art Basel saw New Jerseyy — a gallery located at Hüningerstrasse 18 in North Basel’s industrial environs and run by independent curator Daniel Baumann and local artists (and Used Future publishers) Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and Dan Solbach — briefly turned into a boxing club. Guest-curated by Swiss art doyen John Armleder and some of his students, Clinch/Cross/Cut filled the space with the requisite bags, gloves, and weights, and featured a schedule that had participating artists sparring and jogging in the dusky evenings.

This year, in an equally inspired if less athletic bit of programming, Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, whose rather Romantic take on subjects as various as Easy-E and Expressionism is on view in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial, will be painting the storefront’s windows for a new work called What Leaf? What Mushroom? The otherwise empty gallery will be locked, and a series of concerts will be held nearby featuring Nils Bech, a weirdly enchanting singer prone to a kind of operatic cabaret, and New York artist Richard Aldrich and composer Stefan Tcherepnin, of the famed Russian composing family; he’s fourth in line after Nikolai (1873-1945), Alexander (1899-1977), and Ivan (1943-1998).

Bech will perform the evening of June 9, at Lothringerstrasse 108, after Ekblad’s opening; the last time he sang at one of her exhibitions, he performed a gorgeously strange riff on Agnes Varda’s seminal film Vagabond. On June 10, Aldrich and Tcherepnin will perform in the subterranean room of Schlachthofstrasse 10 — an architecture studio and music space situated nearby at the French border — following a performance by the darkly impenetrable electronic duo Le Dépeupleur, so named by its principals, Kasper Toeplitz and Zbigniew Karkowski, after a Samuel Beckett short story.

While New Jerseyy’s identity is rooted in its North Basel construction-site ethos (it’s funded by the Nordtangente-Kunsttangente, an arts directive aimed at revitalizing the crane-strewn area), Showroom is a decidedly more itinerate project. Begun in 2006 by artists Tobias Kaspar and Pascal Storz and curator Egija Inzule, Showroom has featured spirited programming with a motley crew of curators and artists and temporary exhibition spaces. During this year’s Art Basel, it will turn text-heavy, with an exhibition (at Hammerstrasse 133, a Kleinbasel storefront surrounded by Turkish fast-food joints and located just blocks from the Messe) and a magazine launch, each preoccupied with the Word. The show, curated by Inzule, will feature a magazine work by John Knight, a contribution by the English artist and postmodern fabulist Ryan Gander, and printed matter based on gallery advertisements by famed French critic, collector, and gallerist Ghislain Mollet-Vieville, the famous champion of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Mollet-Vieville's salon-like Paris apartment has been recreated in its entirety at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva.

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.