While the streets and trattorias of the charming Italian city of Torino were abuzz with the arrival of one of gastronomy’s most celebrated delicacies, tartufi (truffles) from local Albi last week, at the 16th annual Artissima fair it was the fair’s new performance program “Blinding the Ears,” introduced this year by dashing sophomore director Andrea Bellini, that had people talking.

At the VIP preview on Thursday, dealers and visitors alike were as excited about that evening’s scheduled performance by the bawdy Viennese collective Gelitin as they were nervous about what the fair would bring in terms of sales.

But Bellini’s decision to start the performance schedule with Gelitin’s All or the just, i 120 minuti di Torino, staged in the swank, storied Teatro Reggio, introduced a certain looseness, if not quite anarchy, to the fair. Over the course of two hours, the dozen or so performers, mostly male and in some state of drag or undress, assembled a three-story-high double-rainbow-shaped scaffold of wood, pausing along the way to sing or chat or explore their anatomy or bodily functions. One, trapped in a suspended cage, administered oral sex to two of his high-heeled pals; another laid down on the stage, aimed his freshly painted ass skywards, and shot diarrhea (fake, we hope) several feet in the air. But what was the point? It seemed there was none, other than the completion of the structure, but no — in fact it was the posing of the boys at regular intervals on said structure in order to create a kind of cascading fountain of urine, each pissing on the one below. And so we were off.

The next two performances were less, well, juvenile, though each also presented a sort of alternate reality — on Friday, for the fair’s opening party, Arte Povera legend Michaelangelo Pistoletto staged Anno Uno – Terzo Paradiso, a text-heavy allegory that, between a lack of action and references to the Holocaust, 9/11, Dantes Inferno, and Platos Allegory of the Cave, most found rather heavy, if not soporific, for a performance beginning at 9:30 p.m. after a day at the fair.

A more lively take on the human condition, power, existence, and freedom was offered on Saturday in the form of RMB City Opera, a digital-era love story combining live action and graphics taken from the Web-based alter reality Second Life by young Chinese artist Cao Fei, recently announced as a Hugo Boss prize finalist.

Mario Cristiani, whose Galeria Continua has posts in Beijing, San Gimignano, and Moulin, said he related more to the latter work, but applauded Bellini for including the celebrated Italian artist among such younger colleagues as Pablo Bronstein, Jim Shaw, and Matt Mullican, calling him “one of the columns of modern art.”

The performance series is part of Bellini’s ongoing effort to expand the fair from a simple commercial endeavor into a multi-genre cultural festival. The independent curator and former U.S. correspondent for Flash Art put his stamp on the fair itself as well, of course, installing near the entrance a section called “Constellations,” curated by Heike Munder, director of Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and featuring 10 “large-format museum-style works by famous and emerging artists.” Performance played a role here as well, with Italian-born, London-based Seb Patanes live Absolute Körperkontrolle (2006), in which two young men dressed as scouts embrace in a kind of wrestler’s face off, drawing steady audiences. In a small room was a video of Marina Abramovics Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful (1975), in which the artist chants the titular phrase while frantically brushing her hair.

For all Bella Italia’s emphasis on beauty, however, the works at the fair tended toward the subdued or “unmonumental,” with lots of black and white, both in “Constellations” and throughout Artissima.

Dealers were uniformly impressed by the level of galleries and work on view at the fair, which under Bellini uninvited several local outposts in order to increase quality, though many complained of slow — or no — sales and difficulty connecting with collectors.

The fair was well attended by locals and insiders alike, with appearances from art-world notables Sam Keller, Art Basel directors Marc Spiegler and Annette Schönholzer, and curator-about-the-globe Hans Ulrich Obrist. But while the pool of 127 exhibitors in the main and "New Entries" sections was international — if dominated by Italy, Germany, France, England, and the United States — the collector base was mostly Italian. And Italian collectors, as several dealers told it, can be difficult to engage in conversation, not to mention commerce, a situation that gave a large artwork by Scottish artist Scott Myles reading “WE REQUIRE A RESPONSE” on offer at Berlin’s Meyer Riegger for €5,000 ($7,480), a certain resonance.

But once contacts were made, things seemed to go swiftly, at least for some dealers. First time exhibitor Timothy Persons of Berlin and Helsinki’s Taik Gallery was glum at the Friday-evening party, having sold none of the striking, mostly large-scale photographs that he had brought from his Helsinki School artists (a show of which will go on view at Bryce Wolkowitz in Chelsea in February). Saturday, however, he reported a slew of sales, at prices from €7,300 to €15,000, thanks to a local lawyer who had brought by a handful of his art-loving friends. “You need someone to help you in,” he said.

Italian galleries weren’t necessarily immune from the challenges of dealing with their countrymen, with several, including the esteemed local Franco Noero, reporting “so-so” sales to ARTINFO. Noero had, however, parted with the most striking work in its booth, a 2009 installation by prankster Rob Pruitt, who currently has a show on view at one of the gallery’s three spaces, that featured a pair of jeans posed in a crouch and stuffed with concrete, with a thick plastic tube running from a bucket of blue paint to a pump, then through the pants and out the fly. Titled Esprit de Corps, Painter, the work also featured an action-painting element: paint had actually been pumped through the tube and ejaculated onto a rough surface hanging on the wall before it. The work went to a local collector for an unreleased price.

Another gallery reporting a “so-so” experience was Milan’s Suzy Shammah, whose booth was dominated by a giant, gorgeous installation of 12 Walter Niedermayr photos of skiers on the slopes measuring 125 x 208 inches. Priced at €52,000, it hadn’t sold as of Saturday evening.

Raucci/Santamaria from Naples was doing great, however, having sold a Mat Collishaw for $12,000, a Cheyney Thompson for $9,000, and a hypnotizing Ugo Rondinone bull’s eye in acrylic on canvas and measuring 86 inches across to an Italian collector for $197,000, one of the highest prices ARTINFO heard at the fair. The gallery had also found an unusual buyer for Brooklyn-based artist James Yamadas systematic large-format collage of self-help book covers, priced at $10,000: it was purchased by Amazon, his source for the images.

Cristiani’s Galleria Continua had had mixed results, selling a few works priced between €10,000 and €60,000, but having less luck with the more attention-grabbing works in the booth, such as Nature morte aux grenades (2006–07), an installation of several dozen lovely glass grenades laid out on a table and priced at €180,000 by Mona Hatoum, another version of which is on view at the Fondazione Merz just a few minutes away. Also yet to sell as of Saturday evening were two “striking” works by Cairo artist Moataz Nasr that recreate Sufi seals in different-colored matches, a comment on the tenuousness of culture, or how quickly it might go up in flames.

Asia Zak from Krakow and Berlin gallery Zak | Branicka, a first-time exhibitor, was by impressed by the Italian viewers, saying that they were smart, inquisitive, and into “challenging art” of the sort her gallery shows. Her booth was drawing a lot of attention with a raucous video by celebrated Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra that depicted a cheerleader let loose in a locker room. Zak’s booth was stocked with largely Polish and conceptual works ranging from €1,000 to €35,000, and had made a few sales.

Berlin’s Esther Schipper had one of Artissima’s most lighthearted booths, with installations by Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, and Carsten Höller, whose “Vogel Pilz Mathematik installations of hyper-realistic sculptures of two mismatched mushroom halves, were doing extremely well. The largest, featuring several dozen of fungi, had sold to Turin’s Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) for €65,000, and smaller offerings of one (€9,500), two (€18,000) or three (€23,000) were moving quickly as well.

Things were “slightly quieter than we expected” at London’s Kate MacGarry, according to a gallery assistant, though they had sold Goshka Macugas installation The Nature of the Beast (2009) to the gorgeous local contemporary art museum Castello di Rivoli, for an unnamed price. When it was shown at Whitechapel in London earlier this year, the work featured a tapestry replica of Picassos Guernica borrowed from the United Nations; that one will be returned and a new one produced.

A Macuga on offer at Galerie Rudiger Schöttle of Munich had not yet sold (four galleries were offering her work at the fair), but the dealer seemed to be having a great time anyway. Also on offer in his booth were large museum-interior photos by Candida Höfer (the Louvre) and Thomas Struth (the viewers of Michelangelos David at the Accademia), but he was most excited about Andrew Palmer, a relative newcomer from whom he had one small painting. Schöttle discovered the British painter, who produces soothing abstractions that incorporate geometric shapes, at a Frieze satellite two years ago, promptly taking him on and installing a work in his own home. “I’m sure he’ll have a career,” Schöttle said.

Maribel Lopez, a first-time exhibitor who recently relocated to Berlin from Barcelona, was also positive, despite having sold nothing as of Saturday evening. She was showing Light Centre, a conceptual “Life Garage Sale” featuring unsettlingly generic black-and-white replicas of everyday objects at prices ranging from €2,500 to €8,000. She said she would be happy to return to Artissima despite the slow going, but thought her chances of being accepted were low, given the number of regular exhibitors from Berlin. (She might have fared better if she’d stayed in Spain, which had only two dealers at the fair.)

Javier Peres of Berlin and Los Angeles was having a great fair, with steady sales of works ranging in price from €7,500 to €70,000, including an untitled Terrence Koh installation of plaster objects in several vitrines (2006) to GAM, and a small Dorothy Iannone painting to another European foundation.

London’s Maureen Paley found sales slow but steady. As of Saturday they had sold three small lovely portraits from Paul P. for a total of €18,000 as well as several other works, but had yet to find a buyer for a large-format Wolfgang Tillmans photograph of a breakfast table priced at €38,000.

Overall, dealers seemed to feel that the fair was in fact more suited to introducing new artists at “prices you can buy,” as local super collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (for whom that categorization may have a different kind of meaning than for most) said than moving works from more established ones, a suggestion the distribution of prices — many in the four- or low-five-figure range — supported. “You come to Torino, you know you find young galleries,” she said.

Unceremoniously stashed at the back end of the fair was the fair’s official “launching platform for the latest generation of emerging talents,” called “Present Future,” now in its ninth year. The work in the section, from 18 international artists, and curated by Aurélie Voltz, Jimena Acosta Romero, Adam Carr, and Simone Menegoi, was better received than the section’s layout, which Robert Meijer of Berlin’s Lüttgenmeijer called “a bit labyrinthine.”

Slow sales and all, most dealers were keen to return for next year’s incarnation, which, if Bellini’s progress so far is any indication, promises to be even more lively and well-rounded than this year’s. “Every year is better,” said Sandretto. “More precise.”

And the tartufi aren’t bad either.