TURIN, Italy—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, Dante’s Inferno, and Plato’s 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 Patane’s 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 Abramovic’s 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.