Scopes first hours on Wednesday were sweaty ones. The fair’s founder, Alexis Hubshman, was darting all over the place, and gallerist Mike Weiss was visibly perspiring following heated early sales. “It’s been a crazy morning. I’m going to take a shower,” he joked.

Thanks in part to his efforts, two works by the newly discovered German painter Stefanie Gutheil — Kopftheater II and Berg, which sold for a total of $25,000 — would soon be in the possession of Kansas’s Nerman Museum. Three editions of Liao Yibais stainless-steel Ring had been snapped up for a combined total of $135,000, and the artist’s Fake Bag went for $40,000.

Granted, Weiss’s booth was hotter than most. But this is what Hubshman meant when he said, as he breezed through booths, “there’s an up spirit to the fair this year.” He had enlisted curator and critic David Hunt to assemble a curatorial board of “the best up-and-coming, next-generation curators,” and Hunt’s four choices, Hubshman said, “were like kernels that popped while they were with us” — in particular Franklin Sirmans, who was appointed LACMAs chief curator of contemporary art in September.

As opposed to last year, when the fair was entirely tented, 70 percent of this year’s Scope is inside a permanent structure. It’s attached to Art Asia, with the two forming what Hubshman (who seems to enjoy food analogies) calls a “doughnut” — a big loop with a sculpture garden in the middle.

The Asian galleries showing at Scope rather than next door, like Jakarta’s Ark Galerie and Manila’s Drawing Room, both first-time exhibitors, presumably have done so in hopes of rocketing into the big time. Some former Scope participants now show at Art Basel Miami Beach; this year, at least two expressed their gratitude to the fair that launched them (or perhaps guilt?) with sculpture loans: a Robert Melee, courtesy of Andrew Kreps, and Dario Robletos A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing (2008), from D’Amelio Terras.

The fair’s two-floor marketplace area — offering knit hats, screened t-shirts, artist-edition snowboards, tattoo artists, a psychic, and a “live cartoonist” — adds a bazaar element. New York’s Anonymous Gallery has booths both there and at the fair, where, in a neat Sesame Street sort of twist, an attention-getting sidewalk-garbage installation by David Ellis was producing musical sounds.

The gallery’s director, Joseph Ian Henrikson, expected that work to be a “hard sell,” but Charles Saatchi snapped it up on Friday. Although Romon Kimin Yang, aka Rostarr, is better known for his black-and-whites, his adventurously colorful Praefectus Astana (2009) sold, for $60,000. And a collector put a reserve on Maya Hayuks A Portrait of the Aura of Iman Bowie on Wednesday, then bought it the next day for $20,000.

Another Lower East Side gallery, Sloan Fine Art, sold a Surrealism-tinged Chris Berens painting for $15,800 in advance of the artist’s first solo show at the gallery, which opens December 16. “It seems like a good omen,” said Alix Sloan.

Cirrus, a Scope Miami fixture, sold three pieces before its booth was even fully ready. “These are all new clients, too,” enthused gallery founder Jean Milant, who’s been basking in the glow of the many kudos some of his high-profile artists have been getting lately, including Ed Ruscha, for his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, and John Baldessari, for his recent Golden Lion and current Tate Modern show. He had sold a 1990 Ruscha print and Baldessari’s Raw Prints (1975) for between $20,000 and $50,000 each, Milant said, and a museum had shown interest in Baldessari’s The Fallen Easel (1987), which is listed at $65,000. As of late Thursday, though, the museum had yet to pull the trigger.

Aureus Contemporary of Providence, Rhode Island, collected $20,000 for a pair of portraits by Karim Hamid, and the gallery’s co-director, Kevin Havelton, suspected that the buyer (who bought two smaller Hamids earlier this year at Basel) was preparing to request a commission. The gallery also sold Screen Door, by Texas-born painter Sara Carter, on Wednesday, for $15,000. “I wouldn’t say we’re living in the 80s, but it’s a good start,” Havelton said.

Not everyone was seeing sales. As of Wednesday afternoon, Virginia-based ADA Gallery hadn’t parted with any of its drawings by filmmaker George Kuchar — or anything else, for that matter. But founder John Pollard didn’t seem too bothered; he saw the fair as a breath of fresh of air. “Here I don’t need to belong to a country club or a church,” he said, adding that he didn’t regret the lack of hedge-fund speculators at this year’s fair. “Now the conversations are better. There’s less bullshit. People spend 20 minutes talking to you about art.”

The Arte Foundation from San Juan, Puerto Rico had curated for its booth a provocative show called “Reality Check” — but as of Wednesday afternoon, it hadn’t led to any check-writing. The organization’s Raimundo Figueroa was hoping an institution would show some interest in Dominique Rousserie, whose work the Centre Pompidou bought recently, but stressed that he couldn’t afford to be too picky. “We need to sell,” he said.

Wilde Gallery wasn’t having any problems in that department. By the end of Thursday, the Berlin dealership had found buyers for seven works, including the largest of nine canvases by Canadian artist John Brown. Other sales included two spray-paint-on-cardboard works by the German artist EVOL and a moody oil painting, Tempestad, by the young Spanish painter Antonio Santin, which went for around $18,000.

Next door, Mauger Modern from Bath, England, had unloaded Doug Fosters Stereoscopic Viewer for $5,745. Perhaps best described as a 21st-century nickelodeon, it’s made of mirrors and stainless steel and offers the viewer a 3-D peek at a nude woman. Richard Mauger wasn’t surprised it had sold first. “It’s a sexy piece of machinery, even if you don’t know how it works,” he said. It was produced in an edition of ten; by the end of Thursday, a second edition had also sold.