Perelman and Guzman also helped curate a special exhibition of the “Next Generation,” artists whose youthful perspective and interactive media appealed to the fair’s younger attendees. A huge crowd-pleaser there was the Caracas-based Galeria D’Museo’s installation of titillating stereograms by Pedro Morales, a Venezuelan pioneer of digital art. His 2009 “Bordados Porno,” or “Erotic Embroideries,” weave pedestrian objects such as hair elastics and plastic googly eyes into patterns embedded with outlines of couplings drawn from the Kama Sutra that are revealed when viewed through three-dimensional glasses. The exposure didn’t translate into sales, though, and all those displayed remained available for $5,000 each.

“Next Generation” Miami dealer Anthony Spinello sold to an established local collector two sculptures by Cuban artist Enrique Gomez de Molina, who employs his family tradition of taxidermy to seamlessly merge disparate animals into impossible hybrids. WTF? went for $6,500 and Out for a Walk sold for $3,500, while the $12,500 Pandemonium (all 2009), an exotic tableau encased in a vitrine, tempted three prospective owners who were holding out for estimates to ship the delicate sculpture to Europe.

Young students and graduates from local art schools also fared well in their colleges’ booths. Lucinda Linderman, who earned her MFA at the University of Miami a few months ago, “up-cycles” her plastic waste into sculptures resembling digestive organs. She wound the previous year and a half worth of grocery bags around strips of her old studio work-clothes to trace her Timeline of Digestion, which a Canadian collector purchased for $6,500.

Colombian artist Federico Uribe also meticulously assembled mundane materials into unexpected shapes: animals made from Puma sneaker parts, shovels and hedge clippers, mops and corks; rakes splayed as palm fronds; colored pencils fastened into human forms. “I like the idea that the intelligence that went into designing these objects is accumulated in my art,” Uribe told the audience at a talk on Saturday.

Uribe, based in Miami Beach, was only willing to sell his show-stopping installation, which also includes older works and is titled “Risk,” as a whole, and the $1 million price tag as being weighed by a New York corporate collector and a Swiss private collector who may get a discount for donating it to a museum. The adjacent booth, of Praxis International’s Miami location, sold several individual pieces: a freshly completed tree bound from books for $15,000 and a 2004-05 gray-penciled dog for $29,000 went to separate local collectors, and a PepsiCo executive from New York acquired a $40,000 abstract work bristling with paintbrushes.

Another highlight was “Focus Argentina,” which integrated 17 of the country’s galleries in a curated exhibition of native artists ranging from masters to emerging artists, with pieces priced from $500 to $130,000. Galeria Rubbers Internacional, the oldest gallery in Buenos Aires, opened in 1957, presented a major work by Luis Felipe Noe, the 76-year-old national representative at the last Venice Biennale. The sale of Acumulacion de Acontecimientos y Situaciones (“Accumulation of Events and Situations”), a large collage covering the back of a canvas and its stretcher bars, to Palm Beach clients for $50,000 boosted collective sales to an estimate of more than $100,000. Gachi Prieto, a Buenos Aires dealer who serves as vice president of the Argentinean contemporary art gallery association that coordinated the pavilion, said that she and the other dealers were impressed by the quality of the collectors and the other galleries.

The Lesters expect three-quarters of this year’s exhibitors to return, and are already drafting, with their input, a more ambitious, three-pronged agenda for next year that will include the commercial aspect, symposia, and a “projects” sector with more curated installations. And in the meanwhile, Uribe’s “Risk” was so well received that the Lesters have invited him to re-stage it at Art Palm Beach next weekend, when the couple will see if their own risks continue to pay off.