Judging by the scene of conviviality outside the Liste art fair earlier today, you'd think there had never been a recession. Gathered for the 15th-anniversary celebration of the fair known as "The Young Basel" was a bevy of VIPs gourmandizing on snacks and champagne, among them Greek megacollector Dakis Joannou, British dealer Graham Southern, and Los Angeles gallerist Michael Benevento, who said that he'd been to all 15 editions of Liste. Having munched and imbibed, the art-world grandees lined up for entry to the fair's preview.

Inside, collectors like Americans Susan and Michael Hort, Rosa de la Cruz, and Londoner Anita Zabludowicz dashed from room to room to check out work by young artists displayed in Liste's rabbit warren of a former brewery. At the booth of Berlin gallery Mickey Schubert, New York collector Andrew Ong was spotted considering a piece by Romanian artist Marieta Chirulescu.  (By the end of the preview, the gallery had parted with a number of pieces by the artist, all abstract prints and paintings that ranged from €1,600–6,000 ($1,950–7,330) apiece.)Meanwhile, at the upstairs booth of Plan B from Cluj, Romania, that gallery's energetic owner, Mihai Nicodim, was juggling several reserves on a brand new large painting by Adrian Ghenie, priced at €65,000 ($79,400).

At the other end of the price spectrum, New York dealer James Fuentes could be seen busily restocking his walls with small pieces by a recent discovery, Ben Berlow, who makes paintings on pages torn from books. They're a steal at $500 apiece, and collectors were snapping up several at a time. Fuentes brought some 80 of them to the fair. "These little guys are going to save my ass," Fuentes said, smiling. He was also showing work by pricier artists, like Jessica Dickinson, whose paintings are $5,500 each.

Other highlights of the fair included a wall-size presentation of 37 enigmatic prints by young conceptual and performance artist Alexandre Singh at New York's Harris Lieberman. Within the fair's first few hours, two of the edition of three had sold for $12–14,000 to collectors from New York and Paris, and the third was on reserve. Los Angeles gallery Overduin & Kite brought a compelling solo show of paintings by L.A.-based artist Dianna Molzan, who finished her MFA at the University of Southern California just last year. So inventive are the works that it's tough to think of them as paintings — they seem more like an investigation of the medium. For one, Molzan had sliced up the canvas and removed all its vertical threads, such that it hung down in loops from its stretcher. All eight pieces by Molzan, priced between $6,500 and $20,000, had been claimed by museums and collectors just two hours into the preview.

Paintings were also doing well at New York's Foxy Production, which parted with several works by Gabriel Hartley, a 25-year-old London-based artist who will have his first solo show with Foxy in September. Incorporating materials like rust, paper, and resin, Hartley's pieces are complex abstractions with hints of playful figuration. The gallery sold several of them on preview day for $4,000–7,500 apiece.

There was one especially racy presentation. New York gallery Taxter & Spengemann brought an hour-and-a-half-long video by A.L. Steiner and A.K. Burns that was composed of a series of vignettes involving hardcore lesbian pornography. It's in an edition of five, priced at $15,000 apiece. When I arrived at the booth, a well-known New York art dealer had stepped outside the viewing room and was breathlessly sharing with the folks from the gallery the fact that images of needles freaked her out, and that she'd have to wait until that part was over to go back in. 

When she did go back in, however, the dealer in question spent much of her time checking her iPhone as bodies writhed on the screen. I noticed several other would-be viewers doing the same thing. Are we that inured to porn? Did Santiago Sierra's Los Penetrados at the last Art Basel Miami Beach acclimate fairgoers into finding hardcore sex videos commonplace? I asked Taxter & Spengemann partner Carolyn Ramo to describe to me the part with the needles, since I'd missed it, and she promptly whipped out an iPad — a recent innovation at art fairs — and flipped through some stills, arriving eventually at the scene that had so freaked out the dealer, in which one woman sews an artful arrangement of feathers onto another's behind. "Actually," Ramo observed, "the reactions have been less extreme than we thought they would be."