The buzz about the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel, a curated forum for galleries to present outsize pieces too big for their booths, began long before the four o'clock bell rang on Monday and the art elite flooded in, clutching their bright pink invite cards. One especially concise preview was supplied the day prior by Mary Spirito of New York's 303 Gallery: "Art Unlimited in four words: circles and naked ladies."

Succinct as it was, her summation was impressively accurate. Circles abounded, from Michelangelo Pistoletto's 1969/2008 piece Labirinto e Grande Pozzo, a maze of corrugated cardboard loops brought by San Gimignano's Galleria Continua, to Mario Merz's igloo-like Pythagoras' Haus (1994), presented by Konrad Fischer Galerie, to Yona Friedman's 2010 Ville Spatiale (Space-chain structure), an installation made from looping wires and fabrics, courtesy of Paris gallery Kamel Mennour. New York's David Zwirner gallery fell short of the full 360 degrees but couldn't be faulted for trying with Dan Flavin's three sets of tangented arcs in daylight and cool white (to Jenny and Ira Licht), a 1969 piece made from semicircles of the artist's signature flourescent light tubes. As for the naked ladies (or naked lady, to be mathematically precise), that was supplied by London's White Cube, which displayed Christian Marclay's titillating 2008 video Solo, in which actress Tree Carr essentially does the wild thing with an electric guitar.

There's usually something of the carnivalesque to the Art Unlimited hall, which also encompasses the Art Statements section of solo shows by young artists. There are scale-flaunting attractions, some of them freakish; dealers do double-duty as carnival barkers, standing outside their displays and urging visitors to come inside. Then, instead of excited children prancing around with caramel apples and cotton candy glued to their mouths, these same dealers and their collector clients hustle through the aisles with cell phones glued to their ears.

The most crowded of the Statements booths was that of artist Simon Fujiwara, presented by Frankfurt am Main gallery Neue Alte Brucke. Entitled Welcome to the Hotel Munber, it was a visual elaboration of Fukiwara's unfinished erotic novel of the same name, presented in a minute recreation of a Spanish hotel bar from the 1970s. After its appearance in Statements, the work is headed for the Gotehenburg Kunsthalle in Sweden. It was brilliant, and deservingly earned Fujiwara a Baloise Prize, one of the two CHF 30,000 ($26,400) awards given to emerging talents in the section. As part of the prize, the Swiss financial firm also acquires work by the winners to donate to Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The hall's carnival atmosphere becomes all the more pronounced in the hangar-like space of Art Unlimited. In the case of participatory artworks, there were long lines, just as there would be for rides at a fair! (Pace Annie Cohen-Solal.) There was a hall of mirrors — a groovy Yayoi Kusama installation presented by Gagosian and there was a disorienting tunnel-type experience, Sergio Prego's 2010 Ikurrina Quarter, a translucent vinyl piece that snaked through the hall and accommodated only 20 visitors at a time. In many ways the hall was a study in contrasts. A small child sat in the piles of sand surrounding Agnes Varda's 2010 La Cabane sur la plage (qui est aussi une cabine de projection) — a recreation of a fisherman's shack, presented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia — happily patching together what appeared to be the beginnings of a castle. Meanwhile, outside the booth where White Cube was presenting Marclay's video, a sign announced that children were prohibited, unless accompanied by an adult.

Just as at the Liste fair, the crowd at Art Unlimited was bottlenecked at the entrance. Inside, collectors and museum folks were out in force. There was Adam Weinberg, director of New York's Whitney Museum, who said that he'd had just been chatting with Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Campbell. "Isn't it great that he's here?" Weinberg raved. And it was: something was comforting about having such a representative of tradition present to witness all the zaniness and vagaries of contemporary art — a tapestries expert, at that.

Neither circles nor naked ladies were to be found in the 70-year-old American artist Ian Wilson's artwork, unless some funny business was going on behind closed doors. Wilson's piece — which, following the carnival theme, could function as the fortune teller — consists of a small room in which the artist conducts half-hour conversations on the heady subject of "the absolute" with anyone who makes an appointment for the privilege.  "Oh, that's very Tino Sehgal," remarked one fairgoer. "No, no, it's very Marina Abramovic!" countered another. Whatever it was, Massimo Minini, the Italian dealer who was co-presenting the project with Jan Mot of Brussels, couldn't be accused of false advertising when he announced repeatedly, "We have the most immaterial work in the fair."

Minini, a natural raconteur himself, told the story of how he first became involved in exhibiting and dealing Wilson's conversation pieces. In the 1970s, Minini went to Rotterdam for a Jan Fabre exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum and wound up watching a soccer game with Wilson. They had a conversation about soccer, Wilson considered it an artwork, and Minini promptly bought it from him. At that time, he paid Wilson $1,000. "I probably told my wife I paid $500," Minini said. "She wanted to kill me for paying that much money for a conversation with someone. But we're still married!"

Wilson's artwork may be immaterial, but it doesn't run entirely counter to the fair's market ethos. You can, after all, buy your own conversation — this consists of a certificate verifying that you had the conversation, since no recording devices are involved — for $18,000. "A fair is a place where you exchange artworks," said Minini. "In this case, it's an immaterial artwork. I'm not against art fairs. I do them, and I enjoy them. Maybe this piece is a contradiction, but I enjoy contradictions."

On that note, you can also buy someone else's conversation. The first one Wilson conducted at the fair may prove especially interesting to collectors, since it had been prearranged with peripatetic curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose official job is with London's Serpentine Gallery, but whose unofficial, and really more accurate, job is to be everywhere in the world that art happens to be happening. One can only imagine what the chat was like between Wilson and the man famous for his "24-Hour Interview Marathons." (It was tempting to picture the genial Obrist being booted when his time was up, still conversing animatedly as he exited; it was equally tempting to imagine that Wilson might become so engrossed with the tireless Obrist that he would cancel all his other appointments and just talk to the curator for the duration of the day, pulling what one might call a reverse Abramovic.)

The Wilson piece seemed very idealistic, until a dealer standing nearby commented, "The absolute? And it's not sponsored by the vodka? That's a missed branding opportunity!" And like that, it was back to business.