The whole enterprise sounded a bit like an episode from the 1960s game show "Supermarket Sweep," the one where you loaded up your cart with the best stuff in a limited amount of time and raced toward the checkout. Two curators from the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Charles Stainback and Cheryl Brutvan, spent 45 hours over five days cruising 13 of this month's art fairs in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach, viewing thousands of artworks in the hope of finding a common thread and then showing the best of the bunch.

"The hard part of the assignment was not the looking," says Stainback, the William and Sarah Ross Soter curator of photography at the Norton. "The hard part was trying to select a cohesive body of work that said more than 'these are our favorites.' That was never our intention."

View Slideshow: Exhibitionists at the Art Fair

Within a short time, Stainback and Brutvan determined that information sharing, communication, and messaging were much on the minds of artists today, and the show they organized at the Norton, titled "Now What?" and running through March 13, includes several works that use actual materials — books, newspapers, receipts, and so on — as both medium and message. In all, there are 39 drawings, photographs, and sculptures by 21 artists, many of them previously unknown to the curators (and quite a few new to this writer as well).

Some were modest but painstakingly crafted efforts. Allyson Strafella's drawings are made with a typewriter, repeatedly pounding on punctuation marks to arrive at a pattern of garbled language and tidy grids. Mark Dion's "Herbarium" offers re-creations of plant drawings made by an ambitious horticulturist murdered by Seminole Indians in 1840. Richard Gilpin's abstracted cityscape, "Splinter XVII," was arrived at after scoring and peeling away the surface of a photograph to produce a lively syncopated surface that calls to mind a delightfully tipsy but anorectic Mondrian.

With works like these, a certain amount of backstory is helpful in understanding the artists' goals (this is a hurdle "typical of much contemporary art," notes Stainback, who promises that wall text will soon alleviate some puzzlement), but others beguile without revealing their stratagems. Mickalene Thomas's "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need" is a 12-foot-long tableau of an African-American odalisque, studded with rhinestones, reclining on a gaudy patchwork divan. It's not clear what this has to do with "information sharing" or "messaging," but the work certainly radiates heat. As does Liza Lou's elaborate "tapestry" of glass beads on aluminum panels, which appear to have been partly effaced or defaced by a creepy mold-like growth across the surface.

For pure quirky charm, "Now What?" offers up Daniel Scott Ellison's diminutive portraits of nightmarish little creatures in what is described on another online site as "faux naïf" — meaning, I guess, that he's not really an outsider artist, he's jut borrowing the look. Equally quirky and twee are Luke Butler's portraits of a young William Shatner as "Star Trek"'s Captain Kirk. In one, the doll-like commander seems to be throwing a tantrum, pounding his fists on the floor; in another, he's either dead or blissfully unconscious. Brian Drury's portrait "Ali" is a mesmerizing likeness of a different sort. Hyperrealist, smoothly polished, and sleekly coiffed, the subject has an unctuous Sal Mineo kind of charm, as magnetic in its peculiar way as a Northern Renaissance angel.

With only one exception, Roxy Paine's 1997 "Pigeon Holes," all the works date from the last two years. "We didn't know that work was going to be at the fairs," says Stainback. "It was probably the last thing we selected. If we'd found out it was something from around 1940, for example, we might have had a discussion. But we felt the piece fit in perfectly with what we were trying to say." A monumental spoof of painterly techniques, with brushstrokes presented like fossils inside a display case, it's a remarkably spot-on and a sure-footed parody, as compelling as Roy Lichtenstein's famous lampoon of an Ab Ex ribbon of paint.

As you exit or enter this concise and compelling survey, Nick Cave's untitled "Sound Suit" serves as a teaser for the Norton's spectacular survey of this artist's work (up through January 9, 2011). While one can posit that all art is about "communication" and "information exchange," the shows here simply remind us of how very diverse these enterprises can be at this moment in time.