While everyone's No. 1 reason for coming to the fair is for the art, the celebrity-studded parties are a close second. Here is an overview of some of the "pre-parties" held Monday and Tuesday nights.
 
True North Meets South Beach 

How packed was the MOCA/Art in America party Tuesday night? So packed that one reveler on her way to the lovely garden at the Museum of Contemporary Art was heard to shout, "I'm following the carrots!" as the party goer fell in behind a tray-carrying server as one would trail an ambulance to get through traffic.
 
On hand for the party were photographer Bruce Weber, fashion diva Donna Karan and artists Albert Oehlen (who has a major exhibition is at MOCA now) and Isaac Julien. MOCA was premiering a new film on three screens by Julien. The piece, entitled True North, was remarkable for the contrast it presented with the party itself: in the film, figures traversed a desolate frozen tundra that was nearly soundless.
 
At the party, ArtInfo ran into New York gallerist Michael Steinberg who has organized a show in the Design District called Form Follows Dysfunction. What does that mean, ArtInfo pressed, why reverse the modernist dictum of form follows function? Are these pieces not functional, are they even dangerous? "Dangerous?" he asked, intrigued. "Well, yes, I suppose. Linus Corragio's work is all found edges, made from scrap metal welded together..." Sounds like a sharp show!
 
Welcome to Fantasy Island
 
The build-up to Art Basel Miami Beach traditionally hasn't begun until Tuesday night, but collector Craig Robins kicked off the festivities early this year with cocktails and a preview Monday evening at his new home in Aqua, the community developed by his real estate company Dacra on Allison Island in Miami Beach.
 
"We thought it was really important to start with most of the people who were already living here in Miami, before all the others infiltrate and everyone gets caught up in the craziness of the week," said Robins, who noted that he was born in the hospital that used to occupy the island. "What has been amazing is to see Miami being transformed from being known primarily as a party town—and it still is, and we're proud of that too—into one of the most important cities in the world for deisgn and culture."
 
While Robins has hosted "Art Loves Design," a Saturday night block party in the Dacra-revitalized Design District for three years, now he is also launching an invitational exposition, design.05 Miami. Co-directors of design.05, Amy Lau and Ambra Medda, also lent their expertise to Robins' home interiors, arranging furnishings and fixtures to show off his contemporary art collection.
 
But the real star of the design.05 event is its "Designer of the Year," Zaha Hadid, whose site-specific installation stretches across multiple floors of the historic Moore building's atrium. Hadid achieved the "chewing gum-like" effect through computer-milled styrofoam with a special coating enigmatically protected as a "secret recipe" by Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu, an architect from Hadid's London office who was overseeing the installation. "The design was in London, the fabrication was in Austria, and the installation is here in Miami, so it's a very international collaboration," Bekiroglu said.
 
Robins took his guests on a short walk toward the island's tip, where the Fabulous Floating Inflatable Villa was moored, like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon-turned-float, only its cartoonish glory is an acerbic commentary on South Florida's "inflated" real estate boom. A tongue-in-cheek flyer for the collonaded, internally lit raft touts "the most prestigious residential address in Miami" whose "top of the line finishes include plastic floors, plastic walls and plastic ceilings." Its designer, Miami-based architect Luis Pons, explained that he drew his inspiration from Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotunda, only this version "is soft the way we understand design and style nowadays."
 
Robins ended his tour at Richard Tuttle's mural on the side wall of one of Aqua's condo buildings, a mosaic imagining the random droplets of water that would be sprayed by a large rock plunging into the pool below. The bulbs embedded in the gold tiles of Splash had not yet been lit, which Robins reasoned was a sign that this first, dark glimpse was "truly a preview." Fairgoers to come will get the full effect, minus the projectile waterworks, now that Wilma and the Hurricane Sisters are officially almost out of season.