Recap: At Fairs by the Beach, the Sands of Creativity, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New York Times, Last week the art world descended on the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s new building on the Lower East Side, where the art was fragmentary, improvisational and defiantly down-to-earth. This week the same crowd has massed here in Miami Beach for the sixth installment of Art Basel Miami Beach, a fair that celebrates everything the New Museum has made an effort to avoid.

The art is heavily scripted, raucously colorful and monstrously proportioned. Parties and people-watching crowd the field of vision. Fortunately, serious art lovers can still find moments of transcendence while hopping from fair to fair, or even from fair to private collection to cocktails by the pool.

With more than 20 fairs (at least 7 more than last year) now piggybacking on the main event, Art Basel Miami Beach has made a point of finding new ways to showcase smaller galleries and individual artists. Art Supernova, a kind of fair-within-the-fair, creates a communal booth with shared storage space and a sales office for some 20 galleries. A program called Art Kabinett disperses solo-artist exhibitions in separate booths throughout the fair. As in previous years, Art Nova places the more cutting-edge part of the establishment along the main room’s periphery, and Art Positions places emerging dealers in beachside shipping containers.

One particularly active corner of the Miami Beach Convention Center is home to Terence Koh’s salaciously self-mythologizing photographs at Peres Projects and Xu Zhen’s complete re-creation of a Chinese supermarket at ShanghArt. Nearby, Michele Maccarone is exhibiting Paul McCarthy’s aromatic chocolate Santas, a lush peacock-feather carpet by Carol Bove and a decidedly less sensual array of documents from the harrowing legal battle between the artist Christoph Büchel and Mass MoCA.

The display of unflattering e-mail messages between that museum’s director and staff members about Mr. Büchel, who worked on a vast installation at Mass MoCA but then walked off last January, is raising eyebrows here. But it has attracted less attention than Mr. Büchel’s installation at Hauser & Wirth’s booth. There, his “Training Ground for Training Ground for Democracy” offers a capsule version of the notoriously unfinished artwork, with a trash-filled alley leading to a room cluttered with voting booths and children’s drawings. For now, Mr. Büchel has the last word.

Statement-making works are otherwise scarce. A few halfhearted gibes at the market, like the fake A.T.M. by Elmgreen and Dragset, are quickly absorbed into the briskly commercial atmosphere. Merlin Carpenter’s slapdash text painting “Die Collector Scum” sold the first day. Last year’s must-see booth, Gavin Brown’s, has a streetwise but nonthreatening display of modified high-top sneakers by Oliver Payne and Nick Relph.

Power dealers are not disappointing. Barbara Gladstone shows a Richard Prince tire planter next to a wall sculpture by John Dogg (recently revealed as Mr. Prince’s alter ego). Mary Boone has new work by Barbara Kruger, David Salle and Eric Fischl, whose work is jointly being exhibited with Jablonka Galerie; Marian Goodman has fresh John Baldessaris and a recent Lawrence Weiner. Mr. Weiner keeps turning up, as do Anish Kapoor, Kehinde Wiley and Tracey Emin.

Ms. Emin’s gallery, Lehmann Maupin, gives its entire booth over to the female artists on its roster, a commendable act that would have been more impressive had the gallery not announced it on the wall. Over all, women are making a strong showing throughout the fair. Art Kabinetts are devoted to Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Simmons and the lesser-known but talented Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Videos by Nathalie Djurberg and Catherine Sullivan stand out, as do paintings by Mickalene Thomas, a performance by Nicole Eisenman and an installation featuring a menorah by Josephine Meckseper (the only sign that Hanukkah had arrived).

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