BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — ArteBA ’07, Buenos Aires’s enormous international art fair, opened last weekend to a veritable orgy of hype, excitement, and local press attention. In attendance at the ribbon cutting were Jorge Telerman, the city’s controversial mayor, whose clean-shaven pate bears down on the citizens from every billboard and scaffolding shed in this election year, as well as Cristina Kirchner, the even more controversial first lady of the republic, who, like Hillary Clinton, is contemplating a run for the nation’s highest office.

Beyond the political theater that surrounds it, ArteBA, now in its 16th season and bigger than ever, seems to be enjoying a smashing success. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend by the time it closes today, and the local papers recounted with almost libidinous satisfaction how many of the works on view were sold in the initial hours of the fair.

With more than 20 countries and 70 galleries on display, ArteBA’s organizers say their ambition is to give the more established art fairs in São Paulo and Mexico City a run for their money, and then — who knows? — maybe take on Miami, Venice, and Basel. Through tomorrow, ArteBA ’07 will remain in the Blue and Green Pavilions of the exhibition grounds La Rural, a mix of modern and Beaux Arts architecture not far from the Plaza Italia, in the center of the Argentine capital.

With improving economic conditions in the region, as well as a reinvigorated international interest in the art of Latin America, ArteBA ’07 is garnering more attention than ever. For the moment, to be sure, it remains primarily a South and Central American show, with some galleries from Mexico and Spain, as well as Miami.

According to Mauro Herlitzka, who has been its director for the past three years, “The goal of Arte-BA ’07 is to be international throughout Latin America, in other words, not to provide yet another display of the international art scene, but to show the world what is happening in Latin America. But unlike the other fairs in the region, we emphasize the works of young, up-and-coming contemporary artists.” He added that the fair’s other mission is to “reaffirm Buenos Aires as one of the great cultural capitals of the region, improving the artistic infrastructure with better institutions, catalogs, as well as promoting understanding among the cultural centers in the region.”

Undoubtedly, the stakes and the tension at the show do not seem nearly as high as at some of the more grandiose European and American equivalents. There, one has a sense that the fate, if not of art history, then surely of the art world, hangs in the balance. Dealers fight to gain a march on the competition, and collectors nervously stand at the doors before the official opening to get first dibs at some rumored new work by an international art star. In Buenos Aires, by contrast, there is more innocence in the air, a more celebratory mood as the local public comes to see more art than they can usually see in an entire season.

Such is the variety of Latin American — and Argentine — visual culture that it would be foolhardy to seek, on the evidence of this show, any rigid generalities of the art. But just as the general mood of the fair is less neurotic than its better known American and European equivalents, so the art itself seems more playful and happy on the whole than the Chelsea crowd might be accustomed to.

Surely there is evidence here of that consolidated artistic mainstream represented by the Chelsea galleries, with their interest in politics, semiotics, high and low culture, and the like. But there is also an earnestness that has largely passed out of the cultural discourse of the Northern Hemisphere. It would be hard to imagine anyone in New York, London, or Basel, at least in the last two generations — basing an exhibition on the question “Que es el arte?” (“What is art?”). But that is the very question that greets all who enter the section of the fair devoted to Premio ArteBA, which will provide a first prize to one of eight selected artists.

One generalization that can be made is that the works on view in this area are all mixed-media installations. There is not a single painting or sculpture included. Equally noteworthy is the frank humor and freshness that mark the works in question. In fact, one would have to go back nearly a generation, to the early days of the East Village scene, for such a wholehearted and seemingly innocent embrace of popular culture. Julia Masvernat’s “Teatro de Guirnaldas” (“Garland Theater”) is a luminous orange tent whose surface is alive with shadow puppets projected onto the taut surface from within.

Meanwhile, Diego Bianchi’s “Wikipedia — Catalogo de Recursos” (“Wikipedia — Catalogue of Sources”) is a whimsical look at the clichés and the materials of contemporary art, with all the usual illusions to semiotics and the work of the artist Tom Friedman, who is a major influence on many of the artists here.

One of the most striking works (but not the only one with a culinary component) is Nicanor Araoz’s appropriated van that disgorges from front and back a mass of several thousand Sonrisas, a brand of cookies with smiley faces that are beloved by Argentina’s under-10 set.

There are many more works, in more conventional media, to be enjoyed in the gallery displays at Arte-BA ’07. They include Alexandra Tavolini’s stuffed toy shark and cow in diminutive fish tanks — an obvious allusion to Damien Hirst — some pleasant cityscapes painted by Karin Godnic, as well as a welcome semi-cubistic landscape by Joaquín Torres-García, one of the foremost early modernists in this part of the world.