MIAMI BEACH — Art Basel Miami Beach, the country’s largest art fair, wrapped up its four-day run yesterday at the Miami Beach Convention Center. And at this collector’s paradise of 300 international galleries, the big names did their thing: White Cube sold Jake and Dinos Chapman’s “The Model Village of the Damned” (2007) for about $1.3 million, Terence Koh titillated with sexually explicit photography at Peres Projects, and Deitch Project’s owner Jeffrey Deitch showed off his latest Ryan McGinness, “Panex” (2007). But this year’s fair — with its nearly 20 satellite fairs and innumerable associated events — pushed to expand beyond the traditional artist-gallery-collector model.

The main fair’s effort to broaden its traditional booth arrangement was in evidence at Art Supernova, which was billed as “an alternative form of gallery presentation in an art fair context.” Located in an arm of the convention center, Art Supernova included 20 galleries arranged in an attempt to form “an experimental group show.” The featured galleries — including Spencer Brownstone, D’Amelio Terras, Perry Rubenstein, and Jack Shainman — were given interconnected exhibition space, an exposed, common storage area (where gallery assistants could be found perched during the rare pause in the visitor rush), and shared office space.

The arrangement was an expansion upon the previous year’s sectors for younger artists and galleries: Art Positions, which offered public art spaces in the form of beachside shipping containers for 20 emerging galleries to present their artists’ work, and Art Nova, a forum for exclusively new artwork. In a nod to the competitive nature of the fair setting, Supernova also featured four centrally located display walls, which galleries could use on a daily first-come, first-served basis.

A gallerist presenting at Supernova, Nicky Verber of Herald St gallery, which was part of Art Positions last year, saw the sector as another stepping-stone toward access to the main show. “We’re a young gallery, so we’d never get a booth in the main fair,” Mr. Verber said, as he cast a watchful eye over the work of artist Cary Kwok, who was operating an on-site hair salon as part of his Supernova installation. “I wouldn’t say it’s artwork. I wouldn’t even say it’s performance art,” Mr. Verber said of Mr. Kwok’s work. “It’s just,” he hesitated. “Something.”

Mr. Verber, however, expressed doubt about the ability of the physical setup of Supernova’s exhibition space to fulfill its mission of being a collaborative group show. “It’s just a little bit less privacy,” he said of the atmosphere.

Satellite fairs and other events, however, took a more extreme approach to incorporating emerging and unrepresented artists. One of the largest and longest-running satellite fairs, Pulse, hosted a smaller fair within: Geisai, a new effort that offered booths free of charge to 20 unrepresented artists. Those artists were selected by a panel that included the director of special exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Massimiliano Gioni, and the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Tom Eccles. In addition, Geisai had the cachet of being run by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s arts management organization, Kaikai Kiki, which just opened an office in Long Island City.

Geisai has been held in Japan since 2001, and the Miami version was the first American iteration. For its maiden showing, the fair took a direct-access approach to presentation. “There are so many satellites and everyone’s saying they’re alternative, but no one is letting artists present themselves,” a Geisai project manager, Shino Takagi, said.

“For a lot of artists, the trend is to represent themselves and back off from the gallery scene,” an artist presenting at Geisai, Tasha López De Victoria, said. Ms. De Victoria and her sister, who is also her collaborator, were presenting as a team called TM Sisters. “It’s really encouraging that we’re still respected,” Ms. De Victoria said. New York artist Eric Doeringer’s booth at Geisai, designed to look like a discount contemporary art store, was a pitch-perfect metamockery of the art fair’s commercialism. Under orange and yellow neon signs reading “Best Art Deals in Miami” and “Nothing Over $250!” in thick black print, Mr. Doeringer, who has previously presented at fairs such as Frieze, Flash, and Scope, offered blatant knockoffs of name-brand artists’ work, including distorted Elizabeth Peyton look-alikes, miniature versions of Jeff Wall prints, and blurry Jean-Michel Basquiats. In a conflux of appropriation, a number of Mr. Doeringer’s artistic inspirations were on display at the main fair, including the work of Mr. Wall and Damien Hirst at White Cube, and that of Richard Prince at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. And how do those artists respond to Mr. Doeringer’s work? “Mostly they’re cool with it,” he said. “But there’s a few that have sent me cease and desist letters.”

The satellite fair Fountain — now in its second year at Miami — billed itself as a “guerilla-style art event.” Held in a warehouse in the Wynwood district and featuring the work of mostly Brooklyn-based galleries, Fountain’s artists could be found at times hanging their own work, a far cry from the formality of the main fair.

The gallery-based model was further challenged in group collaborations and site-specific special projects. At the design arm of the main fair, a site-specific work by a group of three artists — Tobias Wong, Josée Lepage, and Aric Chen — offered a pop-up tattoo shop called “As Long As It Lasts …” where visitors could choose from eight designs made by a roster that included conceptual artist and current Whitney Museum retrospective subject Lawrence Weiner, graffiti artist KAWS, and Brooklyn-based architect and designer Vito Acconci. By late Saturday afternoon, the shop had completed tattoos on four customers, and was scheduled to do two more that day. The artists hired local tattoo professionals to execute the work, which they offered at standard rates: $450 for a small and $650 for a large.

And even in the main hall of the Art Basel Miami Beach behemoth, some traditional gallery booths took it upon themselves to make collectors out of those with modest means. ShanghART’s booth featured Xu Zhen’s 1:1 replica of a Chinese convenience store, “SHANGHARTSUPERMARKET” (2007), complete with hot pink signage, which offered items such as boxes of Pocky candy and bottles of Tiger beer. All of the store’s packages, however, were empty. Visitors could purchase anything in the store, paying cash for the products, which they did by the plastic bagful. A bag of Nescafé and cereal boxes went for about $24. Gallery assistant Laura Zhou, who was manning the cash register, said certain items proved particularly popular. Ms. Zhou pointed to the empty shelves behind her. “Condoms and cigarettes sold out in about three hours.”