Lately you hear a lot of talk – some of it purely enthusiastic, some anxious – about the spiking contemporary art market and Chelsea galleries are multiplying like embryonic cells. But one unqualified benefit of this growth spurt is that even in bleak February, when the art world has traditionally puttered, you can find a tremendous amount of art that rewards your attention.

At Paula Cooper, the Italian-born, American artist Rudolf Stingel has installed a new floor made of particle-board and painted white. Were you not told this, you would probably never notice. Meant to become “stained and mottled” by visitors’ shoes, the floor is a conceptual provocation that barely has a concept and is about as piquant as Redbook. It’s a gesture so meager it deserves to be stomped on.

Presiding over this white expanse, however, is an attractive painting of the artist’s dealer, Paula Cooper, hanging alone. On a very large, square canvas, Mr. Stingel has painted a bust-length oil, a monochrome, photorealist image of the dealer, based on a 1984 Robert Mapplethorpe photograph. In it, Ms. Cooper wears an open-neck, button-down shirt under a zipper jacket; her head turns slightly toward her left shoulder, so that her expression seems alternately wary and seductive. Motes, like a spray of water droplets, play about her hair.

I’ve not seen the original photograph, but – to the painting’s benefit – the motes do not strike a realistic note. They seem like a detail added by the artist to remind us that we’re looking at a painting based on, not of, a photograph – a genuine representational twist, as opposed to the arid conceit of the floor. Toying with the notion of representation was quite popular in the 1980s, so the choice of the Mapplethorpe image adds a smooth art-historical layer to an enjoyable painting.

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“In Word Only,” an exhibition at Cheim & Read by 1980s wunderkind Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88), also aims to stretch representation like taffy. Billed as the first show ever to concentrate exclusively on Basquiat’s written and painted words, it includes drawings, paintings, as well as a number of the artist’s notebooks. Most of the work here is on view to the public for the first time, and the show serves as a sort of appetizer to the Brooklyn Museum’s large retrospective, which opens in a few weeks.

For Basquiat devotees, the chief surprise will naturally be the notebooks, as they provide an unusual glimpse into the artist’s mind. There are poem like lists, random jottings, diaristic entries, questions, and reminders. Among other things, Basquiat is famed for his sharp, often witty, faux naivetes: In the notebooks, one encounters a mix of these jabs and some truly naive plunkers of the sort one would expect from a young man.

Those who, like me, are not devotees will likely gravitate toward the paintings, which were always wildly uneven, as the selection here is. Today, his arch attitude strikes me as far less egregious than it did, say, 15 years ago. The paintings and drawings basically imitate, or represent, graffiti and downscale signage, treating words as glyphs, pure drawings, or ironic statements. For instance, the word “Ideal” appears in an ellipsis, as in a logo, against a dripped upon and mottled yellow ground.

Perhaps the most successful of the works here are three square corkboards painted with words and symbols in black, white, blue, and pale red – gussied-up versions of the sort of palimpsest one sees on many an urban wall.

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Although simpler than Basquiat’s, the naive efforts of the Japanese artist Chinatsu Ban are in some ways far more difficult to understand. Like Yoshitomo Nara and her mentor, Takashi Murakami, Ms. Ban produces what has come to be known as animation art: Works so decorative and commercially inclined they often fall outside the bounds of what in the West has traditionally been meant by the word “art.”

Nevertheless, Ms. Ban’s show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, her first outside Japan, includes only drawings, paintings, and sculptures (Messrs. Nara and Murakami also make T-shirts, ashtrays, and other commercial items). Elephants – in candy pink or peppermint green or ice-cream orange – and little girls abound, all rendered in an utterly stylized, childlike hand.

One canvas, “Elephant Underpants vs. Apple Half” (2004), depicts a green elephant eating half an apple while a bigger half apple, with a heart-shaped face in the core, floats nearby. A row of multi-colored fiberglass elephant pairs – a large one with a small one – stands on green pedestals.

How are we to take this relentless cuteness? In the childlike way they are presented, according to Ms. Ban: “These things are like talismans. It’s scary to imagine that someday I won’t exist in this world anymore. I am troubled by the urge to run away from this fear. Elephants make me feel safe.”

Surely the work of Neo-Pop animation artists like Ms. Ban has a different valence in Japan than in New York. The elephants didn’t make me feel safe. I felt more like a toddler drooling in front of a television. Still, the paintings, and some of the drawings, have an undeniable appeal. And one or two, such as a blocky, Klee-like abstraction, suggest that Ms. Ban isn’t at all as simplistic as her style.

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There is nothing naive about Sarah Morris’s new film, “Los Angeles,” although its pleasures are, on one level at least, simple in the best sense of the word. Playing on a cinema-size wall at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, its subject is, essentially, the city’s glamour. Appropriately enough, the film takes place during the weeklong run-up to the Oscars.

In a sense, the film moves along like the grid-lines in one of Ms. Morris’s paintings, its two axes being what goes on behind the scenes and those famous personages who are the scene. Stars arrive on the red carpet, posing for photographers; a woman gets her teeth whitened; a topless woman shaves producer Robert Evans; a nude woman enters a tanning booth; Dennis Hopper drives and smokes an enormous cigar; someone gets a Botox injection; during a rehearsal, Brad Pitt punches himself in the face repeatedly. A jaunty original score drives the humor and satire.

“Los Angeles” is probably much more entertaining than the real Oscars, and, at 35 minutes, considerably shorter. Watching it from the gallery’s carpeted floor, I was reminded of the other benefit of our art frenzy: A film of this quality, which was probably quite expensive to realize, is available to us gratis, five days a week.

Stingel until March 12 (534 W. 21st Street, between Tenth Avenue and West Street, 212-255 1105). Prices: Works are not for sale.

Basquiat until March 26 (547 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-7727). Prices: Works are not for sale.

Ban until March 16 (535 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth Avenue and West Street, 212-680-9889). Prices: $750-$15,000.

Morris until March 26 (535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth Avenue and West Street, 212-680-9467).