MIAMI BEACH — Medieval pilgrimages included a healthy dose of commerce along with the spiritual exercise. In a similar way, the art fair extravaganza taking place in Miami through this weekend is a heady mix of trade, tourism, aesthetics, and partying on the beach.

In its short history, Art Basel Miami Beach has become one of the principal art fairs in the world in terms of volume, attendance, and sales. Now in its fifth year, the fair is the American franchise of the premier European fair held in Basel, Switzerland, since the 1960s. Art Basel Miami dwarfs its American competitors not least because of the cornucopia of coattail events that take over the city. These are fringe events, some encouraged by “Miami proper,” like Modus R, a mini-fair of invited Russian dealers staged in the Design District. Others are beyond the fringe, including hotel-room fairs such as the Bridge and Flow. These are staged in Deco hotels along Collins Avenue, on the ocean, where you can see works for sale on the bed and in the tub.

The combined effect is a vast quantity of visual stimulation, augmented — as if the art were not enough aesthetic overload — by throngs of beautiful people. Art Basel, in the Miami Convention Center, has more than 200 stands, including virtually every powerhouse dealer on the planet. A select group of 61 emerging galleries is arranged — literally and symbolically — on the periphery of the fairground. Then there are a couple of dozen kiosks for the world’s art magazines.

The euphoria stimulates something of a feeding frenzy as the red dots indicating sales proliferate, but it is hard to imagine that a fair is the best place to buy contemporary art. Firstly, these aren’t necessarily the artists’ best works, but rather what happens to be available: puppy-pound artworks that failed to find a happy home.

Then there is the shameless packingin of wares. The original Basel notoriously used to monitor vendors with Swiss sternness to ensure dignity in the displays. Generally stands here are beautifully installed, but it is still a fairground, not a museum. But to hardened collectors, perhaps these harsh conditions are a true test of a work’s aesthetic endurance.

The kind of classic modernism that was the mainstay of old Basel is actually thin on the ground in Miami. González of Madrid and Krugier of New York and Geneva kept up the old tradition with works by Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, Braque, and American bluebloods such as Kline, Gottlieb, and Judd. More typically, European dealers brought Americans to shoppers’ attention — despite the globalism of Miami, in terms of sales, the thinking is: Play to a local audience. Jablonka of Berlin and Cologne, Germany, for instance, had a display of Eric Fischl, Terry Winters, and Philip Taafe, who is enjoying new museum attention in Germany. Ropac of Paris and Salzburg, Austria, was also strong on Americans, with “Marine #1” (2006) by Alex Katz.

An art-fair booth, like a church bulletin board, is the perfect place to post an engagement: Several new artist-gallery relationships came to my attention at Miami. Cheim and Read had a gorgeous piece by the abstract painter Bill Jensen, who it is showing early next year. David Zwirner had several portraits by Elizabeth Peyton, a recent recruit. Marianne Boesky prominently placed one of Alexander Ross’s sci-fi surreal paintings of an indefinable icky green terrain. But sometimes you can read too much into the presence of a picture in a booth. When I asked at Gagosian about a sensational Wayne Thiebaud reclining beach girl from 1964, my friend at the gallery said: “It’s a painting, David, not a relationship.” The painting is perfect for a Miami Beach collector, a timely reminder that an art fair isn’t just a show, it’s a sale.

Mr. Thiebaud was very much a flavor of the fair. At Krugier’s stand, a 1961 painting was bravely juxtaposed with a 1931 still life Morandi, an artist Mr. Thiebaud is known, incidentally, to collect. He survived the encounter. He was also the subject of a small exhibition in a niche at his dealer, Allan Stone. It was one of a series of 15 such displays designated by Art Basel as “Kabinett,” curated shows that intellectually accent the fair. Other such displays included a comparison of psychologically and socially penetrating portraits by painter Alice Neel and photographer Diane Arbus at Robert Miller; a one-wall William Wegman retrospective at Sperone Westwater, a redux of his recent Brooklyn Museum show, and a series of photomontages about the Vietnam War by Martha Rosler at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Art Basel’s official funky fringe event is Art Positions, for which dealers rent shipping containers on the beach. These hot, fluorescent-lit metal cubicles work better for video than traditional media, although this didn’t stop Zach Feuer from bringing a sumptuous Dana Schutz canvas, “Boy With a Boa” (2006). Salon 94 challenged the elements with a two-part mobile by Kelly Nipper. One part suspended plaster balls that were the casts for similarly shaped balls of ice on its sister mobile. Perry Rubenstein had a video of moving stills by Robin Rhode in which the artist dresses in white and performs a break-dance duel with himself, dressed in contrastingly bright colors. Mr. Rhode also produced, in a live performance, a mural on a side of the container that interpreted the legendary 1965 fight at the Convention Center between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. This work won the $75,000 commission prize offered by the W Hotel group, which is building a condominium tower next to the Art Positions site.

Cumulatively, the dozen or so fringe events are overwhelming. But some of the smaller fairs trump “Miami proper” by offering the kind of thoughtful, intimate experience with one artist that is really what this whole business is supposed to be about. At Flow, in a sweetly kitsch hotel room with carpentry fixtures that oddly recalled Charles Rennie Macintosh, JG Contemporary showed work by Nancy Lorenz. Her Whistleresque decorative panels based on studies of Hiroshige’s wave — using shavings of mother of pearl against gold leaf grounds — were intriguing mixes of craft and spontaneity. And at NADA, an alternative fair of younger dealers, André Schlechtriem Temporary braved the fairground mentality with a solo display of the realist Ena Swansea. Her large, quirky compositions combine big-time initial impact and lingering mystery: good for the fair, and afterward, too.