Next weekend, in New York’s answer to Art Basel Miami Beach, the city will be swarming with art fairs. Besides the two most established ones — the Art Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory and the Armory Show at Pier 94, which are coinciding for the first time in several years — five new or newish fairs, Scope, Pulse, the Red Dot Fair, LA Art, and DiVA, will also clamor for collectors’ attention.

The atmosphere will no doubt be more sober than it was in Miami in December: The cold, as well as the size and diversity of New York, mean that art and art parties can’t suck up all the energy the way that they do on the beach. Still, seven art fairs is a first for Manhattan. It’s a reflection of the strength, or some would say giddiness, of the art market, and the tendency for collectors today to focus their buying activity during a handful of major events a year.

The uptown Art Show, put on by the Art Dealers Association of America, is the oldest of the fairs and the only one that is not for profit. It’s the “establishment” fair, featuring 70 of the country’s leading galleries and focusing on artists who, if living, have already achieved some distinction, and, if dead, are solidly in the canon. Only in recent years have galleries started exhibiting contemporary artists at the Art Show, bringing a little flash to what can be a rather sedate affair.

The Armory Show, which is much bigger — 150 galleries will exhibit in Pier 94’s hangarlike space — is devoted to emerging artists and hot-off-the-easel work. Traditionally, the Armory Show draws more outof-town collectors than the quieter Art Show. “It’s in theory a more fun, younger, of-the-moment fair,” a director of the Paul Kasmin Gallery (which exhibits at both fairs), Hayden Dunbar, said.

The other fairs have their own niches: Scope, located in a pavilion in Damrosch Park this year, focuses on young galleries and emerging artists, while Pulse, at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, tries to bridge the gap between the younger and the established fairs. LA Art, in the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, caters to — surprise, surprise — LA galleries, and DiVA, at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Battery Park, showcases digital and video art. The Red Dot Fair, brand-new this year, is a smaller-scale fair held at the Park South Hotel, which includes a mix of established and younger galleries from New York and around the country.

Dealers are divided on whether the proliferation of art fairs is good or bad for the art world. For younger galleries, the exposure is priceless. “We did Scope in Miami, and we recognized almost immediately that this is a vital part of our business,” Andrea Meislin, who has a secondfloor gallery in Chelsea that deals primarily in work by Israeli photographers, said. “At an art fair, you accomplish so much in a short amount of time. You come, and then everybody comes to you.”

The owner/director of Bellwether Gallery, Becky Smith, said that in the five years she’s been exhibiting at the Armory Show, she has seen art fairs become much more important. “It shocks me how many curators from very important museums come to see artists at the art fairs.”

One sign of how important fairs have become to galleries is that the ADAA now can’t accommodate all the members of the association who want to exhibit. Now, each year, the applications of 35 to 40 member galleries are rejected.

A decade ago, space wasn’t a problem, the president of the ADAA, Roland Augustine, said. But collectors’ habits have changed, and dealers have had to follow suit. “People buy at auction; people buy at art fairs,” Mr. Augustine said. “There’s a kind of urgency to the way people acquire art” today.

For some dealers who’ve been in the business for a long time, that’s a bitter pill. “If I had my druthers, there’d be no art fairs,” the chairman of PaceWildenstein Gallery, Arne Glimcher, said. “Collectors, who used to spend a great deal of time looking for works, comparing quality, are now involved in event and destination shopping.”

The executive director of the ADAA, Linda Blumberg, said she agreed with Mr. Glimcher. For collectors to “focus on fairs, to the exclusion of visiting galleries and museums, is a mistake,” she said. “We all recognize that the art world has become more event-focused,” she continued. “One of the things that the Art Show tries to do is create more of that intimate viewing experience that you have in a gallery. The dealers are more available. It’s a more relaxed atmosphere.”

Mr. Glimcher, who said Art Basel Miami Beach this past December was “the most vulgar art event I’ve ever been to,” might not approve of some of the satellite fairs’ more gimmicky offerings. Scope, for example, will feature Mark McGowan, whom it calls “one of the most controversial performance artists” in Britain. He will dress up as President Bush and crawl around the city on his hands and knees for 72 hours, wearing a sign that says “kick my ass.”

But the vulgarity Mr. Glimcher sees in the art fairs is, of course, what makes them appealing, particularly to people who are new to collecting. Someone who doesn’t know a lot about art might be too intimidated to walk into a gallery, but not to go to a fair. “The fairs are a non-elitist environment,” the dealer Nancy Hoffman, said, “where people can look at work by x-number of dealers under one roof and feel that they have really caught up on their art viewing.”

Ms. Hoffman, who was one of the ADAA members rotated out of the Art Show this year, is exhibiting instead in the brand-new Red Dot Fair. A hotel fair, where dealers set up their exhibits in rooms, necessarily has a more casual feel. Ms. Hoffman said she’s trying to figure out how to display her artists’ works without putting any nails in the walls — which the hotel won’t allow — and what to put in the bathroom.