Within 20 minutes of the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach on Wednesday, the New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash sold a black 1961 Jim Dine painting with a belt across the middle, appropriately titled “Black Belt,” to a New York collector, Beth Rudin DeWoody. Similar mixed-media paintings by Mr. Dine, whose work also is owned by MoMA and the Guggenheim, have sold for between $70,000 and $125,000 at auction.

Last year’s big sale for the gallery came in the waning hours of the fair, when a single piece sold for between $3 million and $4 million. But this year’s sale, gallery co-director Lucy Mitchell-Innes said Saturday, was “financially better.” Despite fewer high-end sales, Ms. Mitchell-Innes said the gallery’s emerging artists – whose work may sell for between $5,000 and $15,000 – were helping to boost sales this year.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s booth encapsulated the range of art on view at Art Basel Miami Beach, which wrapped up yesterday. Its inventory of mid-century masterworks, such as a small blue-and-yellow Rothko painting worth around $1 million, gives off a glossy, upscale sheen; its 30-something emerging artists provide edginess and authenticity. If the gallery had a personality, it would be that of an unflappably polite insider; Ms. Mitchell-Innes has been on the selection committee of the fair since its first year in 2002.

This fall, Mitchell-Innes & Nash opened a second space in Chelsea devoted to contemporary work. At Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery had a chance to show off a new artist, Christopher Miner, as part of Art Kabinett, a new section of the fair featuring curated shows from 16 galleries. In a small room behind a curtain, Mr. Miner delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon with the rapid-fire nasal incantation of a cattle auctioneer in his video “Auction” (2000). It comes in an edition of 10, and four were spoken for.

Young artists such as Mr. Miner (a New Yorker by way of Mississippi) and Hamburg-based Tjorg Douglas Beer were attracting new buyers fixated on contemporary art, who are, as Ms. Mitchell-Innes put it, “like Energizer bunnies, zooming around our booth.”

New York collectors who had seen slides of Mr. Beer’s work flew down to see his sprawling, tape-on-plastic paintings in person – and bought them. Mitchell-Innes & Nash also sold a lightbulb-and-plastic-tub assemblage by Jessica Stockholder, a grouping of streamlined fuselage-like shapes by Bryan Hunt, and two ghostly paintings of the Lever House by Enoc Perez. (Perez paintings can fetch up to $60,000.)

During previous Art Basel Miami Beach fairs, Ms. Mitchell-Innes said, she was drained by Saturday. But this year, “I’m very energized because we’ve been involved in a lot of new projects, and you can see the rewards,” she said.

This year, the selection committee winnowed down 600 galleries’ applications to the 195 that filled the windowless hall, cut off from natural light like a casino. Galleries throughout the fair reported doing brisk business at moderate price levels. Berlin’s Eigen + Art sold two large Martin Eder paintings for $60,000 each; the Japanese gallery Side 2 sold five portraits by Paul P. for $5,000 each; and Berlin’s Contemporary Fine Arts sold two large Chris Ofili sculptures of a man and a woman excreting, priced at $275,000 and $290,000.

At prices above $500,000, art-fair buying slows to a hard-earned trickle. Still, a big sale brokered at the fair can land several months later, after a collector has had a chance to mull over the expenditure. The fair itself provides a useful deadline for artists to complete work and for buyers to make decisions. A Park Avenue collector who had seen the exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein surrealist drawings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this fall flew down to the fair to examine them and ended up buying two.

The first two days of the fair were busy, Ms. Mitchell-Innes said, but people were still buying through the weekend. “I see a lot of secondary market collectors here today who couldn’t get away from New York [before],” Ms. Mitchell-Innes said on Saturday.

“A big collector told me last night, ‘This is spring break for adults,'” Ms. Mitchell-Innes said. Her own socializing was limited mainly to late-night dinners and reconnecting with far-flung friends at the booth. Contrary to legend, most dealers in Miami do not watch the sun rise after drinking all night at the Delano.

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“I want to talk about art, and you can’t do that at art fairs. I hate them,” said Zach Feuer, a New York gallerist who helped found one.In 2003,the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), of which Mr. Feuer is a member, started its own Miami fair. This year it had 400 applicants for 83 slots.

It’s a love-hate thing. Mr. Feuer knows the fair is good to him. “I love NADA,” he said. “I wouldn’t be happy at any other fair.” And yet: “People get in a frenzy. It’s great to be on the receiving end, but it’s not always good for the art. People have called after fairs to say, ‘What did I buy? I have this invoice.’ “

Mr. Feuer’s downtown attitude is typical of the NADA dealers. Candid, casual, deadpan, he is literally married to art: His wife, Alison Fox, recently had one of her paintings installed in the home of Rosa de la Cruz, a Miami collector. A close-up of the bearded, 27-year-old dealer graces a two-page spread in this month’s Art and Auction “power issue” (he represents “rising power”).The spread was featured in his booth, crumpled and tacked to the wall. Scrawled above Mr. Feuer’s face are the words: “An art dealer of my stature should stay at the Ritz.”

“I checked into one hotel – the Shelborne – and it was disgusting,” Mr. Feuer said. “So I checked out and went to the Ritz.”

Gallery artist Justin Lieberman, who had an opening of new work at Miami gallery Locust Projects on Saturday, was inspired to create the Art and Auction-intervention piece on the spot. The work’s price was a night at the Ritz-Carlton for the artist. A California collector put down $459 plus tax, and Friday night, Mr. Lieberman was in.

The collector did not warn about mini-bar charges, however, and Mr. Lieberman found them exceedingly high. So he created a second piece, which incorporated a $12 bag of peanuts. Someone else bought it, so on Saturday evening, Mr. Lieberman was back at the Ritz. Two editions of a photograph by Mr. Lieberman, “A Little Man,” a three-quarters life-size cowering nude in T-shirt and socks, also sold for $6,000 each.

Another gallery artist, the Berlin based Swede Nathalie Djurberg, also sold well in Miami. On Thursday, the fair’s official opening day, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith peered intently at a monitor showing works by Ms. Djurberg as collectors Don and Mera Rubell looked over her shoulder. The Rubells bought five of her stop-animation videos – which show plasticine figures variously engaged in an orgy and in a French Neoclassical comedy – for $5,000 each. Four videos by Ms. Djurberg at Mr. Feuer’s booth each came in an edition of four, and only two of 16 were left on Saturday. “She’s been the hit for us,” Mr. Feuer said. “It’s been nice to launch an artist.”

The Rubells had also passed through on the fair’s opening night, Mr. Feuer said, along with other seasoned collectors such as Dean Valentine, Charles Saatchi, Dennis and Debra Scholl, and Susan and Michael Hort. The more experienced collectors tend to buy first, fast, and expensively – at the $15,000-and-up level, Mr. Feuer said. By Friday, newer collectors took their time worrying over works in the $2,000 range. By the weekend, some visitors, perhaps unfamiliar with the subtleties of contemporary practice, were angry at the art. “The Haim Steinbachs have been pissing people off,” Mr. Feuer said.

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Warsaw is the new Leipzig. Polish paintings by Rafal Bujnowski, Slawomir Elsner, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Zbigniew Rogalski were the highlights of the Rubells’s new acquisitions for their museum like warehouse. Last year, their holdings in East German art helped fuel the buying spree for graduates of the so-called Leipzig school: Neo Rauch, Christoph Ruckhaberle, and Matthias Weischer.

The two Polish galleries in town both noted the Rubell effect on their business. “The Rubells were the first major collectors,” said Michal Kaczynski of Raster, which was showing gray portraits by Mr. Rogalski – whose three paintings sold at $10,500 euros each – and paintings about painting by Mr. Bujnowski. “On the first day of professional preview we had interest, but the show at the Rubells made the interest bigger the next day.”

So why Poland? “It’s something with this generation, born in the ’70s,” Mr. Kaczynski said. “They were born into totalitarianism, and it changed when they were teenagers.”

At Foksal Gallery Foundation, in the Art Nova section of ABMB, a painting by Mr. Sasnal of warehouses connected by a stringy black mass sold for $35,000. “Quite fast his prices have gone up,” codirector Andrzej Przywara said. (Mr. Sasnal is represented by Anton Kern in New York.) Mr. Przywara noted that the Rubells have been tracking his artists since 1996.